STL Queer Sangha: Time, Impermanence & Patience, July 2024

This audio recording of my STL Queer Sangha July session has it all, sci-fi references, humor, astrology, queering systems change, and cultivating inspiration for liberating ourselves from empires. The topic of this Dharma talk & corresponding practice is TIME, IMPERMANENCE & PATIENCE. A bit on the esoteric side, the talk moves through shifting perspective, connecting to the wisdom of history and ancestors to ease the suffering associated with time; while the meditation guides through a practice of patience, grace, self-forgiveness, and embodied presence.
If you’re interested in just the guided meditation, skip to 25:39.
There are two prompts at the end to engage with the practice as it shows up in your life - perfect for journaling!
Disclaimer: This track includes explicit language and human imperfections (it is a live recording).

Transcript

This month's Dharma topic and practice is impermanence, Patience, And more encompassingly, Time. And I want to tie it in to also activism, Which I'm defining today as sustainable and restorative impact for our personal and collective well-being. So like, We ourselves are always included in that collective well-being. And I really found this topic, I think I found it in advance of finding this meme that came through my social media that really rung true and and brought the topic home to me. It's one of my favorite Ursula K Le Guin quotes, Who's a sci-fi writer, Feminist sci-fi writer that is. She says, We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. So today's practice is also about how the nervous system responds to the concept of time. Time is that ever-present in our life. It is the one thing that is not of us, But really is the container of our life. And I want to very much queer this topic, Because like gender and like money, Time is also a construct. So as queer folks, We already come into the concept of time and impermanence with some semblance of understanding somatically fluidity and flow. And we don't necessarily live a binary life. There's a lot of flow and queerness and fluidity and a lot of non-duality, Which is another topic that is really embedded in this talk today, In this practice. And so I consider that of like the non-duality of being and not being. We can think about it that with our queerness too, Of being and not being. It's generally, You can kind of define that on your own. So the harsh reality of the construct of gender, Of sexuality, Of money, Of capitalism, Of cis-white, Heteronormative body, Patriarchy. There's a harsh reality in all of that construct. And to queer that is to really find the fluidity and to find a different way within that. So all Dharma topics, In one way or another, Network back to liberation and easing our suffering. Traditionally, It's ending suffering, But we can think about, Hey, Easing suffering is enough. We can definitely practice that just easing part of it. And so when we think about queering time and how time is also itself queer, It very much has like a circuitous route. It is not linear. It is all-encompassing and it can be all in nothing, Kind of fractal in nature, Not any one stop or start, Much like the Buddhist Eightfold Path, Which is also considered fractal. There's no exact starting place. You can kind of move within the planes of the Eightfold Path and each kind of part of the path teaches each other. So you can kind of learn your way through and constantly stay on the path because it is endless. The path is something that we apply in our constant present. So with the path, It's not like there is a path of an endpoint where we're trying to get to. And that's why bringing the thought of easing suffering, I don't assume that I can end suffering by my practice. I can definitely know in my body the felt sense of easing it, Though. That is enough for me to practice with that. And that easing of suffering is not something that stops in my life. My aim today with this, This is a little bit of an esoteric topic, But my aim today is to provide a perspective and practice for you to find fluidity and ease and that regenerative sustainability with the concept of time. I'm a Saturn old sign, So I think a lot about time. And we also have good old Saturn going retrograde in Pisces right now and not having a great time with it. So time is up for review. And I'm curious before I get more into this, Like, If anybody out there, You can raise your hand if you have ever felt the burden of time poverty in your day to day. So never having enough, That feel of constant hustling for the record show, All hands and limbs are up in the air right now. That guilt of like taking too much time of resting. And that dirty word that comes along with the concept of time, Laziness. So time can very much feel very differently, Depending on our personal experience of life. I'm curious if you out there can kind of maybe speak out loud what the felt sensation is inside your body, The experience of like hustle and scarcity and anxiety and dread and worry. Does that have a visceral effect? What does it feel like? The oppressive nature of time. Yeah. So like executive function has a lot to say about time too. Whether we have that executive function or not, Like time can feel very differently. Yeah. So like time can speed up when we're feeling that nervous system activation. That's always what it's related to is nervous system activation in some way or another. And then I'm curious if you all out there can or have experience and can maybe put a word to the felt sensation of longing, Of desperation, Of depression and grief and apathy. What happens to time then? What does that feel like in the body? Slowing down and drawing out almost as if time was like taunting our experiences of enormous pain. That is not fucking nice time. And that's why people don't like Saturn. It's the time Lord, You get angry when Saturn does things. Hopefully we might try to get to one semblance of friendly today. That is my goal with this anyway. So like, Exactly to ease some sort of ease between that like speeding up in the like, I feel every second I felt like both during the pandemic, Like everything seemed to move so fucking fast. And yet, I remember ever, Every excruciating moment. It's like, How can it be both? So like, Whether time speeds up, Or whether it slows down, It's still a fear based response. So when we notice that we can notice, Ah, This is fear, You know, Least put a name to it. And fear is an intelligent emotional response. It is an evolutionary response to keep us safe. So there's something in that that is important when we feel those things. However, It is the clinging and the enmeshing with that fear that causes the anxiety that causes the suffering that causes the worry. So time is that container of our lives. And unlike capitalism, Money, And even gender, It is the one dimension of existence, The one variable on the planet Earth, That will remain constant and chaotic. How can it be both? Time is going to outlast us. We cannot control time. And that is terrifying to our mammalian brains. It's out of our control. And yeah, Like what, What year is it? What day is it? What lifetime is it? So when we kind of like, Feel that dissonance between like, Wait, What the fuck is actually happening? Like, How is it? How is this coming back again? Like, That is also your body doing yourself, Your nervous system a favor and being like, This is not right. I have experienced this before. And like, Not just in my lifetime. This is also what our ancestors teach us about. I'm going to circle back to this also momentarily. Because this lesson not only comes from the quote that I took. It also comes from witnessing and experiencing people around me having a really fucking hard time with time. I in my life have had a really hard time with time. We live in a time of a desperate need of climate change. We have war selection cycle, Probably in American history coming up. We're in that death rattle of capitalism. It is it is dying. And there was like, There was a meme that I saw recently. And like, I always kind of think about about politics and how politics relates to the Dharma and queer liberation. And there was some meme that I saw recently, And it was talking about like, The creep of fascism, That like, There's never going to be like one exact moment where like, All of the world that was going to wake up and be like that, That was over the line, That was too much, Like, That's never gonna happen. The goalposts are always going to continue to move. That is how they play this game. It is how they have always played that game. So that also gave me pause to consider going back to the first meme, The Ursula K. Le Guin quote, About the goalposts moving. So I went, And when I see things like that, And I connect to the patterns like that, And I feel suffering, Like I feel people suffering, I witness people suffering, And I'm being a healer. I'm like, Where can I go to my practices to find something that can help me in this situation? So I go back, I think about what did the Buddha say about time? And what did they teach about time? And I'm a systems thinker. Time is a system. When I have these big questions, I go to the Dharma and find the lessons and the practices that have been taught and passed down for the last 2, 600 years to help me ease that because 2, 600 years is a lot longer than capitalism and colonialism. And I do love that Buddha, Much like Jesus, Being a rebel too, Doing that social impact in systems change 2, 600 years ago. And I define systems change, Which is what we need a lot of in our world right now, Is defined as shifting the conditions that hold suffering and systemic oppression in place. So when you shift the conditions, The knot of suffering, The knot of oppression, Detangles. This is what I do in my day-to-day life now, And I do it better because I have these practices that are rooted in the same concept, Shifting the conditions. So if I know that impermanence is a thing, All of existence is impermanent, I am a finite being, I will land out, The earth is finite itself, Time is impermanent. And all of this checks out with quantum physics as well. I'm not going to get into more esotericism there, Or metaphysics, But we can totally get coffee and do that sometime because I love talking about this kind of stuff. My effort here today with queering the Dharma is to make this teaching relatable and accessible to ease suffering in here, In our now. So the concept of impermanence and non-duality is not just a concept, It's not just a philosophy, Not just something that we can think about, This is something that we can actually practice in our body and with our nervous system, With our responses to the constantly changing goalposts of our lives and the society that we live in. I am always interested in how do I respond to that? How do I respond to what hurts the most? So if I zoom back out to the Ursula K. Le Guin quote, We live in capitalism, Its power seems inescapable, So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. I want to hone in on that part of the quote, That power seeming inescapable. It seems inescapable. Our body reacts to it as being inescapable. That's what that part of the quote says. So we human beings, This mammalian creature that we are, We get tripped up in the falsity of human-created power over structures, Much like time. Who thought the Gregorian calendar was a good idea? I was just having a conversation yesterday with another healer that was like, Have you heard about the 13-month year? And I was like, I'm into it. It aligns with the lunar calendar. It aligns with flow. Why the hell are we doing this other thing that doesn't feel like flow? But to get back to the point and talking about queering, Dharma, And liberation, And certainly politics, When we look through time, When we go back and look, Empires always fall. That is actually the nature of empires, Because it's a power over structure. It's just hollow on the inside. If you build something hollow on the inside, It is inevitably going to fall down. The problem is that we human beings get stuck in this endless cycle of creation and destruction. So you can think about how our souls understand karma, How we understand our past lives, How we understand these experiences that we happen in this lifetime. We're like, This shit is not right. We're in this constant cycle of creation and destruction. I read a lot of sci-fi for the same reasons that I read world history. I am a big nerd. But one, To remind myself of the pleasure of imagination. That's why I read sci-fi. I like to go imagine things, To allow my mind to wander creatively and explore a situation that is not the present moment. Another reason is to keep my system thinker brain on its toes. Between sci-fi and world history, When I read both of those things, I start to connect the patterns. I start to widen the context. I read accounts from brilliant minds generations and centuries ago that were awakening humanity to the same messages and warnings and possibilities found in today's futuristic fiction. How much of Star Trek has actually come true? A lot. Not all of it. But we do have cell phones. That part of it came through. If we think a moment between our sci-fi fantasy brain here, Why do we love that hero's journey? If we're talking about revolution and empires falling, Why do we love that hero's journey or the anti-hero's journey? I'm a big fan of the anti-hero. The seemingly un-hero hero that is just a normal-ass, Messy, Authentic person that just has a good heart and comes in and saves the day. Why do we love that journey? I have another quote here from another systems thinker. In his speech given at the National Cathedral on March 31st, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King said, We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, But it bends towards justice. I get goosebumps when I hear that quote. I have a visceral reaction when I think about that because I can feel that concept of time being impermanent. When I read all of world history, When I read my sci-fi, I can be like, You're fucking right. It does. The name of that speech was remaining awake through a great revolution. Sounds very similar to where we are now. That quote really implies the impermanence of the moral universe, Doesn't it? We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, But it bends towards justice. Sounds like it actually has an end point. That is because the earth is impermanent. All things will end. We can think about all of those things, And that's where nihilism could come in. We say, Why botherness? Why bother? I'm sure we could make that choice, But this is not nihilist queer sangha. This is STL queer sangha about queer dharma. So that MLK quote from a speech titled remaining awake through a great revolution. Meditation is about remaining awake. And MLK himself was great buds with both Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton. Totally different types of religions. All of them hanging out in the 60s, Being like, Hey, This shit is happening, And it's happened before. And we're still quoting these wonderful human beings today because they were right. So social justice, Activism, And like positively and regeneratively impacting our communities is about remaining awake through it. To be here, To be in the constant present with it. When we feel those very human sensations and the crushing reality of the society that we live in, It's not because society is permanent. It's because it is impermanent. So we already intrinsically know and feel impermanence in our body. The very fact that we are hurt by all of those trappings around us. The very fear of being trapped in this like question of dictator one or dictator two is the very wisdom of our own body expressing love about what it is that we actually care about. The environment, Our loved ones, Liberation, Ourselves. We already feel, We already experience that sensation of impermanence. That society and the world has conditioned us to not love it. We live in that time of pics or it didn't happen, Or what happens on the internet stays forever. That is definitely not true. That is that society made grasping and clinging to permanence that causes us suffering in our minds and our hearts and our bodies. So when we approach that sensation of time, That scarcity of time, There's only one and only response to that. And that is to open and embrace it. It is to open and love it and by nature love ourselves. So I choose to show up and love the shit out of my impermanent non-fixed nature. Like I am this messy finite creature that is awake in this tiny speck of time. I am gonna love the shit out of that and not conform to somebody else's concept of time. So within that love, Within that grace, Within that forgiveness is where I feel tremendous patience with how I as one single human being can respond in my awakened state of the day in this great revolution. I can respond with great patience because I love my impermanent self and I can love time. I can open myself to it. I can open myself to the sensations of grace, Of forgiveness, Of joy. It is said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. How much of our past loves to follow us along? You can't go backwards in time and do anything about it. It doesn't mean that we excuse something that happens, But it's just getting rid of that clinging of needing it to have been different. So in this dance between existence and non-existence, The non-dual nature of human consciousness is the place where I can feel anxiety and release it and find my next breath. I can feel great terror and feel unconditional love too. I can experience great doubt and choose to act vulnerably too. I'm non-binary, I like that. It doesn't have to be either or. It can be both and and that is really the nature of non-duality is that both and and neither. So in terms of activating my life and my response, My attention, My awakenedness, My agency, My agency to choose and make choices to exist as a human being in this time is to choose to love anyway. It is to choose to keep showing up as this imperfect, Impermanent form and non-form. Because in the great universal scheme of things, I am one tiny speck of human consciousness of the universe experiencing itself. When I think about the power of that, That feels like tremendous patience and grace. So this is what we're going to practice today in our meditation. I invite you where you are to maybe stand up and stretch a moment if you would like to get any more water. And I know you all are experienced meditators and to find the pose when you're ready to settle that will be good for you. We'll do I think about a 20-25 minute meditation. Very much about practicing grace and feel free to shake out your body as well. As always, You're welcome to change your position in your meditations. If you start one way and you decide that that's not it anymore, You can totally shift around. You can also always do a walking meditation when you're ready to settle into a pose that is supportive for your body. A pose that has both ease and relaxation. A position that allows your airways to receive what they need and they want. We'll start by, I'll invite you to settle into your seat and your sense of gravity and connection to the floor. Wherever you are, Take a few deeper breaths for yourself at your own pace. Doing your best to connect with the diaphragm and the belly breathing. Letting that exhale come out of the mouth. And before we really even get any deeper into this meditation, I want to remind you of inviting yourself to have great patience with yourself and to release any expectation of the meditation of how you should feel or how you do want this to go. So really starting off with that invitation of grace. I invite your body to search around and see if you can find a way to shift your pose and invite just even one more percent of ease into your body. Allowing your breath to do its work in any time that it comes across any tension. To remember to exhale. That exhale is there to help carry away tension. That exhale is there to help release clinging. Connecting with that sense of gravity and feeling your cushion or the mat underneath you. Doing your best to shift your awareness to what you can feel with your human body and moving away just for now from what you think about it. Maybe inviting yourself to notice all of your other senses too. Perhaps your sense of sound is alive. Perhaps you can feel the air on your skin. And again that subtle reminder that whatever you think about time and whatever you think about your practice, To offer yourself grace to release and let it go. Releasing that judging of yourself in your relation to time. Maybe using the sense of sound as a playful moment right now. Noticing the sounds that you can hear near. Noticing the sounds that you can hear far away and out the window. Truly inviting yourself to take this time to slow down, To pause, To connect with that intention and inspiration to nourish your nervous system. No matter your relation to time and slowing down and patience. Inviting yourself grace with that experience right here and right now. And always staying steady and returning to the breath anytime you feel yourself going away in story. Utilizing that breath as a way to ride right back here to the present moment. Right back here to the present where you are working with nourishing your nervous system. Perhaps inviting yourself to feel the soft lighting that is around the room that you know is there from behind closed eyes. Maybe even soaking in the sensation of the studio and the space being a space specifically for healing. Allowing yourself to exist in this room. Exist in a place with other folks who are also working on nourishing their nervous system. Reminding yourself to take another deep breath in and release any tension that you can feel right now in your body. Go slow through the nose and long and audible through the mouth. Letting that exhale connect with your intention of grace. Offer yourself grace in this experience, In this meditation. Grace in this lifetime. Inviting yourself in with that invitation of patience. Knowing that impatience is often a thief of joy. So again inviting yourself to release any expectations. Even if it is challenging to practice stillness, To practice meditation, That intention to offer your nervous system ease and support still exists. In our work today of practicing impermanence, Impatience, Non-duality and time, Perhaps you are able to call in a situation involving time. Maybe something surface level that is not too high stakes. Maybe something that you are working with right now. Some situation of either having not enough time or too much time. I invite you to call that experience in and firstly connect the felt sensations that are present with it. Is there heat? Is there cold? Is there fuzziness? Is there a speeding up? Is there a tightening? Also knowing as you practice awareness of sensations, That sensations themselves are impermanent. This practice of naming them and witnessing them is a little bit of practice of not merging with those sensations. The practice of learning the language of your body. You may also connect with any emotions that are present. So if sensations are first, The emotions usually come next. You can invite yourself to be curious about your experience. Saying what all is here? What all can I practice with today as I can also feel myself in this cushion and in this room and still in the present moment listening to my voice. You may also notice with those emotions come along different thoughts and thought stories and those patterns. Give yourself a moment to notice the noticing. So noticing how all of those things can be webbed and connected. So practicing also taking a step back and noticing. Notice the sensations. You can notice emotions. You can notice thoughts. Perhaps you can even notice a whole constellation of experience. This can be a practice of noticing the threads of an experience. Noticing your minds want to go into the story and in this next impermanent breath, I invite you to shift back to noticing your breath, To noticing sounds, To noticing the mat underneath you. Allowing that experience to shift away. Inviting yourself to remember that you are right here in the present moment practicing nervous system nourishment and invite yourself into a couple of deep breaths right here and right now. Here can your exhale release tension in your body. Deep breaths to let that go. You invite just even 1% more ease into your body right here and right now. Inviting yourself to unclench that body. Inviting yourself to remember that forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. So even those sensations and thoughts that you were just feeling, They're also impermanent. So notice how they have shifted on. Those are attached to memories and they're not here and right now. I invite you to slow the breath just one more count. So however you're breathing right now, Slow it down just one more count and give yourself that nice audible exhale connecting with the diaphragm. Letting your shoulders relax. Letting your shoulder blades drop down and back. Inviting your jaw to relax. Inviting your spine to relax. Inviting yourself back into practice with the breath as a practice of flow of the current moment, The constant present and finding that wave of the breath and inviting just 1% more space into your spine. Letting your spine be long and spacious. Staying with that flow of the breath. Inviting yourself to know that you can practice staying with the breath. You can practice staying right here and right now. Offering yourself forgiveness any time that your mind wants to get carried away in thought. Inviting yourself into practice of deep, Deep patience with yourself. Maybe even taking a moment to connect with one word or phrase of self-compassion. There's one word or phrase that the you that you are right here and right now really wants to hear. What is that one little bit of deep, Unconditional love that you can offer yourself just in this moment? And as you take in that thought, That word, That phrase, Continue to invite more ease into your body with it. Inviting your body to relax in the knowledge that you are imperfect. To relax into the knowledge that all experience is impermanent. Inviting yourself in this exact moment. Saying maybe to yourself, Can I love myself even just 1% more in this moment and with this next breath? And if this current breath is challenging, It will move on and there will be another breath. You can re-invite that intention of self-love, Of compassion, Of grace, Of forgiveness, And of deep, Deep patience with yourself. Inviting yourself into the knowledge that you are worthy of your patience. That you are worthy of experiencing pleasure and joy. That you are worthy of being imperfect. So much of the world invites us into that habit and practice of perfectionism. What does it feel like right now to invite yourself to be an imperfect, Impermanent human being? Taking in the knowledge that life is not about going big or going home. It's not about too little, Too late. It's about doing enough just right here and right now. Just in this one moment. Just with this next breath. As we round out the end of our practice here, I want you to take another few deeper cleansing breaths. Slow through the nose and loud and audible through the mouth. Inviting yourself to release the practice. Inviting yourself in the awareness that the you that is here in the practice right here and right now will even be different tomorrow. And that you can choose to love that version of you too. I invite you to have movement back in your fingers and your toes. Allowing your feet and your hands to wiggle. Allowing your legs to unfold. Your neck to rotate. Inviting your shoulders to roll back maybe a few times. Inviting yourself to move out of the meditation at your own pace. And as always, I have a couple of prompts to think about. I was listening to a podcast about climate change and systems change the other day. And one of the climate activists was talking about time and the concept of like doing enough right here and right now and on time instead of that go big, Go home, Or too little, Too late. And I really honed in on that as like that's the place and that like ever-present constant moment of here is where we actually can attend to things. And we can get caught up in the like we have to do so much in our world. We have to do so much for ourselves that it can feel like it has to be huge, But we're not doing enough. Where we get trapped on the other end of things where it's like, Oh, I lost so much time. It's too little. It's too late. And I brought that into the meditation today because I thought it was a good moment to practice that like, What can I do right here and right now? How can I love myself 1% more? How can I invite ease in just 1% more and right here, Right now? And I'm curious how that guidance landed for you or even if you noticed it, Maybe you were deep in meditation with something else. I have one last prompt. I'm thinking about a takeaway because I always think about like how we can integrate these practices in our day-to-day life. I like to do like pragmatic Buddhism. Throw it out to you all if you could think of like one way, One action, One affirmation, One word, Something like that, That you can take into your day-to-day life and to honor your time. So like that can be like a practice that like give yourself five minutes every day. Like how much bullshit is out on the internet about affirmations and affirmation decks, But there really is substance to it. So to give yourself that intentionality of like connecting to that felt sense, Like it happens up here. Sure. But like your body is what responds to it and your body is what is going to find you that nervous system nourishment that you need to keep going, To keep doing those things. What is one way, One action, One affirmation that you can point to that something that you are already doing or something that you can do and take into your life to honor your time? Maybe it's one way you can dedicate your time to your well-being. Maybe it's one way you can dedicate and honor your time for your loved ones to service. Thank you all of you all. Thank you for your practice today. Thank you for your vulnerability. Thank you for going into a little bit of esoteric nature with me. I appreciate y'all and just send you grace and gratitude.