I just finished reading Curt's latest updates on his blog, "Back On the Road Again." I feel happy to read that he and Sharon (they're the ones we're house sitting for) are having a positive experience on their adventures. They've been in Southeast Asia for about a month now, and have just moved on to Nepal. I was thinking about them yesterday when I was riding my bike down Tombstone Canyon: I miss seeing their smiles, waving to them in the passing, listening to Curt's incredible true-life adventure stories, and most recently learning a card game, called Shithead, from them. I miss Sharon's yoga classes too. When they return, we'll already be gone, without ever sharing a proper goodbye. (Our hope is that they will be able to come visit us, at some point, in Fort Collins.)

So, today is the day (AGAIN) for the dentist. I am apprehensive and frustrated as it is my fourth visit. It began a month ago with a simple filling for a small cavity and ended that same day, as the numbness wore off, with what the dentist (after a couple more visits) assumes to be a cracked tooth and a need for a crown. I'll get the prognosis today.

I am struggling with feelings of anger surrounding the disastrous results of visiting the dentist, and I think my anger stems most of all from wanting him to accept responsibility for his part in cracking my tooth. I don't know that such an admission will come from him--probably not--and because of this, I am left to figure out how to relax around the distress I feel and to assuage the tension rather than coil it tighter.

As I told mema, even though I am not a Buddhist, I was hoping some of the wise buddhist philosophies could help me right about now in learning to ease into the vulnerability I feel, instead of fighting against it (and pitting myself against the dentist), which is making me all the more miserable.

In experiencing these difficulties and fears, concepts such as compassion toward myself and toward the person I am angry with become empty bowls of understanding. At least, that's how I felt earlier this morning when I first woke up. In bed, before I got up, I tried to mentally visualize how to affect the chain-of-events, but I was coming up dry. The concept of compassion was remaining unpliable and hollow, and I couldn't really go anywhere with it. I was attempting (unsuccessfully) to not become riled up, yet again, but I was still retelling, over and over in my mind, a saga of avoided responsibility, betrayal, and failure from a man I trusted; I was making the dentist into something bigger and badder than he actually is. Placing blame, where I believed it was due, wasn't benefiting my circumstances in any way--it just made me unhappier, more upset and troubled, high-strung, tense.

Despite my blank ability for compassion in that moment, I believe there is value to the acts of bodhichitta and tonglen, as well as the other buddhist frameworks for relating to our pain: to challenging our instinct of closing down to ourselves and others when we experience suffering, to keeping our hearts and minds open. However, putting theory into practice is quite difficult, and I get tangled up and then tied down by my feelings as they run laps through my thoughts.

My indignation, and also my trepidation, wake me up at night, and in the morning I just want to stay in bed to sleep through the foreboding I feel; to cancel my appointment and just say, the hell with it; to chew my food on the left side of my mouth, as I have for the last month, and to continue to do so for the coming years. It is my love for eating and enjoying the lustiness of food in all spaces of my mouth that keeps me from becoming too dramatic ;-) and reminds me that I cannot deny what will happen, whatever it is.

Yet, I still have these feelings--and what to do with them? By letting them spin off in all directions, I am just heightening my stress and amassing more fears. I have become utterly paranoid about my teeth! (As if I wasn't already a little too concerned about brushing and flossing, right?!)

This morning, after my ruminations of how to best calm myself and to stop my resentment toward the dentist, I searched online and found a few audio excerpts from talks Pema Chödrön has given. Even though I feel distraught by finding myself in a situation I didn't anticipate, something I read from Chödrön made a lot of sense to me, and related to the barriers I faced in bed when I tried to visualize. She said, "[W]e know that our capacity at this point is fairly limited, and yet we enter in at the level of aspiration." From this tumultuous event in my personal current affairs (and, I realize, it is a completely meaningless event in the world's current affairs), I am offered an opportunity to change the habit of putting up barriers, of shutting down, of hardening or tightening when I experience suffering in myself and see it happening in others. This is the moment. 

Chödrön tells us that you begin by contacting the experience you are having: you pay attention to your feelings, and from a level of aspiration, you encourage yourself and notice the effects. "[I]t's a very gutsy kind of practice. It's also extremely honest. Because a lot of times we do have the wish to alleviate suffering in the world and we want to jump right in. And often we jump right in and then we drown. . . . What you want to do is currently more than you are able to do. And so by doing these aspiration practices, you get very real about where you are right now and you respect where you are right now." From such practices, you expand and eventually go on to something more challenging.

"This is a very important point," she says. "There's no problem with being where you are right now. And the fact that we encourage it and expand it at the level of mind training is just to say that we respect and have appreciation for where we currently are. And at the same time we leave wide open the possibility of being able to expand way beyond where we currently are in the course of our lifetime. But, you know, the expansion never happens through greediness or pushing through or striving. It just never happens that way. All practice grows and flourishes by learning to relax with where you are already. So some combination of learning to relax where you are already and, at the same time, holding a big vision or keeping the possibility open that really your capacity, my capacity, the capacity of all beings is limitless, absolutely limitless. This is such a powerful thing." (All quotes above from a speech Pema Chödrön gave, called, "BODHICITTA AND ASPIRATION.")

Reading this really did help me. Listening to Chödrön's voice from the excerpts of her recorded speeches, helped too. It didn't make me feel better about the whole dentist debacle, but it provided me with a coping strategy. Actually, I can see that the strategy of relaxing past my stagnant thoughts also begins, for me, through reading and then writing. The outcome shifts my thoughts just a touch, and the act of paying attention to my raucous, imperious emotions becomes a little bit easier; it is less taxing than letting myself get caught up by them and reacting with more scrambled fears and tension, even if that is my immediate reaction.

So I have had some time to feel calmer now--my breath less tight or strained--and in writing this, I moved myself outside to sit in the sunshine and soothe myself further. Perhaps in such an insignificant action, I can recognize there is a congruous response for altering chain-of-events for the larger picture too. Out of something other than fear and anger, that is, which is hard to release. I can barely begin to conceptualize the larger picture of how relating and responding to bigger events in the world can possibly be born out of something as small as paying attention to my own feelings, but it is encouraging to imagine. I'm sure I'll lose that insight quick enough, but maybe I will be able to sustain it through my dentist visit. That's my goal.

Here's a brief audio excerpt from "Working with Pain: Developing Inner Strength" for anyone interested in hearing Pema Chödrön speak.