Breathe In, Breathe Out
Or vice versa, all things being equal
BLACK AND WHITE
One idea here often leads to another and so it goes for nearly 100 weekly posts in a row when I’m never at a loss for words. Until, well, now. I find myself a little tongue-tied in this fleeting reprieve between the Election and the Inauguration. Clenching during this slower dip before we ascend and accelerate to the ripped flag atop the rickety old roller coaster again. Adjusting safety belt with baited breath. Last week, as I narrated my clumsy attempt at an irregular meditation practice (on occasion for 10 minutes), I encountered either a technical or philosophical problem I’ve been wanting to explore more for a moment. Something to pass this time before the who-knows-what.
Ever busy of brain (because of course I imagine I know “what”), I needed a distracting soundtrack for my meditating, that I shared last time, and as solid a visual to ground me as possible. If I don’t concentrate on these two things—the manufactured sound blocking out the other sounds, and the scene I’ve concocted in the darkish depths of my closed eyelids—then the meditation is woefully unsuccessful, if not even more stressful. Trying not to think of all of the things I want to think about can be more painful than just thinking about the things. So I am on the serene lake surface paddling in some small boat with the alien warble sounds and there’s the white mist rising that I vacuum into my lungs with all the positive connotations of white mist: softness, cleansing, beauty, calm. And on the exhale, out comes the sooty black smog of my anxiety and the dust from the unkempt corners of my mental tangle. White in, black out.
A friend Paul, who leads a local meditation, chimed in in the comments:
In tonglen meditation, you reverse it: breathe in the black, heavy, negative, sticky—the susuwatari soot—then exhale the light, positive, clear, and good. You eat the evil. You transmute it.
This flipped the possible script for me entirely. Eat the evil? Transmute the soot? Was I breathing backwards all along? The wrong colors in the wrong direction? It’s enough to make you hyperventilate, this monkey(mind) business. I had pictured myself paddling towards the pretty place (and feelings) I wanted to integrate, but now I have to absorb the negativity and ugliness first and produce the nice product from the soulfactory within myself? Was my former way of pumping out this funky junk actually just fancy littering? I did feel a little greedy and selfish for syphoning all the delicate mist off the top of the water. And a little nasty and reckless for leaving a pigpen sort of mess in my wake. So transmute then! I have everything I need within!
I have yet to try this next time I meditate and I’m worried the reverse breath trip will ruin the scene, but sucking in the bleak black world might nicely align with the dread alien abduction tone of my “white” noise backdrop.
Breathe in black, breathe out white like a cigarette that’s good for you. I’m told a count of eight might be good for both sides. There’s really so much to do when you’re not thinking. I remember the boyfriend who quit smoking on my behalf, only to take up vaping instead. Which I protested would only cause popcorn lung with its seemingly innocent lightly scented smoke. Try not to doze off on this boat (in your bed) while you count and hold or count and blow, too tight of chest, relax already geez, wipe clean and start over.
I found more about this Tonglen and other Tibetan approaches on this wellbeing website from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing (how nice for the poor students we’ve saddled to fix this broken world for us to at least have a moment of peace!). From their site, they define
Tonglen Meditation as “Breathe in suffering and breathe out compassion”
Purification: At the end of your meditation, visualize the suffering you breathed in as black smoke. You must let go of this black smoke, or it could increase your own suffering. Breathe out this black smoke completely. Then fill your heart and your whole being with compassion toward yourself, everyone else, and the world.
This doesn’t directly link the compassion to the white part (only inferred), so I feel a little stuck on blackness all around here but I get the idea, but also had a different thought. Perhaps the ideal scenario for my meditation, as I responded to my friend, would be breathing out the black first, and then sucking in the white? So I get the same satisfying off-gassing effect but in a kinder order where I’ve transmuted it, or the world has, on the outside. Is one allowed here to breathe out first? My body doesn’t quite get that instinctively, even though we live luckily in this loop where breaths do keep going in and out regardless, so really you can claim to mark the start of the cycle wherever you like.
I did find some site that thinks my approach is “modern.” How-to get your colors in order from the Modern Meditator:
Get yourself into a comfortable position where your breath can flow easily
Start by bring your awareness to the out-breath
As you exhale, imagine negativity, pain, fatigue, or illness (see below for more ideas) leaving your body as a thick black smoke
Watch it evaporate into the atmosphere
Keep breathing out this negative quality or situation as a dark, heavy smoke. Watch it leave your body
Then, switch your attention to the in-breath
With each inhalation, imagine with it a pure white light, entering your body.
Each time you breathe in, see the white light fill up your torso, your arms and your legs.
Imagine the white light permeating every muscle, bone, and organ in your body.
Keep breathing in radiant white light until you are that brilliant white light.
For as long as you wish to keep practicing, you can toggle between the two; breathe black smoke out and breathe white light in
Just as the breath is made up of a pair of two opposites—the in-breath and the out-breath, so too, is this practice. The visualization combines the opposites of color— black and white, as well as weight—heaviness and lightness.
Working with opposites, we can add a further layer, choosing words or phrases to give further meaning and intention to the practice.
For example:
Breathing out fatigue, breathing in alertness
Breathing out restlessness, breathing in patience
Breathing out illness, breathing in health and healing
Breathing out judgement, breathing in compassion
Breathing out anxiety, breathing in calm
Breathing out fear, breathing in confidence
Or perhaps you’d like to work with your own pair of opposites?
In Tonglen, the pair was suffering (indeed life itself is suffering in Buddhism) vs. compassion. Right now, in this moment before the roller coaster rises, we might toggle between some version of dread and hope.
DESPAIR AND RESILIENCE
Last week I went riffing on every shade of darkness from which hope might still spring, key among them being my friend Alma and her husband who lost everything in the Altadena fires, save for a few of their most precious instruments and their pets. Alma went back to examine the rubble and came upon this enduring object of her own creation—she is a ceramicist, among her many talents, and some of the pots she had fired twice in a kiln had now survived their third burn. Better now for it, she wrote:
This Love Urn was made to hold ashes, but I found it surrounded by ashes. It’s like a third raku firing. I think it’s even more beautiful now.
From a sea of upstart GoFundMe’s, I chose their campaign to try to help uplift through some social media sharing since I think Alma and Paul are the sorts to be leaders in lifting themselves as well as others as they will build from the rubble a home that creates community as a spiritual and arts hub more welcoming than ever. Of course, as it goes online, I caught some flack from someone—not a troll, but an acquaintance—who, having grown up in Pasadena, was offended by my distant and naive (and she said “offensive”) appropriation of the words “hope,” “love,” and “resilience,” when the reality is, and she is correct: rebuilding will be long, difficult, perhaps even rare, and definitely extremely costly. Maybe not focus on “rebuild” she said, but survival. Was I being tone deaf? Rather, I defended my stance since it was Alma not I who set the tone of this lovely white breath of reborn life emerging from her black ash pile. I’m convinced she will emerge as among the strongest phoenixes to inspire others. Alma chimed in too to reply, simply saying, “it’s a matter of perspective.” You could look at it this way or that, and both are true.
Who came up with this color scheme where black is bad and white is good? Might we flip that a bit? I brought up the soot sprites last time, those cute if dark susuwatari characters from the Japanese Ghibli studio films my kids loved so much growing up. Lest I made them sound bad and dirty, they are indeed rather complicated and compelling. They don’t need excising so much as kindness and diligence.
From the Ghibli.Frandom page, in My Neighbor Totoro:
They are small, round balls made from the soot that dwells in old and abandoned houses and leave black dirt in their wake. If the house becomes inhabited, they decide if the inhabitants are nice people. If they are, they will leave.
And in Spirited Away:
According to Kamajī [an old man with six long arms who operates the bathhouse], Susuwatari was created by magic, and if they don’t work diligently, the magic would dissolve, resulting in their disappearance.
Transmute through work, yes, I believe this. It’s best to keep my magic intact by staying busy.
EQUAL AND OPPOSITE EXCHANGE
And so in the vein of massive expensive distraction and radical hope (and inventing a new four-year project), I went on this scary Election Day to go suss out some acreage with a rustic treehouse for sale in the Catskills. I already own a perfectly imperfect mountainous parcel where I performed some mad pandemic reno, but it’s small and is starting to feel a little locked in by less than savory neighbors, like someone’s toothless uncle who just plopped a new readymade house at my border one day with no notice. I found a possible new, bigger and more private, parcel online and should have known if I go as far as seeing a thing (two hours from home), I pretty much immediately will consider it my mission to make it happen. Within a few days, I had an accepted offer.
Since I have no business buying new land when I already own land—and can’t afford to—I had to sell my old land first. I quickly produced all the ingredients (pics, blurb, video, stats) for a real estate listing and shared them with the broker who represented the new parcel I wanted to buy. Could she please list this fast while she was at it so I could actually fund the new thing? Unfortunately she reminded me that the treehouse had been on the market for over a year; it’s only slow winter now. I had to show her the money first, cash. And she didn’t seem motivated to double dip on this deal just yet to help me list when I wasn’t even locked into a contract with her client. Money doesn’t grow on trees, or does it?
The first part of my ceaseless, obsessive effort involved somehow securing a handful of loans from various sources (against my work retirement, a line of equity from my house, a friend with some funds to hide for a while), and upping the rate of side gigs as has been my habit. I miraculously could now account for every penny required while I continued to twiddle my fingers waiting for the realtor to assist, until I couldn’t take it anymore, and just did it myself. Ever impatient, instead of waiting or finding someone else, I just listed my land myself for free—on Facebook of all places. Naysayers be damned, it worked. Especially when I went in to edit my ad one day and the bots (sprites?) somehow added many zeros to my original price making the asking price of $90,000 look like it was reduced from $9,000,000. Huzzah, what a deal! My land went viral. Granted, a good amount of people auto-inquired but never come, but the people who said they would come to see it mostly did (if always late).
After two sessions of cold open houses in an trailer in the snow and then muddy no-snow, I went up for a third and then a fourth weekend showing a few less people each time. One weekend I met one really interested would-be buyer, a young local pioneering type of woman with pets, and the second, an older version of the same sort without pets. The sort of person who understands and appreciates my land (and the odd things I’ve done there). They both really liked the weirdness that might drive others away. The fact that I put “relics” from the boarding house ruin I tore down all over the side of the shed. The pipe tree I concocted (sorry, it’s coming with me). The cemetery of a small crew of the original Lanes of Lanesville. The toilet bucket of sawdust. The lack of cell service. No running water, yes a family of wild turkeys. I got two offers in quick succession and had the hard time of choosing between two perfectly good imperfect people. The younger though needed to do a payment plan, and the elder didn’t. The elder won.
But here’s the crazy part where I believe I opened and closed a bit of the universe of my own making: the price that I’m getting for the land is almost exactly (down to a few hundred dollars) the cost of what I bought it for including every little expense on it (even taxes and falling tree emergencies) for four years. The sum total of every dollar out is what I’m now pulling back in, because a few likeminded souls dig it like I do. And then, to make things even more amazing—in a matter of months between Election and Inauguration when everyone was hibernating, I’ve somehow, against all odds and snubbing all naysayers, bought and sold two things in tandem. The treehouse is moments away from closing. The total price of what I will pay, including all the extra fees, is within a few hundred dollars of my total earnings minus the fees of my sale. Money comes in, money goes out. E = mc2 in the balance of universal energy dynamics, and Catskills land swaps. Only weeks after receiving the loan funding, I can already repay it. Land going and land coming.
Equal with an edge, because I’ve tilted toward improvement and progress, toward greater love and less dread. Because I go from 1.6 acres to 4.8 for the same cost while boosting my per capita shed quotient by two. Instead of one trailer and one shed, I will now have one trailer plus one treehouse and two sheds. And trampoline, ropes course, swings. Because a family with young kids hid there during the pandemic, remember those days? When time slowed and we accrued hobbies and thought it was a good idea to retreat to nature and play board games. I still do like my escaping, but this time it will come with well water and maybe even a hint of cell service, though I’ll pretend it doesn’t.
The Soot Sprites (conjured from soot itself) are small, black, fuzzy creatures with spherical bodies and white eyes with black pupils. Their usual mode of transportation is levitating/hovering, but it is revealed in the film that they can extend black, wiry limbs (arms and legs) from their bodies to accomplish certain tasks (in this case, moving coal into the furnace) and can lift objects many times their own weight. They also dissolve into soot if crushed, but quickly reform themselves shortly after.
I love the concept of these ever-reforming black balls of wiry limbs who lift more than their weight. Constant transmutation. Everything is temporary. I will soon receive keys to new structures as I hand off my own—good people in, good people out, at least in this smaller realm I can somewhat control. And the soot sprites will rise up and release like my black breath with this sweet soundtrack because both homesteads are in the right hands.
Exhale.
I kind of tripped and fell into my first home purchase. I bought immediately after the Global Financial Crisis - not because it represented a great opportunity, but because I was only just barely starting to live like an adult. Oddly though, pretty much nothing happened w/the price until the pandemic. Then, things went nuts.
By then, we had already settled into our new home and were toying with the idea of landlording. We had a great tenant we got along with, but it was still crappy. Fortunately, though, that meager income helped me to hang in there until it was very easy to sell. I doubt I can do anything that financially successful again any time soon, and maybe never.
Okay, I LOVE My Neighbor Totoro, probably more than my children, but it's become a sentimental marker for me of them as small children. Congratulations on the treehouse and of making possible what seemed like an impossibility! Please can we have a picture of the pipe tree? I cannot imagine what you are describing and the closest I can come up with are the blue glass bottle trees that are common in some parts of the American South rooted in the traditions of Africans and enslaved African Americans. Thank you for the reminder, to breathe in and breath out - and then turn it on it's head!