A couple weeks ago I went to a free screening of the documentary No Impact Man (2009), which tracks the life of a man and his family in New York City as they try over the course of a year to reduce their environmental impact to zero. They stop eating meat, start buying local foods, get rid of the cars, start biking, get rid of packaged items, start composting, only buy reused, get rid of the t.v., and well... watch the film. It appears they actually succeeded - and had a blast doing it.

At the beginning of the film, the wife (Michelle) is just going along with the husband (Colin)'s idea, expressing her love of technology and dislike for "nature" here and there. By the end of the film, her skin looks healthier, her pre-diabetic "condition" has been reversed by the no-meat diet, and she tells her friends that there's no going back to the lifestyle they lived before. Colin, meanwhile, has lost 15 pounds without trying. The no electricity has pushed the family into the outdoors, where they socialize more, get exercise, and dream of transforming the streets of New York with green spaces.

Those who viewed this film with me agreed that this film is thoroughly inspiring, showing us how we as individuals can transform our lives and showering us with a vision of how these personal transformations could work at the level of societal change. In the discussion that ensued, people pointed out the personal changes they would like to make in their lives after seeing this.

What most stood out to me was the waste. Colin mentions that we in the U.S. live in a "disposable society," in which we treat everything we produce and consume as disposable, creating endless landfills. I particularly like the idea of composting, something I intend to take up when I have a stable home. To be honest, though, I think I have already made the biggest personal change I can for the climate, although I did it for the animals: I'm vegan.

It is exciting to come across people - especially people of influence - who really believe in the power of personal change as not only on a vertical axis between individual and impact, but also a horizontal axis between individual and society. One individual is where it all begins. When I did an athropological study on vegans and vegetarians last Spring, this was my conclusion based on the evidence that these people were influenced by people they knew.

Come to think of it, I think I actually heard about this guy years ago (2007?) when he was filming (or being filmed). Back then it was heard with skepticism, but 2008 is when the media started to care about the environment. Anyway, if you haven't seen the film, here's the trailer.

If you have seen the film, what change(s) does it most inspire you to make in your life in the next few years?

Note: This post is my contribution to this year's blog action theme, climate change.

When my roommate bought me Thich Nhat Hanh's manual to Zen meditation, The Miracle of Mindfulness, my depression of three years ended and was replaced by a sense of life's meaning, a sense of direction and purpose: toward a happiness I could finally believe in. But I simply did not have the discipline at the time to meditate for more than five or ten minutes at a time, and even then I only did it once a week or once a month. Not surprisingly, with such infrequent and inconsistent meditation, I slowly drifted away from Zen. When I ended up in an unfortunate situation six months later, I became depressed again, even questioning the potential of Buddhism to save a wretched soul like me. A year after I received that book, I made it to Blue Cliff Monastery where I tried many forms of meditation over a period of six days. That is where I really learned how to meditate, especially through the beloved outdoor walking meditation. I may have lacked the discipline by myself, but the sangha empowered me to stay focused on meditation enough to get past the barrier to entry. When I returned to university, I decided to visit the Christian-led interfaith meditation center. The director, learning that I was devoted enough to stay in a monastery, invited me to guide a Buddhist meditation session once a week for students. I accepted, and that one day a week gave me an anchor throughout the entire semester to keep me meditating regularly. I usually went to meditation 2-3 times a week because I figured the best way to prepare for guiding a meditation session was by meditating. Nevertheless, the meditative state those 20-minute sessions left me with would inevitably wear off after a few hours, leaving me to be unmindful the rest of the week. I still lacked the discipline to meditate on my own. When summer came, I no longer had that anchor, and I had an experience that drove me crazy for most of the summer. My emotions became more erratic than I'd ever experienced, and I felt increasingly like I had no control over them. In the midst of this existential crisis, I became painfully aware of my complete dependence on external circumstances, on society, individuals, books, the internet. I asked myself what I would do if all of it disappeared, if I were just left on the streets or in a lonely forest devoid of all human life but me. The only answer I could see was this: meditation. That was the key to self-reliance. So I decided that this had to be my doorway to self-discipline. I determined that I would meditate for at least 20 minutes a day indefinitely. Twenty minutes to settle in. Those 20 minutes quickly became my daily anchor, my spiritual lifeline, allowing me to release my emotions. I rapidly became more and more aware of my thoughts and feelings, able to just relax and let them pass. I overcame anger this way, an emotion I had struggled with for my entire life, which always would take over my mind. Now for me anger passes quickly; I just notice that I am angry and it goes. Whenever I would fail to meditate for a few days, my emotional state would deteriorate. I would start to find life frustrating or depressing. But a couple of days of proper meditation would lead me back in the right direction. I have heard of meditation saving people from acting on a manic attack or get them through OCD, and those experiences played a part in my determination to start meditating daily. Mine is just one more such story. I've actually found that my skill at taking care of my emotions has been so enhanced that I can go a while without meditation and be fine. However, it is always something to come back to when the mind drifts from that conscious space. I highly recommend daily sitting meditation to anyone struggling with mindfulness. It is not to be neglected in favor of getting a buzz off of books, not when you are really struggling. _/\_

A while back I finally decided to start a vegan blog, which I had been planning to do for a long time. I know I still owe you a post on climate change, but I'd like to go ahead and share my new blog, which has gotten rolling.

culture, politics, and animals

Henceforth, that is where all of my posts related to primarily veganism and animals will go. Gaia will continue to be a spiritual space for me.

I have been journaling lately: beyond keeping a blog full of random thoughts, I now have a dream journal on another blog, and I also use MyFitnessJournal.com. I write in my dream journal whenever I remember a dream, and I write in MyFitnessJournal on most days. MyFitnessJournal greatly encourages me to keep tabs on everything I'm eating, by making it easy to keep track of each item, writing it down and giving me stats to review. Even if I screw up on a daily basis, eating too much of this or that or in general, it forces me to keep thinking about it instead of avoiding it. This is a step up already. But, beyond that, there's an open-ended journal to write about my day, what I ate, why I ate it, how much I exercised, what exercises I did, and perhaps most importantly of all, reflections and plans for the future.

What's awesome about having a place to reflect and plan on a daily basis is that, even if I fail most of the plans I make, I continue reflecting and thinking up new plans instead of constantly rehashing what didn't work and shouting at the sky, "Why can't I do it right?!" So each day is, in some small way, fresh; I don't blow any one idea out of proportion because I know that tomorrow I will begin anew. This was not the case before I started journaling. You may have five tricks in your box, and maybe that sounds big at first glance, but if they are not working, what use is that? By journaling, I think up new tricks every day. Most of them don't work out half as well as I'd planned, but that's okay because I know I can get back up and try something new and refreshing - I know because I do so every day. You may come up with five more tricks, and only the first one is actually successful... and then you come up with five more, and only one of them seems half-successful and the others pretty useless. But if you keep coming up with new ideas, day after day after day, and then that motivates you to research new ideas or leads to a conversation about your ideas that gives you a new idea, eventually you'll find one here or there that is really helpful. Maybe after a year, you have fifty ideas and ten or twenty that are really useful to you at the moment, ten others that may be useful later on, and the others ideas you can build on or have built on already. That's better than the past eight years spent on the same five half-baked ideas that didn't work.

The point is that I keep my mind on improvement. "Improvement is always possible; perfection never is." (Steve Pavlina) I used to always focus on perfection, but now I am focusing on improvement. Each day, instead of thinking "I want to be as healthy as so-and-so" and then worrying because I'm not getting any closer, I say to the universe, "I want to get better. I want to learn. Each day I can learn by re-gauging where I am right now and what I'm capable of doing from here." Because in reality we don't even know where we are. How can we know how to get there if we don't even know where here is? So each day we spend trying to figure out where here is, and because we live in a multi-dimensional world, there's no end to this learning. There's no end to improvement, to being a student.

One thing I love about Aikido training is that the fact is inescapable. You can't just go off on your own and dream of becoming a master all by some magical force within you that no one else has discovered. You have to train with others, who may be more advanced, you have to constantly look for improvement, to have others very intimately point out your weaknesses as well as your strengths, which are constantly shifting. You see a 7th dan (black belt), their technique so clearly more studied than yours, and just know that even they are still learning. And you know that it will take you at least half a life time to get there, like it does everyone else, so you just return to where you are right now.

I have noticed that, too, this is the purpose of persistence. Someone gave me some fitness advice that training daily - like journaling daily - is best for endurance, even though otherwise one may wish to wait a few days for muscles to recover from training. Persistence = endurance.

My dream journal serves the same purpose - not just to have a record of my dreams and help me remember them, but even to remember to think about them and then to reflect on them. So even though I'm pretty laid back about it and haven't since had a lucid dream, I know it will continue to be a part of my life instead of just something that I had a lot of interest in at first and then gave up. Yeah, my strong feelings about it have waned a lot since I started, but they wax occasionally because I've kept thinking about it by journaling... and I know that, in the end, I will be glad I did it because ultimately it is something I do value and do find interesting.

Because I am focused on improvement, I am glad that I'm doing it and not just about what I've succeeded at already. Or, rather, I now view the process itself as a success, even though I am still just beginning.

To quote Steve Pavlina (again), "Either you succeed, or you have a learning experience."

"What do trust and forgiveness mean to you?"

When people say trust with regard to close relationships, they are usually referring to whether or not the person's words match up to reality, although I think trust is not an all-or-nothing thing. I trust myself to ride a bicycle, I don't trust myself to teach anything to a black belt. But as far as words go, that's tricky... I do trust everyone on some level, with words, and I also distrust everyone on some level with words (except for maybe Zen masters who have mastered the art of silence). Sometimes that trust doesn't really manifest itself in practice, and sometimes the distrust is not harmful in the bigger picture. But actually, in some way, I can look within myself and say the problem was not with the other person, but with how I chose to trust them. Was my trust broken, or did I have false expectations? Or both? A distinction must be made: like love, there is conditional trust and unconditional trust.

As far as forgiveness goes, I believe this: "To forgive is to set a person free and discover the person was you."

I've decided that even if someone makes a promise, I will just expect nothing. Not in a distrusting sort of way, but... someone said that life (the universe) is a dream, and we are the dreamer of our reality. Our dream is not us. A promise is not them or me. A promise is just a symbol in a dream. It is a projection of our consciousness. The Truth is merciless, so we should be merciful to ourselves - and each other.

Other views are welcome.

Meet Tarra & Bella, an elephant and a dog who've become very close friends!

Episode #1
Episode #2 - the sequel

The second video talks about what happened after the first story aired. I love the sanctuary owners' response. (No, Disney... no.) The story of Bella & Tarra actually isn't that unique within the animal realm. You may know about the Christian the tiger, raised by two people with obvious mutual love (the video went viral). Or the boy who was raised by wolves. Joan Dunayer's book Animal Equality has many more heart-warming stories like this. As she notes, they are typically dismissed by science as mere "anecdotes." But aren't anecdotes most natural and abundant, language being the gift of the story-teller, life being remembered and imagined in stories? Can love be quantified? As animal rights/vegan theorists and myself have noted, our story begins locally, at the level of the individual. If the fact that the average American eats more than 1,100 chickens in a lifetime means nothing, then perhaps it is because we have forgotten the individuality of each of those 1,100 chickens.

In other news, this month Bolivia became the first country to ban circus animals.
Following this, PETA came out with a video on the Ringling Bros showing how they keep elephants pent up to the point of mental illness and also lead them about with hooks in their flesh. I must ask whether it is possible for circuses and zoos, in a world that fetishizes animals by wearing their skins and counts them as human property, to place respect over profit.

To underscore the final point of the story:
Humans have no monopoly on love and compassion (dharma)... We have a lot to learn from nonhuman animals, spiritually - without erasing their autonomy. :)

Housemate told me, "'Your body is your temple. Don't put crap in it.'"

It occurred to me, then, that our mind is also our temple. Just don't put junk in it. Imagine that the mind is a muscle: relax all your muscles, and you will discover emptiness. The emptiness of clear, clean (Holy) water. I also try to make my conversations with others like this. When I was a kid, my dad would say, "If you ain't got nothin' good to say, don't say it." I think I am just now beginning to understand the significance of those words.

Story time...

The other night I was at a party, and my old roommate was there... I hadn't really seen her in this context before, or seen her in a long time. But as she traversed the room, she kind of created a channel with each person that struck me as astonishingly deep. I hear she likes to keep her friend groups separate, and I can see the beauty of it: doing so helps her to create this singular channel with each. I have a feeling others didn't appreciate this nearly as much as I did, at least that night. This is the person who taught me unconditional love. If you are like me, and struggle a lot socially, I recommend finding a person like this to have faith in through understanding... it will help you find faith in everyone more, just to have one person. Then you will know your ideal firsthand.

I've been thinking a lot about how I would like to portray myself in social media and in other social interactions. Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, and we are but actors on that stage, so it's important to find our role. We have to make it our own, but we also have to make it others'. People don't usually want to see a play that doesn't take their own interests into account. According to Anna Deavere Smith and postmodernism, acting could be about embracing the ambiguities, the unknown in our lives. We don't know all the things that exist around us, or even in us, in this moment, so how can we as actors become mirrors reflecting what we have observed, channels engaging our audience, putting our audience on display? Fires in the Mirror?

In a mind clear as still water,
even the waves, breaking,
are reflecting its light. - Dogen Zenji

How can we become clear media?

I have struggled with this as an activist. I came to the conclusion that I need to communicate more with my social "audience"; I need to try to learn about the people I encounter, where they are coming from, why they disagree if they disagree, why they struggle if they struggle, how they're different. I have all these universal (global) ideas of social justice (i.e. the least amount of exploitation of sentient beings possible) which I'd like to apply, but it seemed as though there were all these incomprehensible, frustrating barriers. I realized how the individuals and individual communities I meet and engage with represent the local... it is said we must think globally and act locally. In practice, we need to know details; we need to know our locale. Well, this is it.

I have gone back to the drawing board that this life always seems to be calling for. Suddenly, and no doubt this is partially due to pure luck, my friends started telling me that my words had influenced them. My vegan campaign did very little (to my knowledge), but my little expressions of sincere concern, my continual references to what I believe in without directly or intentionally implicating others, had influenced them to consider changing their eating habits. And best of all, the burden on me was lifted, for I no longer felt like I had to create new vegans... instead I felt that I just wanted to learn about people. I suspect that, in doing so, in making them part of my own sense of sincere interest, they could become part of my (vegan) world. They now... belong. I accept, at the same time, my place in their world. (Don't get me wrong -- I'm not proposing that campaigns are useless in general or the like. This is just my journey I speak of.)

To find the locale of one person is more intimate and, for me in some cases, easier than to understand the broader audience of actually standing on stage before hundreds of people as did Anna Deavere Smith, or on the platform of a blog or Facebook or a powerpoint presentation. And perhaps this is only natural - the need to delve into the most intimate locale (oneself), the most intimate interaction (with another individual), before learning to embrace a multitude of views at once. There are things one can share with an individual that, of course, one would refrain from sharing to the larger group. There's a kind of global locale to the open community of the internet. And the reality is that I get social anxiety... anyone who's seen me trying to talk to a group of people face-to-face could tell you that right away. It's as if I just never learned how to be a mirror to others, too busy worrying about the distortions that that mirror implies.

So I realized something. I want to be a mirror to my friends, to the world, to you, distortions and all. I want you to know me in your own way. The things I want to share with the world through social media, in any interaction really, but particularly in the more controlled places where my deliberations distinctly matter, should be how I want you to know me: not just as me playing my role, but by mirroring our shared love for discovery, like a clear medium into which, together from our respective vantage points, we can look. This is not to say that I will limit the things I write about so much as open up the way(s) that I write so as to reach as many people as deeply as possible for our mutual growth. And only by asking sincere questions about you and your perspective, as well as myself and mine - by in some way capturing and putting my audience on display - can I dare to hope for that.

I know that I will slip up many times to come, forgetting the lesson I now share; I know, also, that I will return to it many, many times - build on it, deepen it. Let me know if I have succeeded, at all, and if you plan to join me (comment, digg, Twitter follow, ShareThis, etc.) . Thank you.

_/\_