Tiny Revolutions №120: What do?

I took the bodhisattva vows and all I got was this existential clarity

Hello from Los Angeles, where I've spent the last three months in intensive training at

Angel City Zen Center

in preparation for becoming a lay teacher. It’s been one of those experiences that is so intense and profound that you don’t actually want to say too much about it, you just want to be in it to the fullest degree possible. I’ve journaled a lot but I really didn’t want to think too much about what I would say about it all—it’s felt like putting a narrative on the whole thing that I tell the world about would cheapen the experience. Besides, the narrative will come later, of that I am sure.

But one of the best aspects of my training is that my teacher, Dave Cuomo, is a brilliant writer and poet, and has given me many little assignments to help me reflect on the teachings. Today I’m sharing something I wrote for one of his assignments: to go out and “complete” the Four Bodhisattva Vows—famously impossible—and see what came up in the process. It's good to be back in touch!

Cyril Porchet, “Crowd”

1. Beings Are Numberless, I Vow to Free Them

The amazing thing about recovery meetings is they never run out of people to join them. Beings are numberless and so are addictions, which are an obvious if highly flawed way to end suffering, at least for an instant, and, as we know, life is suffering. Addiction will be with us as long as suffering is with us, and that might be a while.

I go to recovery meetings for the same reason I practice Zen and write things on the internet—to feel less bone-crushingly alone. A recovery meeting is a miracle because for one hour we can save each other. In the presence of others who are willing to acknowledge how difficult it is to be a human, and how much pain is involved, we are free. We hold hands and chant the serenity prayer at the end of it. “God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I go to the recovery meetings to free and get freed. We can’t do it alone. We need each other to create the container so that it can hold us in our efforts.

A man at the meeting on Friday night wearing a ripped black t-shirt and a black baseball cap pulled low over his eyes stroked his moustache as he told us how he’d been in recovery for four years now and it was all going pretty well—he doesn’t want to drink or use most of the time. And still, he said, “The thing I am most often wondering about is, ‘What do?’ I mean really,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing all the time. What do??”

I knew what he meant. I often look around at people and wonder how their agendas are so clear. Always one thing after another, a life that seems to me, the person looking in, like they have it all figured out. Or at least more than I do. It soothes me to know I’m not the only one confused about something that seems to come naturally to so many. What do?? It’s obvious some of the time but less so others. And if you’re not accustomed to numbing out, like those of who attend recovery meetings for our various addictions are, choosing how to spend your time can feel onerous. Some of us work too much or overcommit to some project or another. We conquer one addiction and then seek out new ways of suffering when the old ones aren’t available anymore. And then we figure out how to stamp them out before we move on to another one. I went on the 12 Steppers website and discovered 32 different types of recovery groups, but I’m pretty sure there are far more. New ones spring up all the time.

This is a good thing and a sign of hope, as far as I’m concerned. We may never run out of suffering or addictions but also we’ll never stop trying to help ourselves and each other to escape them.

2. Delusions Are Inexhaustible, I Vow to End Them

I can’t remember the first time I labored under the assumption that a man would rescue me from my life, but I do recall it becoming habitual sometime around junior high. As one of nine children, I was always surrounded by people growing up, but I was so often lonely. I started setting myself apart from the others early on, perhaps because most of my siblings were boys, but also, I don’t know. I felt different. A boyfriend would change that. I would feel less alone and I would feel more validated in being different and special. I wanted to feel special.

A school dance would be coming up and I would think, it’s fine, I’ll have a boyfriend by then. While making plans for vacation, I’d think, it’ll be sweet to miss the boyfriend I’ll have by the time that rolls around. Holidays? Well, I’d assume I’d just be hanging out with my boyfriend.

Sometimes I would actually have a boyfriend. Most of the time I wouldn’t. It didn’t stop me from clinging to the idea that I would. Years and years that went on. When I didn’t have a boyfriend all I could think about was how I needed to have the right boyfriend, and I would think my life sucked and I sucked because I didn’t have one. Only the fucked up thing was that when I did have a boyfriend I would basically be thinking about how he was not the right boyfriend for me! Which would lead me to…break up with the boyfriend. And then the whole dumb cycle would begin again.

My delusions are inexhaustible.

I’ve studied the twelvefold chain of dependent origination and concluded that there is a way out of this particular loop of suffering. I started to get off of it in 2020 when I took a break from dating because I had quit drinking and oh also there was a global pandemic that got in the way of us doing much canoodling with strangers. The past few years of dating had felt like a series of increasingly joyless jumps from rock to rock, with the rocks being men I was not actually interested in but felt like I needed.

How do you spend that many years trapped in the same delusion? I can tell you at length sometime if you’re interested, but it starts with not believing you are enough on your own. Then the pattern reinforces itself: you make well-intentioned but doomed attempts to connect with good men who actually care about you, while pining after ones who don't respect you. Eventually, you see yourself not just as insufficient, but as a menace to the very people trying to make you happy.

For the past five years I’ve been asking myself what it means to enter a relationship from a place of curiosity and desire, not one of desperation and fear, and practicing accordingly. I am no longer deluded about this one aspect of my life, and it feels like a much safer place to be. I don’t assume I will have a boyfriend at any time in the future, but I also don’t assume I won’t. I don’t know. It seems just as likely as not, and that’s about all I can say. Every day is new, and so am I.

3. Dharma Gates Are Boundless, I Vow to Enter Them

The looming specter of my career is making itself known. The end of ango approaches and so does the hard fact of the matter: after a few months of focusing fully on Zen practice and training, I need to start earning money again. Which brings up a wild array of feelings. Curiosity, excitement, dread, anticipation, hope, fear. The conundrum of my career, and how at wit’s end I often am about it all. Me, a person who has had wild swings of fortune, who has been restless and ambitious and confused and conflicted, sometimes very “successful,” sometimes broke, always in motion. Why’s it so hard, I think?

This is a dharma gate, and here I am entering it.

When I arrived in LA on February 28, I was spun up with anxiety about the coming three months and the fact that my plans to keep work coming in during ango had not gone according to plan. I wasn’t broke or anywhere close to it, it just felt that way. I’d been trying a lot of things to earn money in the past two years, and none of them had worked out quite as well as I’d hoped. The writing courses didn’t take off like we wanted them to; the coaching offers undersold.

But once the ango got underway and I gave myself wholeheartedly to practice and study, the pressure alleviated. I had money in the bank. I also earned some in the first month doing work for an old client, and got an unexpected tax return that helped a lot, and my sweet dad sent me helpful cash infusions via Paypal to ensure his girl kept all the wheels in motion. I am incredibly fortunate. I am also incredibly competent, and have never shied away from hard work. I love this about myself.

But thinking about going back out on the market to sell things brings a physical heaviness to my body. My throat constricts, my breathing turns shallow.

What is there to do but stay with the pain, the conditions exactly as they are? I can’t run from them, that never works. What if this, too, can be OK?

I’m just so tired of thinking I have to make things happen. I don’t know how to make things happen. Dharma keeps reminding me: it’s not up to me. It never was, and yet I still feel this pressure. How 21st century, how delusional. How human.

One more week of training and then I’ll find myself back in the hustle, knocking on doors and exploring who I can serve and how I will earn. I expect it will be uncomfortable. I expect I’ll be at turns optimistic and hopeful. I will be tempted to put my head in the sand and turn away from the challenge, to rest in the assumption some opportunity will drop into my lap without me having to do much about it. But even though that might be true, I find myself thinking of the monk asking Master Mayu Baoche why, if the wind is ever present, he is waving his fan. I have to wave the fan.

4. The Buddha Way is Unsurpassable, I Vow to Realize It

I often think about how lucky I was when my friend mentioned that there was a Zen center down the street from my house back in 2018 when I was looking for a new group to sit with. It was by chance that I walked into this place; I hadn’t been looking for Zen specifically, it just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Sometimes I think if I hadn’t found

Angel City Zen Center

I would have fallen into another tradition—stuck it out at Insight LA or found some other secular meditation teacher’s group to join. But then sometimes I think it’s more likely that I would have kept hopping from place to place and not settling anywhere. I’d have gone to [REDACTED] and found it too stuffy. I’d have gone to [REDACTED] and found it too pretentious. I’d have gone to [REDACTED] and found it too weird. And then I would have grasped around blindly like a hungry ghost all my life, sometimes glimpsing the truth but more often shielding my eyes from it because it didn’t look how I wanted it to.

What a gift, then, that I found a spiritual community that spoke to me in a language I could understand. That put sutras and rituals in a palatable wrapper, interpreted through the lenses of people whose hearts had been just as pulverized as mine, who wanted to believe that there was a way out of suffering but wouldn’t trust one that was just handed to you on a platter. That showed me what I already knew to be true, which was that the only person who could save me was myself, even though it was the last thing I actually wanted to do. It was just that the only thing worse was not doing it, so here I am.

I’ve been a seeker all my life. I tried Catholicism, very earnestly, as a child. I tried books and writing and men and travel and yoga and climbing the corporate ladder and drugs and every other means to transport and lose myself, and I loved and learned something from all of them. But none of them has given me the truth that I’ve found in Zen practice. The sheer perspective and reminder that there is no other way, no other teacher but this very moment. Nothing else that can be trusted or relied upon at all.

How could I not have taken the final Bodhisattva Vow? The Buddha Way is truly unsurpassable, and I do my best to realize it every day. When I’m tired, when I’m disappointed, when I wake up listless and don’t remember why life is worth living — those are the times in particular when returning to the simplicity of the path is most essential.

I can think of no better aim for my life, no better way to spend my time than to find out what this thing we call reality is, to fully experience life exactly as it is. It is not easy, no, but it is simple enough that I can stay true.

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So! That’s where I am. How about you?

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, like this post or share it with someone who needs it.