Cheerful Birthday

I began practicing weekly with the Shambhala Meditation Group of Buffalo during the fall of 2007 after living back in Buffalo a year and a half. I first became involved with Shambhala meditation seventeen years ago during a transition year upon turning forty.

I was drawn to the big questions my entire life. My young sister Jane died suddenly when I was six, an event that linked me to a need to ask.

When I was 23, I bought a copy of Be Here Now at a bookstore on Sixteenth Street in SanFrancisco. I had studied the zen tradition of raku pottery, read more books by Ram Dass and Alan Watts, as well as female adventurers Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein, Simone DeBeauvoir.

Art had been my religion, but by the late eighties, I found myself browsing bookstore shelves for inspiration and discovered an exploding universe of ideas as the new age settled in. I read Yogananda, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, practiced yoga before it was YOGA, received instruction in Transcendental Meditation. I also stumbled upon books by Chogyam Trungpa and found myself going back for more.

Kerry told me about a class she had taken in Marin called Shambhala Training. I soon discovered Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, by my new favorite author, Chogyam Trungpa. I also discovered that he had founded a college in Boulder thatThis joining of art and meaning was just right for me. The school featured a famous writing program that honored the work of the beat poets. It first opened back in the fall of 1974 around the same time I passed through Boulder on route to San Francscio. I had just finished reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road and was full of curiousity about the dharma bums. Still, at that time, I knew nothing of what was going on in the Trungpa Naropa world. No internet, no facebook, no twitter. Even if I had read or heard something about the school or Trungpa, it likely would not have caught my interest at that time.

The seeds had been planted, but it would be another seventeen years or so before the promise of art and meaning would lure me to graduate school at Naropa Institute. Before heading west, I attended Level One of Shambhala Training in New York City during the spring of 1992. The next three years were an immersion in learning, self-discovery and meditation that delivered me into a new career in healthcare. I remained soulfully connected to the Shambhala sangha, practiced meditation and attended certain events, but I was always a bit outside the community.

I have never been a joiner. I sometimes push myself into endeavors hoping to become consumed by an artform, job, cause, greater purpose. How wonderful it would be to maintain a solid commitment and sense of this is it. Of course, I have felt that way many times, but the sentiment changes. Fruitless to even go there. Chogyam Trungpa once addressed a group of EST students attending one of Werner Erhardt's infamous weekend sessions: "Ladies and gentlemen, I must inform you...it is not IT."

So after nearly dying and losing all sense of ground, I found myself living back in Buffalo. During my early months here, I found a postcard designed by a local artist that confirmed the rightness of being here...
Buffalo--City of No Illusions.

I never expected to connect with a meditation community here. I was okay knowing the practice was within me despite my surroundings, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover others to sit with each Tuesday night. Curiously, several of us have Aries birthdays. Last year, Trudy introduced The Elixir of Life birthday practice and again this year, we took time to contemplate (and celebrate) impermanence, death, cause & effect, suffering with these solumn words...

I entered this world.

I age day by day.

Hanging onto the past, I squeeze all the life out of my existence in an attempt to overcome the process of aging.

I should realize that all beings suffer this plight.

Let me be a warrior and celebrate this truth without hiding in the shadows of denial and discursiveness.

All the logic in the world will not save me from the simple trth that I age.

Sickness is my companion; it follows me everywhere.

I try to avoid the truth, but the painful conversation with sickness never ends.

Death is my friend, the truest of friends, a true friend that never abandons me.

Death is always waiting for me.


Cheerful Birthday to me. What's up with cheer? It is a Shambhala thing. The word happiness implies an end state, the result of causes and conditions over which we may have little control.
Cheerfulness is volitional, a deliberate decision to be good-spirited. We may act intentionally to rouse good cheer.

I'm fifty-seven now. The fact that I have made it this far is worth a bit of cheer. More and more, I am discovering the anthropology of myself in the world as I trace the tangled trails of my existence. The twisting and broken threads do make sense. Patterns emerge. Things sort of add up...despite appearances.