On Paradoxes

02/12/2024

“Every wave system has crests and troughs. These two aspects always go together. For example, sound is not pure sound: it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence. And that’s simply the way things are… nobody ever saw crests without troughs and troughs without crests, just as you don’t encounter people with fronts but no backs… or a coin with heads but no tails. Although the heads and tails, fronts and backs, positives and negatives, are different, they are at the same time one. One has to get used to the notion that different things can be inseparable… our physical world is a system of inseparable differences.”

-Alan Watts

In meditation practice, expectation narrows possibility. Expecting reduced anxiety, lower blood pressure, or a mental detente limits us to our scope of experience. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg once said that her practice shifted when she stopped expecting something to happen and just did the practice. It’s a paradox: we meditate for results, but if we expect them? Nope. Insights and breakthroughs often lay beyond what we expect, believe, or imagine to be possible. 

Brene Brown popularized vulnerability research. When vulnerable, we’re emotionally exposed and can’t predict outcomes. It’s the same when courageous: outcomes are unknown. While sitting, we are honest about what arises (‘seeing things as they are, not as we would like them to be’), and courageous enough to sit with it (which, paradoxically, helps it dissolve). Vulnerability is courageous, courage is vulnerability. They are, paradoxically, synergistic, incomplete alone. 

Feelings, emotions, thoughts, and sensations co-arise with embedded judgements about them and preferences for their staying or going. We like calm, for example. We desire for it to stay and are concerned for its passing. We dislike pain, desire for it change, have concern about it staying, and crave for comfort. Encoded in craving for a state to stay or change is dissatisfaction, or aversion, to what’s arising. Craving and aversion intimately, paradoxically, co-arise. All we have to do—paradoxically—is just be with it, with no judgement, and listen with relentless curiosity and compassion.

How we navigate unsavory feelings or thoughts in sitting practice determines the depth of our practice and personhood. In pain, there's wisdom in growing through and with it, receiving the wisdom and info in the feeling, and knowing it will pass. In positive states, there’s pain of knowing it will pass, and the suffering of clinging to it. When pain and discomfort become teachers, and the shadows of pleasure emerge, the differences between obstacles and allies lay in our view. It’s a paradox: obstacles are allies, allies are obstacles (if we attach to them). 

I went vegan in my early twenties. It was a needed course correction. Years in, however, I was bloated, skinny, and tired, and returned to meat after over a decade of vegetarianism. Years ago, after reading that 6.5 hours or so of sleep is all most need, I shaved two hours off my sleep. I’m still recovering. My journey in reclaiming health from decades of night shifts and a Vata-provoking lifestyle helped me see that the trial-and-error of getting healthy often wrecks health. I see this paradox regularly in clients. Alongside stress, trauma, and self-criticism, one of the core causes of imbalances are diets, supplements, etc. people think are healthy but just ain’t so, at least not for them (yet may be for some). This paradox is one of the slipperiest: the journey to what we want can, sometimes, ensure it remains elusive. 

Ayurveda is a root-cause oriented and truly holistic medicine. It embraces what allopathy often dismisses: the individuality of each person, for one, and that the greatest allies to physical and mental health exist beyond the body, in mind, soul, or spirit. Healthy food, exercise, and sleep may remain stubbornly palliative until we love ourselves like our life depends on it, face our shadows, and, of course, remove the cause of an imbalance (‘removing the cause is in of itself the best treatment’). Physical and mental fitness lay in attention, choice, loving and forgiving ourselves, and stress response. It’s a beautiful paradox, really: what we seek outside, in vices or doctors or ponies or Porsches, lay within. 

To understand the health possible through Ayurveda, and the equanimity possible via meditation, takes practice, and practice takes discipline. Freedom from a chattering mind, weight, or blood sugar takes discipline. Discipline is using our unlimited power of creative freedom to choose, out of infinite possibility, to do one thing, or the right thing, or to be of service to others over individual freedom. Freedom, paradoxically, is tasted through discipline (as Longchenpa says, ‘discipline is like a fine, clean carriage; the ladder for climbing up to higher realms, or to the fortress of happiness.’). 

Physical problems are often downstream of mental or emotional ones. Getting healthy can delay health. Expectation ensures that we won’t receive, and simply being is often the most skillful action. Craving and aversion, vulnerability and courage, discipline and freedom—it’s crests and troughs, heads and tails, yin and yang. Fronts and backs. 

In paradoxes, there is synergy.

Paradoxes—opposites—are synergistic. 

Which is a paradox. 

I’m co-hosting a three-day Ayurvedic retreat at The Sanctuary, Thailand with the inimitable Catherine Heartwood from March 04-07. We will be using hands-on Ayurvedic treatments like nasya, basti, pranayama, meditation, and nature to balance Vata, soothe the nervous system, and reduce anxiety and stress. Message for details or questions.

Initial Ayurvedic consultations on Zoom are deep dives into your digestion, lifestyle, sleep, stress, and—yes—self compassion. They take around 90 minutes. Within a week, I’ll write a master list of diet and lifestyle recommendations, herbal protocols, and perhaps meditations and breathing exercises to implement at home. $180 per session. If you’ve had an initial Ayurvedic consultation and are ready for a follow-up, please reach out if I haven’t already.

If you want to learn how to meditate, or perhaps stabilize a practice, private meditations are sliding scale, and slightly cheaper in five or ten-class packages. I used to make them expire, but it’s of more benefit to both if I’m used when needed. Paradoxically (have you detected a theme here?), inconsistent meetings are often best for long-term consistency. 

I’m starting drop-in meditation classes soon. Message if you’d like to be notified. 

I post dharma and Ayurvedic content regularly on Telegram. 

That’s it. 

Thanks for reading. 

Be kind to yourself. 

It’s a service to others. 

Michael