Impermanence is the meat and potatoes of my practice. Though over the years my thinking (and this blog, which will soon follow that thinking) evolved to consider many more Dharma topics (self and self belonging, suffering, aggregates, karma, etc.), I always come ‘home’ to impermanence. It’s my staple food for thought. It is my constant companion. It is the Dharma, my great refuge. So here I want to offer you, Dear Reader, one more simple tool that I consider a straightforward, ‘pure play’, impermanence thinking technique:
The Decision Tree
Like the Matrix, the Decision Tree provides a structured approach to seeing multiple possibilities for a given situation. Unlike the Matrix however, it is not strictly binary so it allows me to think through more possible factors/outcomes at once. It lets thoughts grow, branch-out, explore many possible futures/outcomes; ultimately, it helps to understand the TRUTH of this world — the outcomes I hope for/worry about/believe will happen are really just one single solitary leaf on a tree filled with leafy possibilities.
Story:
I was in pain. Daily. I would wake-up and my lower back would ache, moving around relieved it, but anytime I had to sit for an extended period, back it would come. Per my physical therapist, the cause was a destabilized joint in my lower back and/or a tear in my hip; incidentally, both common injuries amongst dancers and yoga folks and the like. Her recommendation, lay-off my 6X a week 2 hour a day intensive yoga practice and give myself time to heal.
For a saner, less stubborn, less worry warty, less vain person, the story may have ended right here. But for cray cray Alana, much to the benefit of this blog, there is of course more…
I was so attached to my practice, to the way it defined me and the results I believed it had (my ideal ‘dancer’s body’) I just couldn’t lay-off. So in and out, in and out, in and out of the physical therapist’s office I went. I honestly thought: if I quit doing yoga I won’t stay physically active (which is ironic since before I did yoga I used to body build). I will get lazy, inflexible and fat. I will lose the ability and the figure I had worked so hard to build. If all that happens I’ll be miserable. I realized I had a great deal of certainty that I had built up around the idea of quitting yoga so I decided to analyze if I could really be so sure that the outcomes I imagined would come true.
For me, my mind has a tendency to leap from imagined A to imagined Z super quick (just like from hugs to the homeless to swine flu death, or mole to cancer, or not being invited out to not having a true friend). So, a tool, like a tree, that helps me imagine some of the many other possible outcomes softens my sense of ‘for sureness’, my sense of permanence. Just so you know…I don’t actually always go around drawing a tree…but you may notice just from reading this blog, my mind works this way naturally, the serious of questions/reality checks I often ask myself show tree-like echos throughout my stories (just look at the prelude to this blog for a very recent example). The truth is, for this story, the tree did soften me-up a bit. Ultimately though, it was the pain, the suffering and consequences, that got me to take a break and give my body a chance to heal.
Tracing the benefits of a yoga practice got me to start and continue doing it, but using the same thought process to see the harm got me to quit. Of course, it’s worth noting that my desire for the benefits of a yoga practice (strong, fit, flexible, dancer bod) remained so I simply replace yoga with other activities that I thought would help me achieve that aim with less pain…the deeper questions of can I control my body, can it stay strong or fit or a particular shape forever, are those things I preference really more valuable? Can they make me loved? Cared for? Safe? Safe from what exactly? Is it worth the effort? What is the middle ground? Those are questions for later in my practice, questions I still face right now. Questions that maybe will motivate you to stay tuned…