Since Dharma Practice Day One, Mae Yo has repeated one homework assignment to me over and over — “Alana, look at your stories, go and prove that all your problems really start from your sense of me and mine.” Somehow, I kept ignoring the assignment; just an empty space in my notebook again and again.

Even though I had sort of figured-out that I was the one causing my problems (see the last section, Whoo Wait a Sec its Me…), I figured I could tweak myself, improve myself and then the problems would go away. This idea that the very concept of self and self belongings is a lie (wrong view) and that any self I created, even a new and improved one, was going to keep biting me in the ass, I guess it never really clicked until…

Shortly after I had ‘finished’ the homework about suffering in where my mind visits most often, I happened to go to temple and listen to LP Anan talk about his experiences helping look after a baby some community members were leaving at the temple while they went to school/work.  I must have been primed to really start thinking about the perils of me and mine because the sermon hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt it resonate in my heart and, ultimately it launched my very first effort to answer that age old homework assignment about me and mine.

In this entry, I want to just share a few of LP Anan’s remarks that really got my ball rolling. In the next entry I will share my own contemplations on the topic.

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A couple with a newborn came to the temple in some dire straights — they had no one to help care for their child while they went to school/work and not enough money to pay for daycare. Mae Yo, being Mae Yo, offered to help and soon enough the temple was doubling as day care and the monks doubling as nannies.  LP Anan (one of the monks) was explaining how, at first, he didn’t want to care for the baby. He certainly didn’t want to change a dirty diaper. Its disgusting!

But over time, the baby started to grow on him. The baby would smile, when LP Anan held him. Or cry when he was put down. And LP Anan came to love the baby, to feel needed by him, to feel proud to be such a good caretaker of the baby. The baby became his responsibility. The baby became his.

Suddenly changing diapers became an act of love, something LP could do to prove what a good caretaker he was. Diaper time went from being disgusting to being desirable, at least when it was his baby’s diaper time (other baby’s diapers were, of course, still disgusting). And I, heard loud and clear in LP Anan’s story —  the condition of ownership is the ticket — that is what transforms a yuk, a suffering, into something desirable, something that we want to nurture and protect and preserve.

Incidentally several months later, the couple moved away and, of course took their baby with them. And LP Anan, suffered loss, suffered sorrow. Not because a baby had moved away, but because his baby had moved away….

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When I got home from temple I went back through my homework about suffering in where my mind visits most often (see the previous 3 entries) and I noticed a theme (finally!!!!!). My time, my body, my clothes, my self… in each story my suffering has a singular seed — me and mine. And in each story I was able to forgive the pain my time (the careful planning and frequent disappointment), my body (soreness, hunger), my clothes (obligation for continued striving) caused me for one simple reason –they are mine.  Imagine that, Mae Yo was right after all..