#sukha

A Return, Anew: Into Nurturing

Greetings World!

I'm dusting off this old Tumblr after nearly 7 years to start a new project. And the timing feels meaningful - in Judaism, 7 is considered the number of spiritual fullness and completeness.

So here we are, in 2024 - 7 years after I last posted here regularly. It feels like the right time to pursue new depths of self-knowledge and balance. I want to understand how the different pieces of my life puzzle fit together; where my energy flows and where it's blocked.

Each year, I choose a new quote to guide me for the year to come - for 2024, I chose a quote from Buddhist-Vietnamese monk and one of my teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh, to carry me forward:

"Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet."

I look to 2024 as a chance to sink deeper roots into this beautiful, blossoming life I’m building for myself. Thich Nhat Hanh's words will remind me to walk steadily yet lightly upon this precious Earth, embracing each breath as a gift. There is much more love to cultivate, still and despite.

In this coming year, I aim to be more rooted, intentional, and connected - to my new home in Philadelphia, its land and community, my body and spirit, my creative work, my relationships. After so much movement and flux these past few years, my goal for 2024 is to sink in deeply and mindfully, and pour my energy into what serves my raison d’être.

I'm divvying up my time and energy amongst different categories of creative pursuits and personal development goals:

Producing/performing theater and clown

Writing essays, poetry, and fiction

Navigating my day job in instructional design

Opportunities for teaching (clown, Jewish studies, yoga)

Travel and adventure

Building community and relationships in my new home

Nurturing my health and wellbeing

In times past, I have felt energized and focused by what I brought into my life; other times, I felt drained and overwhelmed by it all.

So this year, I'm going to document it - how I spend each week across these different areas. What activities feed me, versus take from me? When do I give too much and have nothing left for myself?

I'm reminded of a teaching from yoga philosophy around sthira and sukha - finding equilibrium between strength and comfort, effort and ease. I want to find that sweet spot, where I can walk the line between sthira and sukha in how I pace myself across all these different pursuits. Grounding down into steady effort when needed, while also cultivating softness and spaciousness.

So, once a week, I'll tally up the previous 7 days - what projects got my time and energy, what didn't, how balanced did I feel, what do I need more or less of, etc.

I'm hopeful this reflection will help me find alignment, purpose, and sustainability across the many beautiful puzzle pieces of my life.

As the Jewish tradition says, 7 is the number sitting at the center of it all, binding together the physical and spiritual worlds.

Dukka, the word I think Robin is referring to, I sometimes think of as meaning discord or being out of joint or out of tune with the world. Here below is a bit more that arrives at its origins in the wobbly axle of ancient times that has also let me think of it as a flat tire in modern ones.

According to Monier-Williams in his Sanskrit-English Dictionary, duhkha means “uneasy, uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult.”

If we give up trying to translate dukkha into one word, it could be said that it is an existential sense that things are not as they should be, which manifests in human experience in varying degrees between despair (things are vastly different from the way things should be) and a vague uneasiness (things are not quite as they should be). By “existential sense” I mean a perception based on our experience of the world as self-conscious beings. Whether we are philosophers or not, the nature of our existence and our relationship to the world is of supreme importance to us. We are sentient beings who are acutely aware of our existence, and therefore our potential non-existence. When humans contemplate this great matter, we typically experience dukkha.

The subtle nature of the experience of dukkha can be understood further from its etymology. Sargeant (2009, p. 303) explains the historical roots of duḥkha and its antonym sukha:

It is perhaps amusing to note the etymology of the words sukha (pleasure, comfort, bliss) and duḥkha (misery, unhappiness, pain). The ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were a nomadic, horse- and cattle-breeding people who travelled in horse- or ox-drawn vehicles. Su and dus are prefixes indicating good or bad. The word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning "sky," "ether," or "space," was originally the word for "hole," particularly an axle hole of one of the Aryan's vehicles. Thus sukha … meant, originally, "having a good axle hole," while duhkha meant "having a poor axle hole," leading to discomfort.

For me, it helps to demystify dukkha to imagine someone getting nauseous from riding in a cart that keeps swaying from side to side who is thinking to himself, “Oy, this is very uncomfortable.” https://brightwayzen.org/not-misunderstanding-dukkha/

La chica es un amor, seguro que la va a mimar más que tú yo juntas. -Te cuento pensando que, solo por eso, nuestras lágrimas van a valer la pena.-

Es toda una alegría que a este bicho le vayan a dar un hogar. Seguro que le has buscado la mejor familia del mundo, espero que de vez en cuando nos manden una foto o nos dejen verla. -Te digo sonriendo y miro a la perrita que está comiendo sus premios, emocionándome porque ahora la tengo delante de mí disfrutando de sus premios, el día que la encontré solo era un manojo de miedo lleno de dolores y sangre, a partir de ahora solo la levantarán la mano para darles caricias, te miro con mis ojos llenos de lágrimas.- Va a ser toda una suerte.

Confío en que si, Irene. Que esa alegría se mantenga siempre. -Te digo acercando mi mano a la cabeza de la perra para mimarla un poco y, cuando me dices que ojalá nos dejen verla yo hago un gesto pensativo.- Podemos preguntarle cuando venga. No creo que se niegue, además no se va a ir muy lejos de aquí. Seguro que no va a negarse. -Propongo, sonriendo después.- Siempre recuerda que esa suerte fue porque le tendiste la mano, porque le diste la oportunidad, Irene... -Te digo al verte emocionada, al ver tus ojos brillando emocionados, porque ahora son lágrimas de felicidad y no de miedo como aquel día de diciembre, porque ahora son sonrisas en lugar de miedo. Ahora ya hay luz después de la noche. Una luz que me quiero llevar conmigo cuando me acerco a ti para abrazarte y compartir también tus lágrimas que hacen a las mías bailar en mis ojos.- Qué suerte que estuvieses ese día. Qué suerte que sigas estando hoy, Irene...