Welcome! And, The Value of Reflection

Welcome, all, to the Earnest Gay Buddhist Blog - EGB for short - counterpart to my Insta account Sassy Gay Buddhist - SGB for short (you can see I love abbrevs). Here I will post longer reflections, mostly about my meditation experiences, realizations, and the ways Buddhism has impacted my life. While they will be more "earnest" than my silly Insta posts, there will be plenty of sass and humor as well. Hopefully they will be inspiring and/or enlightening (pun intended) to readers, whether they have a meditation practice or not!

To start out, I thought I'd talk a bit about one of my motivations for writing this blog, and also a topic that is timely around the beginning of the year when lots of people tend to take the opportunity to reflect and set new intentions for themselves. I wanted to reflect on the value of reflection (so meta, I know 😛), especially when you are learning a new skill.*

1. Changes that happen through meditation are slow, subtle, and often times don't actually happen on the cushion. They're also often not the changes you expected to see. You may not catch them unless you take the time to reflect and introspect. When I first started practicing loving-kindness meditation, I felt for a long time like I was just a love robot spitting out phrases that meant nothing. I didn't feel anything during the practice and I didn't believe it was really doing anything. I remember listening to an episode of Ten Percent Happier (that podcast will get referenced A LOT here - I'm a Stan 😊) where the host Dan Harris gave the advice to look for the effects of meditation off the cushion - meditation often sneakily re-wires our brains, and while we may not feel anything during the practice, we will likely notice differences in the way we show up in the world. I started paying attention and soon noticed a moment of road rage that I was quickly able to let go of and turn into a more compassionate thought. I was shocked (in a good way) - IT'S INSIDE ME!!!! I had been looking for the proof in the wrong places. At the time that this happened, with little meditation experience, I was a sloppy untrained worldling (this is not just a sassy moniker I made up, it's actually a technical Buddhist term), so the changes were pretty drastic and easy to pinpoint. Now that I've been meditating for a year, the changes are often much more subtle, and I sometimes don't become aware of them unless I intentionally reflect.
   

2. We live in a productivity culture and are trained to always be looking forward and planning our future accomplishments and achievements. Capitalism tells us that no matter how much we've produced, it's never enough. We need to be constantly applying the cattle prod and forcing ourselves forward. When learning to meditate, I tend to start taking all of my new skills for granted and to forget all the bad habits I've already let go of. I often spend too much time looking forward to all the new habits and skills I'm still trying to cultivate and am hard on myself for not making as much progress as I would have liked. Pausing to reflect helps me give myself credit for all the beautiful skills I've cultivated so far, as well as all the unhelpful, harmful patterns I've managed to move past, which gives me more motivation to continue. Living in constant fear of your inner critic may motivate you for a while, but the cattle prod is not sustainable, and it will cause you unnecessary pain and harm. Using reflection to hone in on what you've accomplished helps you reconnect to the deep intentions you probably had for starting this practice in the first place, and that is a much more sustainable source of motivation.
   

3. So reflecting is useful because it helps you see more clearly your progress and achievements. This is even more important because, especially for a practice like meditation where the changes can be subtle, you will probably have to validate the changes yourself. Loved ones and friends may have trouble recognizing them, in part because, as discussed in one of my favorite Invisibilia episodes, we tend to have fixed views of people's personalities. We tend to see others filtered through the expectations we already have about who they are and how they act, rather than taking in new changes with fresh eyes. Proust, one of my fav authors, also describes this beautifully: “[O]ur social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about [them], and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.” (Marcel Proust, Swann's Way) Another reason that others may fail to notice our changes is because we are all mostly focused on ourselves. Think of the irony - you are thinking about yourself and how much you've changed and wondering why the other person doesn't notice it, but are you noticing them? Aren't they probably doing the same thing - thinking about themselves and expecting you to perceive what they do? We certainly have a need to "be seen" as humans, and through reflection we can give ourselves the gift of being seen - by ourselves.
   

4. Which leads me to my last point - reflection is a form of self love. On yet another TPH episode, Korean monk Haemin Sunim describes attention as one of the highest expressions of love. When we love someone, we want to pay attention to them - so we can take care of them, because we are curious and interested to learn about and understand them. What is reflection but the action of giving attention to yourself? When you reflect, you implicitly tell yourself, "I think you are worthy. I am interested in spending time with you and learning about you because I love and care about you deeply." What could be more beautiful than that?

OK, inaugural blog post and reflection on reflection complete! May the true reflecting begin in earnest (pun intended), and may this blog serve to bring a little more kindness, compassion, connection, and good-will to the world. Peace out (pun intended), my Untrained Worldlings!

* This Ten Percent Happier episode talks about a lot of the same ideas, but I had already drafted this before I listened to it, so I am going to go ahead and publish it anyway.