Being present to compliments, seeing yourself

Last night, as I was typing away on my computer way past my bedtime, my friend remarked to me, “You’re so good, you write every night. If I did that, I’d be done with all my work as soon as I got home from my trip.”

Instead of thanking her for her compliment or even acknowledging what she said (you’re good, you write each night), I deflected it:

“Oh no,” I explained. “I’m not good. I’m writing on my blog because I want people to read it and write comments on it. I’m writing to get praise and attention,” I laughed. “But I’ve also found that when I feel the need to write, I should write, because that feeling doesn’t always come up and it’s hard to find later.”

I’m pretty sure I know why I did this, why I deflected her comment instead of accepting it, I think I said what I said because it was the truth. See, I had been noticing earlier that day how much I had been grasping at the possibility that people would love my travel blogposts, how eager I was to check to see if there were any comments on my blog, how instead of wandering around in the city I was in, I just wanted to get back to my hotel room to write. And this desire to write had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with the reaction I was hoping to get from it.

Also, when she said that I was good for writing every night, I knew that wasn’t true either. Though I had written each night since we had been together, that was more out of coincidence than from any discipline on my part. I just happened to want to write both those nights, it hadn’t come from a commitment to write each night or from a place of being good.

But the next morning, as we were walking through the bus station, I thought about the fact that I hadn’t been present to her when she gave me that compliment. She had offered something to me and I had pushed it away. I also thought about the fact that others often see in us the things that we don’t see in ourselves. I began to wonder if my deflection of her compliment might be my way of not seeing myself or rejecting another person’s accurate view of me.

So I reconsidered what she said. I thought about the possibility that I might be committed to writing (not each night, because I knew that wasn’t true). That made me remember that that night I actually had written in order to capture something that had happened that day because I thought it was important. And then I remembered that I had written something else because I knew it would help me to process some things, would help me to see myself better. I can't say that those were necessarily commitment to writing or being good, but they weren't me grasping for praise or attention either.

In all this, I still don’t really know if her compliment to me was true or not. But I think she saw something about me and my writing. And I guess what I want to do is to be aware of myself around this, to genuinely consider people’s comments to me, be aware of when I deflect them, and consider whether or not that deflection keeps me from seeing a self of me that I wouldn’t normally consider.

getting help from others

Recently I discovered that I have some issues around getting help from others. What I have discovered is two things. One: I resent people when they don’t help me enough. I expect their help to do everything for me and get really mad when their ‘help’ leaves me having to figure things out for myself. The second issue I have probably stems from the first: I don’t actually trust people to help me. I may ask for their help but then I take it with a note of caution, weighing it against my own judgment of the situation. This second issue doesn’t bother me so much, I think it makes sense to weigh advice against your own better judgment; but today I learned that really, I’d probably be a whole lot better off if I would just let people help me.
Here’s what happened:
I stayed at a chain hotel at the airport when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur. I knew I was staying at the chain’s downtown version of their hotel the next day so I asked the receptionist at the hotel how to get there. She was quite helpful: she gave me a map and explained that I would just take the bus to the monorail and take the burgundy line to the stop she had circled on the map.
“And how do I get from the stop to the hotel?” I asked.
“You will see it,” she said. “Big and red and white,” she explained, and smiled.
So, I got on my bus, navigated my way to the monorail, and looked out the window for the big hotel as we approached the stop. It was nowhere to be seen. When I got off at the stop, I didn’t know which way to go so I walked up to the station agent and said “Tune Hotel?” From inside her kiosk, she stretched her arm out to the right, pointed, and smiled. I thanked her and happily walked down the steps on her right. At the foot of the steps, I looked around for the big hotel and saw nothing but shops and skyscrapers. I walked to the end of the block and looked around once more: still no hotel... and that’s when I got mad. I pictured this woman's outstretched arm and pointing finger, which minutes before I had been extremely grateful for, and wanted to say to her: "You know what? Your arm stretching and your pointing, they do nothing for me. You may have pointed me here but now I have to figure out where the hotel is and you didn’t help me with that at all.”

I considered going back to ask for more direction but I was pretty sure that with the language barrier, she wouldn’t actually be able to help me any more than she had. At that point, I had no choice but to keep walking, so I did. I crossed the street and walked down the sidewalk. About halfway down the sidewalk, I looked to my right and saw: A huge hotel, big and red and white, and completely unavoidable from this side of the street.
And that’s when I decided that the station agent had actually given me the direction that I needed, but I had to do some work myself. The station agent knew that if I kept walking to the right, I’d see the hotel eventually. I however, couldn't see this until I actually was willing to follow her directions, to actually get to the place where I could finally see the hotel.
It was a good lesson, but it didn’t stick.
When I got to the hotel, it was too early to check in so I decided to go to the bus station to buy my ticket for my next day’s trip to Johar Bahru. I took the monorail to the bus station but once I got there, didn’t see any ticket booths. I approached the woman at the information kiosk and said “Ticket to JB?” She handed me a piece of paper that said that all southbound buses leave from the other terminal. I thanked her but then decided that she hadn’t understood me, that she thought I was asking where to catch the bus, not where to buy the ticket. 
So I ignored her advice and walked around until I saw a sign, pointing up the stairs, that said “ticket agents.” I walked upstairs to find an entire floor filled with ticket booths and felt relieved that I had not gone to the other station. But as I walked around, I noticed that none of the buses said JB. Then a man approached me, asked me where I was going and when I said JB, directed me to a ticket booth. I bought a ticket for the latest bus I could get-11:30- and the lady told me to come back to her tomorrow, at 11.
The next day, I decided to get to the station early. I figured that if I had to get from where I picked up my ticket to that other station, getting there at 11 might not be enough time. As I waited for the monorail to take me to the bus station, a local woman approached me, asked where I was going, and explained that I should go to the other station, that the station I was going to was only for the northbound buses.  I began to get a little worried about my bus ticket, the people who sold it to me, and whether or not I had articulated where I was going. But I had no choice, my ticket was at the northbound station, so I went there.
I approached the kiosk, the woman gave me my ticket and said “Platform 22, downstairs, leave at 10:30.” I slowly walked toward platform 22, confused as to why the bus was leaving from this station when it was a southbound bus. I scanned the monitors to confirm that platform 22 was going to JB: there wasn't even a 22 on the monitor. When I got to platform 22, the doors were closed and no one was there. 
"See?" I thought. "She doesn't know what she's talking about. There isn't even a way for me to get to platform 22..."
"JB?" a man interrupted the tirade inside my head.
'Yes!" I said in surprise. I spied a walkie- talkie in his hand. He said something in another language and I heard the woman's voice reply.
"Follow me," he said as he lead me toward the top of an escalator.
"Oh yay!" I thought to myself. "Platform 22 wasn't a place, it was a man and the lady upstairs told him to wait for me and now he is helping me."
"You see my friend in red and white?" he asked as he pointed to man, standing on the corner, wearing a red shirt and a white cap.
"Yes!" I said excitedly.
"You go to him," he said and pointed again.
I was in heaven as I walked down the escalator and the man in red waved at me. "This is so nice," I thought, "I'm being shuttled between all of these people, helping me to get to my bus."
When I got to the man in red he said, "You see my friend in blue?" and pointed to a man in a purple shirt, standing across the street.
"Yes," I answered, familiar now with this routine, and began to walk toward him.
"Wait!" the man said, and pointed to the oncoming traffic. I stepped back on to the sidewalk. "Okay, now you go," he said and I cautiously crossed the street.
The man in purple took my ticket and directed me to where a bunch of other people were sitting, on a curb, next to dumpsters and parked motorcycles. It appeared to be a corridor between a parking lot and the main road.
"Bummer," I thought. "This doesn't feel so good anymore. I think I'm on the shady-bus to JB. I wonder if it's going to be a mini-van or a school bus or some vehicle without air conditioning." As I sat down on the dirty curb in the hot sun with all these other people who had been roped in to this scheme I imagined the air conditioning of the southbound bus station, I imagined the snacks in the waiting area, I pictured that darn piece of paper that the woman had given me when I initially asked for help: GO TO THE OTHER BUS STATION. And that's when I learned the lesson. If I had just let that first person help me, if I had actually followed her advice, trusted her to help me, I'd be in a plush bus station waiting for a nice air conditioned bus that I knew for sure was going to JB.
But I wasn't. Instead, I waited on the curb with everyone else for about 45 minutes. But when the man came and directed us to a dirty parking lot, I actually let him help me. I followed him, through another alleyway which lead to the bus, which was air conditioned, and got me to JB.

Zazen your self

I don’t really know how to articulate this but it feels important so I’m going to try. I’ve been noticing this pattern in my behavior. I’ll do something, and then wonder whether or not it’s okay. Often if I find that it’s not okay, I try to hide it, or manipulate it, or present it in way that is acceptable. It’s like I want to do this thing but I don’t want anyone to know about it (it’s not one thing, it’s just having an impulse or even just starting to do something, and then wondering if it’s an acceptable thing to do). I find that I am hiding myself, or presenting myself in a way that is acceptable- but not actually changing the behavior.
Once I started noticing this, this hiding, I started to look more closely at my behavior, at why I thought it was unacceptable or what it was that I was doing that I was trying to hide. And what I started to see was that the things that I was doing, were myself. It wasn’t so much that the behaviors were good or bad, acceptable or not, it was that they were me and I was looking for approval of me. I was judging, me. I would show up, I would think “Oooh, is it okay to be like this?” and then I’d go, “I don’t know, but I don’t really want to find out,” and so I’d change the looks of things or the motivation behind them. I’d deflect the behavior away from me and toward “good” outcomes or “good reasons” for doing it instead.
But I finally saw this- saw this manipulation- and I didn’t really like it because I knew it wasn’t true, I knew I was hiding and lieing and I didn’t want to do that. So instead, I asked myself to be true with myself, to actually see my behavior, see it for what it was, instead of whether or not others would approve of it.
And how I responded, depended on what I was doing: sometimes I’d see what I was doing and say, “Oh yeah, not so good, you think you’re doing it for this, but really you’re doing it for that; which is fine, but are you sure you want to do that?” And so I’d kind of back off, realize that wasn’t what I wanted to do, and I’d stop the behavior.
But more often than not, I’d see my behavior as it actually was and say, “Yeah, that’s you. That’s what you do. That’s kind of how you see things, that’s kind of how you work. Are you okay with that?” And most of the time, I was. I mean, this is me, this is how I came out and who knows what’s coming next, but this who I am.
And it was interesting, because once I said, “Yeah, this is who I am,” once I accepted my behavior as a true manifestation of myself, I didn’t matter so much, or at least I didn’t worry so much, about what others thought of it. It wasn’t that I was going to act without regard for others it was more that, if they asked, I would say, “Yeah, this is what I’m doing because I think it’s the right thing to do right now. I can see how it might look, it might look totally different to you, but I’m being honest with who I am and what my circumstances are and this is what I’m doing in response to them. This really is me, believe it or not, this is who I am. I’m open to suggestion, absolutely, but I’m doing what I’m doing with thought, intention, and awareness. I accept it, and if you don’t, please let me know, but I’m definitely doing my best to be me.”
And I keep coming back to this. When I worry about acceptance or appropriate behavior, I look back at my self, not at the approval of others, I look at my behavior and whether or not it’s true. And if it is, that’s all I can do, and I’m okay with that. I’m not fixed in the behavior but I’m confident in it, sincere in it, willing to stick with it until someone suggests otherwise, until someone points out a delusion I didn’t see or an effect I hadn’t thought of. It’s like practicing being present with myself: am I just being exactly as I am, or am I adding things on to it, longing to be someone else, clinging to an image of who I thought I was, or avoiding who I actually am. It’s almost like I’m meditating on me, like instead of coming back to my breath in meditation, I just keep coming back to me, being honest with who I am, being willing to reveal myself to others because I accept what I am revealing.

TM8 First Class Boundaries

This is part 8 in my series of posts about my travels in Myanmar.
My flight back from Inle Lake made multiple stops. I was sitting in the front row, the exit row, for the first two stops. After we touched down at the second stop, the stewardess told me that I needed to move, that the next flight had reserved seats. So I got up and asked her where my seat was. She explained that I could sit anywhere but in the first two rows, “Reserved seats,” she repeated and pointed to the first two rows. So I sat in the second row and began to wonder. I wondered if the first two rows were reserved for the current flight attendants, or for other stewardesses transitioning between two cities; and then people started getting on the plane.
I watched as two women walked down the aisle and sat in the two seats in front of me. Two men followed behind them and sat in the seats opposite them. Two more men came, and one sat in the aisle seat, next to me; his friend sat in the aisle seat opposite. I spied the women immediately in front of me, to figure out why they got the seats and I didn’t. I saw: tennis bracelet, large diamond ring, frequent tossing of head full of well- groomed hair. I watched her friend flip through a fashion magazine. “First class,” I thought. “Rich.” I watched the stewardess interact with them, wondered if they were friends of theirs and were getting the insider’s deal or if they were high society and that the stewardess had to pander to them.
Then I looked at the two men across from them. I saw: old, dressed moderately, but carrying themselves as if things should be done for them. “Huh,” I thought. “They don’t look especially rich, but they’re kind of acting like it.” I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the guy across the aisle from me. He was wearing traditional clothing (the longhi, it’s similar to a sarong: a long piece of fabric wrapped around and tied at the waist) but also had jeweled things in both the collar and cuffs of his shirt. “Definite money man,” I thought, and wondered if he was the boyfriend of one of the women. During all of this, the man who initially sat next to me had gotten up, walked to the front of the plane, and opened the door that said “Staff only.” He looked inside, then sat down on the floor in front of it, facing the women and men in the first two rows, talking and laughing with them. After a while, the stewardess came up and they all laughed about what he was doing. Then he returned to his seat.
I noticed myself as he sat down. He gestured, to ask if it was okay to sit next to me, and when I normally would have smiled and said yes; instead I simply nodded, somewhat coldly, and picked up the in-flight magazine. “Well that’s interesting,” I thought. “I guess you’ve already decided some things about this guy, without having said a word to him.” And I had, I had decided that he (by his association with the people in front of me) was first class. And, to be honest, first class had taken my seat, was getting things that I wasn’t, thought themselves better than me. And then I noticed myself throughout the entire flight. I listened to hear if the “first class” people were getting drinks that I wasn’t, I watched to see if they were offered special newspapers or magazines, I checked to see if they were getting a different sandwich, not the “chicken bread” that I was served. They didn’t, everything was the same, but I don’t think that was the point.
For me the point was my immediate separation from these people. I immediately pulled away from them, refused to be friendly with them, began perceiving their behaviors within a story of you-are-first-class-I-am-not. It’s really not that big of a deal, I don’t think they especially wanted to interact or speak with me, I think they were focused on their flight or their next destination. But it was interesting for me to see both the reality of the situation and my reaction to it and how much of my reaction was created by my story that they were first class. For me it was a little sad, because the guy was being friendly, and I was being cold. Again, it’s not such a big thing, just something interesting to notice, how quickly I created separation, how it was entirely of my own doing, and how it kept me from meeting the guy next to me.

TM7c Boatman: We say goodbye

This is the third and final part in a series. It’s about my last day in Inle Lake, and my interactions with the tour guide/ boat driver who had shown me all around Inle Lake for the past two days. During my two days with him, I learned to stop worrying so much about what he thought of me as an American tourist and instead just be myself.
I was surprised when the boat driver picked me up early to take me to the airport, but I quickly put away my book, gathered my things, and waved goodbye to the nice people in the hotel lobby. On the way to the market (where I would be met by a different driver who would take me to the airport), I planned how I would give him a $20 tip. I wanted to give him the money discretely but I knew that the bills had to remain crisp, so I couldn’t stuff them in my pocket. I also debated what I would say and when I would give it to him.
As we approached the docks, I simply pulled the bill from its envelope, asked the driver if I could give him something, and then handed him the bill as I thanked him for showing me Myanmar and its people. He smiled and thanked me and told me that the driver would be here at 1:30 (it was 1:00). 
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet him here at 1:30, near the oil cans,” and I pointed to the oil cans near the dock.
“I stay here,” he said. “Until the driver comes.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “You can go.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You keep your bag here,” he said as he motioned to my large backpack.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m sure,” he said. “No money in it, right?” he asked.
“Right,” I said. I pointed to my smaller bag. “I have that with me,” and I thought hmmmm, I hope he doesn’t leave it somewhere unattended. Then I thought, eh, it’s probably fine.
I walked into town, looked around a bit, found a really cool NLD t-shirt for my friend, and then realized I needed to get back because it was almost 1:30.
As I approached the dock, I saw the driver sitting on the steps and waved at him. As he stood up, two other men stood up with him and they all walked toward a car.
“Oh,” I said, realizing that they had been waiting for me. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “Bye bye, see you next time.”
“JaySuBay,” I said to him as I got into a strange car with two strange men. It occurred to me that I didn’t have my backpack. I was pretty sure it was in the trunk and I didn’t want to be the jerky American who asks, but I also didn’t want to be the idiot who didn’t.
 About two blocks later I asked, “My backpack? It is in the trunk?”
“Yes,” the man in the passenger seat answered.
“I thought so,” I said. “He takes care of everything,” I smiled as I pointed back towards the driver who was waving goodbye to us.
Then the man asked me when my flight was and we laughed about how early I would be and then we stopped, outside a bank, and the man got out of the car. I didn’t see where he went, but then the driver pulled farther forward, parked, and then he got out of the car too.
“I guess I’ll just stay here,” I said to myself jokingly as I looked around but couldn’t see either of them anywhere. Then I looked behind me and saw the man in the passenger seat doing something in the trunk, then closing it. He walked over to my window. “My brother will drive you to the airport now. Goodbye.”
“Thank you,” I said. “For robbing me,” I thought.
I wondered whether he took my whole backpack or just parts of it. I wondered if we would get to the airport and the brother would say, “I don’t know what happened to your bag! It was here when I got in the car.” I wondered if they stole it when they first got out of the car or if they had stolen it way back at the port. Then I remembered what the boat driver had asked me, “No money in there, right?” and I decided this was a racket. He brought them the stuff (the passenger’s heavy luggage) but didn’t partake in the thievery, that was up to them.
I made a mental calculation of what was actually in my backpack, what they might have taken, what I would be sad to have lost. I was pretty sure I had my kindle with me, but the only other things in there were my clothes, a copy of my credit cards and passport, a bunch of souvenirs, and the power cord to my laptop. I pictured them picking up the power cord to steal it but then then being told by the boat driver to leave it, that I was a good person, that the power cord wasn’t worth robbing me for. I thought they might take the photocopy of my credit cards and figured I’d call the bank when I got back to my friend’s house in Yangon. It would be an inconvenience, but not too bad. Really, the only thing I would be sad about was if the power cord were stolen, because I would only be able to write for 6 more hours.
I desperately wanted to get in to the trunk to see if my backpack was there. It was weird to be sitting right in front of it and not be able to get it, to check it, to see what had been stolen. And then I thought, “It doesn’t matter. It’s already been done. Seeing it? Checking to see what has been stolen doesn’t change whether or not you were robbed. You have no idea if you have been robbed or not and even if you did, that already happened, let it go. You can’t do anything about this.”
I took a deep breath and tried to quiet my thoughts. I tried to be present to the things around me. But then I started reliving the incident over in my head. I wondered whether the boat driver had picked me up early on purpose. I thought about asking this driver to let me check my backpack. I considered all the things I could have done to prevent this. I thought about how I would have reacted to this if it had happened a year ago, before I started going to the zen center.
“Stop!” I said. “Stop thinking about this.” But then I thought, “How is this harming anyone? I’m not that upset thinking about this, I’m just thinking about it, not worrying or being stressed.” But then I looked at the guy in the front seat and I realized that I had made him in to a thief- that I now looked at him as someone who would rob me, as someone totally separate from me, capable of doing me harm. And I thought about all those different Buddhas in the pagodas and how the Buddha is everyone and I tried to see him as the Buddha, and then I thought, “My readers would be so proud of me right now. I’m being present to being robbed and I’m trying really hard to see the Buddha in the man who I think robbed me.” I did, it’s really what I thought. I really did try to be present and stop thinking that I was robbed because I thought you would be proud of me for doing that. So thank you, for being my motivator.
I struggled some more with my thoughts but then I remembered how  much I had missed of my ‘driving tour’ of Bagan when I was lost in my thoughts, so I started looking out the window and tried to be present to the scenery of Myanmar.
When we finally arrived at the airport, I quickly got out of the car, eager to see if my backpack was in the trunk. As the driver handed my backpack to me, I immediately noticed two things about it: a metallic red, handmade, origami-like paper flower had been placed in one of its buckles, and the top of my backpack was partly unzipped.
I pointed to the flower, smiled, and said goodbye to the driver. He was probably confused because I don’t think he was the one who put it there, I think it was the boat driver with whom I had spent the past two days. I walked into the airport terminal, put my backpack down as quickly as I could, and unzipped it…everything was there. I don’t know if they rifled through it or not, maybe I had left it unzipped, maybe they had left it unzipped; at that point, it didn’t matter, I had my things, and I had a shiny red flower.

TM7b Boatman: We Marry

This is part two in a series of three posts about my interactions with the driver/ tour guide of my boat tour of Inle Lake in Eastern Myanmar. It’s super long.
That night at dinner, I was present to the wait staff the same as I had been the night before. I met them as individuals, asked them how their day was (genuinely this time) and was happy to hear about their days. I learned that many of them lived in the hillside villages, rode their bikes to work, and often hiked the trails. It was nice to see familiar faces in the dining room. It was fun to share our appreciation for some of the traditional dishes of Myanmar, to talk about how incredibly good the mangoes are here.
As the waitress brought me my dinner that night, I noticed a couple of things about my dinner: I was served dishes that I had never eaten before (they appeared to be higher quality variations on the traditional fare) and the meat that I was served seemed be higher quality (usually you are served two pieces of meat: one piece which you can actually eat, and another piece which, as far as I can tell, is basically the base from which the other meat was pulled: bones, cartilage, and a little bit of meat. That night, I got two pieces of meat that I could eat). Shortly after I remarked on the flavor of one of the dishes and expressed my appreciation for the new salad they had brought me, the chef came out and we had a minimalist conversation in which, through our gestures, I expressed my gratitude and he expressed his pleasure with his dish.
And then I got delusional. “Wow,” I thought. “They must really like me in the kitchen. I wonder if the wait staff is talking to the kitchen staff, telling them how I’m all nice and stuff and so they’re making me special meals.” But then the next morning came, and I ordered eggs the same as I had ordered eggs the day before. The day before, my eggs were seasoned, and had melted cheese in them. But this morning, they were just eggs. “Uh oh,” I thought. “What have I done? Did I offend someone last night?” And then I got my reality check: “Different chef Shannon, different chef. Nobody likes you more or less because you’re being present to them. You don’t get good food for being kind and compassionate, you don’t get bad food for doing nothing, there are just different chefs in this world and you got a good one yesterday.”  
After breakfast, the driver picked me up and asked, “You want to see long-neck ladies?” He had mentioned this the day before, that we would go to the village of long-neck ladies and that I could take a picture. I did not want to go to the village of long-neck ladies and take a picture. I knew a little bit about this tradition of having girls wear a series of metal collars around their neck that stretches their necks. I had read somewhere that this was done to actually protect the women; that in ancient times there was a fear of women being stolen from their villages from neighboring tribes and the belief was that if they had long necks, no one would want to take them and so they would be safe.
But I didn’t want to gawk at these people, at these long-neck-ladies, it just seemed so circus-side-show-freak. I had seriously considered saying “No, I don’t, I don’t want to stare at and take a picture of these people as if they’re some freaks of nature.”  But then I thought about this and realized that it didn’t have to be like that. I didn’t have to stare at them as if they were freaks, I could see them the way they are: women who are respecting a tradition, women who are choosing to do this and taking pride in it (or, who knows, just following in their mother’s footsteps). So instead, I said okay and we headed off to the village of long-neck-ladies.
It turned out that the “village of long-neck-ladies” was the back room of the paper factory.  So I got another tour- this time of how you make paper from the pulp of mulberry trees- was shown another ‘show room’ and bought a final handicraft (a nice lampshade). Once I made my purchase, I was lead to the back room where two women with many metal cuffs along the length of their neck were diligently working at looms. “You want to take picture?” the guide asked. “Oh, no thank you,” I answered. I greeted the women, remarked on how hard their work was, and thanked them. Then I made my way back through the factory to the driver. 
When I got i,n the driver explained that we were going to a pagoda and that it was about twenty minutes away. We rode for quite a while on the open lake and then entered what appeared to be a river. We slowed down a bit and I noticed that in certain parts of the river, there were lines of bamboo posts with an opening, in the middle of the river, forcing us to navigate through the small opening. Through this opening, the water flowed more forcefully and so the driver’s brother had to speed up the boat to make it through. I loved this, it made me feel like we were on a white water rafting trip, and I sat up each time we passed through and smiled and turned around to see our wake. We went through about 15 of these before finally stopping at what appeared to be a restaurant, at the side of the river.

We got out of the boat and the driver said to me “We walk to pagoda now, about twenty minutes.”

“Okay,” I said, and followed him as we walked along the river. We passed many shops, then walked across a bridge that lead into what looked like the center of a town. There was a school and a market place. As we walked, I asked quite a few questions of the driver, about what the buildings were, about the school and the market, etc. He answered mostly in one word answers so after a while, I decided that he wasn’t up for talking that day, and just stopped asking. When we finally got to the pagoda he said, “I meet you back at the boat. You know the way?”

“I guess so,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders. “Walk along the river until I see the sign that says ‘Art’?”

“Yes,” he said, then smiled and walked away.

As I walked up the entrance that lead to the pagoda, I wondered why he left me there. Was he leaving me to my solitude? Did he not want to have to escort me through the vendors who sell me stuff? Was he tired of talking to me? As I kept walking, up hill, toward the pagoda I thought, “Oh, no, it’s none of that. It’s just a really long walk, up hill, to this pagoda, and he doesn’t strike me as the long-walk kind of guy. He’s the guy who rides around in a boat all day, ferried around by his brother.” And I thought this was funny, that he was kind of a kick back guy, that this all might be entertaining for him, that maybe he was enjoying this too.
The pagoda itself was pretty cool but it had one of those ‘Ladies prohibited’ signs in front of the Buddha so I moved on to the outside of the pagoda where there were tons of really old and crumbling pagodas. I worried a bit about walking around the edges, going on trails that weren’t really part of the pagoda itself, worried that I would bother the workmen who were restoring them. But then I thought, “All I am is a person, appreciating the Buddha statues inside the old pagodas, what’s wrong with that?” and the workmen barely batted an eye as I walked past.
As I left the pagoda, I walked past all of the vendors again. I was surprised to see a couple of vendors who had arms and legs but were missing a hand or foot (this looked like a result of a birth defect, not an injury). I was also surprised by my reaction to them: I didn’t feel any pity for them or treat them any differently than I had the other vendors. I just noticed that they were missing a hand or foot and noticed how they were able to hold their handicraft or their newspaper. I walked back through town, past more vendors, and found my way back to the boat. Once I got in, the driver waved to me and said, “Bye bye, I live here, my brother take you from here.”
I was pretty sure he was joking but I was equally aware that even if he wasn’t, there wasn’t anything I could do about it so I said, “Okay, have a good afternoon,” and waved at him and looked ahead as his brother started the motor. He jumped in behind me and we pulled away.
“You want lunch now?” he asked.
“Okay,” I answered and shrugged my shoulders.
“There is no lunch near the monastery so it better we go now,” he explained.
“Okay,” I said.
Then he got all chatty: he started to ask me how I liked the pagoda, how I liked the village, how I liked his country. As he was suddenly Mr. Talkative, I thought about how I had decided earlier to not talk to him so much because I thought he wasn’t up for talking that day and I said to myself ‘Not always so…” and laughed.
On our way to lunch, it started raining. Then it started pouring and the driver offered me an umbrella. “That’s okay,” I said, as I motioned to him that I didn’t need it. I wanted to prove that I was a tough American, that I could handle rain, that I didn’t need no stinkin’ umbrella. But then it started to monsoon, and at first, I kind of enjoyed it. It was nice to get wet and not worry about it. But then my pants were getting really wet and, like, the rain was so thick that you couldn’t see in front of you and I thought “Who are you not using the umbrella for? What is it you’re trying to prove?” and as I turned around I saw that the boatman was using an umbrella, and that I was the idiot who wasn’t. So I grabbed the umbrella, struggled to open it, and as soon as I did, it stopped raining, completely. That’s when I laughed, really really hard at my self and this situation.
”It just… isn’t… working. You can’t keep trying to be someone other than who you are. This is who you are, be  it. “   And so I was. I walked awkwardly up the stairs of the restaurant, kind of pointed out the ridiculousness of my wet pants to everyone who passed by, ordered soup and one rice dish because I was tired of ordering the same huge spread of Myanmar food, and got fresh squeezed pineapple juice again, because it’s just so good. After I finished my lunch, I sat at the foot of the stairs to reapply sunscreen for about the third time that day. The driver approached me and asked, “You ready?”
“Almost,” I replied. I pointed to his face. “See, you have this lovely sunscreen. I have to buy mine,” I said as I pointed to the bottle of sunscreen in my hand. He laughed and headed down to the dock.
As I got in the boat, he told me we were going to the monastery. We ferried through the inlets and then turned on to what I thought was the side of the road: a big crop of lotus blossoms. Instead, we pushed through the lotus toward an opening in the water. As we pulled up to a dock in front of a wooden building, the driver said, “Leave shoes here,” and looked up the stairs that lead to the monastery. Then he turned to me with a look of embarrassment on his face. “Maybe it is lunch time,” he said with a smile.
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Should I not go in?” I asked.
“It is okay,” he said. “Maybe it is lunch,” he said again with a smile and pointed to the steps that lead up to the monastery.  I took all of this to mean something to the effect of: “Sorry about that. This isn’t going to look much like a monastery, you’re not going to see little monks, in robes, reading books and praying. I’m not sure what you’re going to see, it’s their lunch time so… go ahead, but know that it’s lunch time.” So I did, and it was kind of funny. Everyone was seated on the far side of the building, eating. They sat in little groups, kind of like we do at our tables in the dining hall, and apparently, they had already chanted the meal chant ‘cause everyone was talkin’ away! It was loud, you could hear the sound of dishes being washed, plates being eaten from, and people cleaning up, as well as people talking.
 I stayed on my side of the monastery, looked at the Buddha statues, almost walked over to their side but decided against it. I read an explanation of the monastery on the wall and felt proud that it read that they were accepting of people regardless of race, creed, or culture. I put a donation in their box and walked down the steps to the sound of many monks, working together to fix the roof on their building.
The driver walked up to and pointed to a fish in the water. “You see fish?” he asked.
“Yes…” I said as I looked at this one fish, sitting still, in the brown water. I waited for him to give me some information about this fish, some significance or story, but he didn’t. I looked at him and then I said, “I think fish is asleep.”
“No,” he said. “Just sitting.”
“Oh,” I said, and I tried, I tried to have this fish be a part of the tour, but it wasn’t, it was just a fish sitting there. So then I pointed to the scenery in front of us, asked him about some plants, asked him about the mountains and I must not have communicated well because he couldn’t really tell me about any of it, other than to say that the purple flower was a water hyacinth.  I felt like he was trying to extend the tour, like he felt bad that it was lunch time at the monastery, that it was only two o’clock and we were done, but there was nothing we could do. We had seen everything I guess, and I didn’t really need to see any more.
“We go to hotel?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said and we stepped in to the boat and rode home.
As we pulled up to the hotel the driver asked, “Which room is yours?”
I looked at the little houses, on stilts, trying to determine which was mine, “One of those in front,” I said. “Room 110.”
I got out of the boat and he said, “Bye bye, see you tomorrow.”
As I walked up the dock to the hotel, his question repeated in my head: “Which room is yours?” and it was hilarious to listen to myself spin a tale around it. I wonder why he asked that? Was he checking to see if I was in a fancy room? What if he came back to my room with me? What if I invited him to my room? What if tomorrow, on our boat ride, we totally connected and had this incredible romance? But then I gave myself a reality check: you don’t speak each other’s language, he is a boat driver, in Myanmar. But then I gave myself a zen check around that: you don’t know that you two wouldn’t connect, you can’t decide who he is based on labels, don’t decide what’s going to happen before it happens. And then I spun some more and suddenly, I pictured the two of us experiencing total angst as we struggled to find him a job in San Francisco while we lived together in my little room in my apartment…
“OH MY GOSH!” I shouted at myself. “Four words, and you’re marrying the guy… All he asked was ‘Which room is yours,’ that’s all he asked. Maybe he knows someone who is staying there, maybe he wants to know which room is yours so he can tell whether or not you're ready to pick up each day, you have absolutely no idea what he meant by that phrase and it wasn't even a phrase like wanna get a drink! Four words have changed the entire nature of your relationship with this man. Stop the presses, slow down your horses, and be quiet about this. So I did, I just laughed at myself and the little girl in me as I walked up the dock to the hotel.

TM 7a Boatman: We meet

This is part one of three posts about my interactions with my tour guide as we rode around Inle Lake for two days together. It’s super long.
I had been struggling a bit with my interactions with people-who-serve-you when you’re on vacation: the people who show you to your room, serve you your meals, and, in this case, the tour guides who show you their country, and the people who are being shown to you. I just couldn’t figure out the ‘right way’ to interact within these roles that I perceived as superior/ inferior. I felt really uncomfortable being ‘waited upon’ but didn’t know what to do about it. I had kind of decided that really, I just needed to interact with ‘these people’ the same way I’ve been trying to interact with all people: to treat them with respect and to meet them with kindness. But still, I felt uncomfortable in my role in this, and I could see myself squirming. 
I was visiting Inle Lake in Eastern Myanmar and knew that part of my ‘package’ was at least one day of sightseeing.  I expected to be picked up at the hotel along with a bunch of other guests and be toured around by some unfamiliar tour guide.  Instead, the same guy who had just picked me up at the dock and delivered me to the hotel stood waiting for me, by his boat, and I was the only one on the tour. “Oh my gosh, this is going to be so hard,” I thought. “I’m going to be spending all day with him and I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk with him or just let him do the tour.”
As I walked toward the boat, he pointed toward the front seat and said, “Be careful.” Now, you should know that I’m comfortable on boats and in the water, so I felt no need to ‘be careful’ stepping in to the boat. Also, as he crouched down to hold the boat for me, I felt like some Victorian lady, stepping across a mud puddle that he had covered so that I wouldn’t get my petticoats dirty (I’m telling you, I have issues around this). Needless to say, I did not want to be careful, I wanted to show off, I wanted to prove to him that I was not a rich-American-tourist who needed help to get in a boat; I was different, I was just a school teacher who had gotten a sweet deal on a monsoon package. So I just stepped in to the boat all comfortable and sat down all confident.
As we drove away from the hotel, him seated behind me, this long boat in front of me, I felt like Cinderella in her pumpkin carriage. I was being daintily ferried over the open water of the lake while the men behind me (his brother was steering) were motoring the boat and sitting at my beck and call to answer any question I may have. It wasn’t the reality of the situation, but it was what I felt like, and it made me uncomfortable.  As we got closer to the inlets, he told me where we would be going that day. “We go to the pagoda, then lunch. You like traditional Shan food or Chinese?”
I thought about this. I had been eating a lot of traditional Shan food lately but I also didn’t really want greasy Chinese food. Then I thought, “I don’t want to be the American who only eats what’s familiar food (Chinese) so I said, ‘Shan.”
“After lunch,” he explained. “We go to lotus weaving shop, silver factory, and floating garden, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders.
As we rode, I saw lots of things I had questions about, but the motor on the boat was loud so I figured it was rude to yell over it and make him answer my questions. The scenery was beautiful, lush green mountains that reminded me of Switzerland in their shape but Tahiti in their foliage. It was nice just to be out on the water, to be surrounded by cool temperatures and breeze and I was surprised by the familiar smell of lake water; I couldn’t believe that in Asia, the scent returned me to summers in Michigan eating sandwiches and cheese puffs on paper plates.
We finally slowed down as we navigated through the inlet that lead to the pagoda. We pulled up to the dock, the driver jumped out, and held the boat for me. “No shoes in pagoda,” he said. “Leave in boat.” I took off my shoes and as I stood up he said, “Be careful,” as I stepped on to the dock. I walked up the steps and toured the pagoda quickly. There weren’t many Buddhas to see and the large one had a sign that said “Ladies prohibited” so I didn’t spend much time looking at it. I wondered, as I walked back to the boat, if the guy was annoyed, like, “Huh, she didn’t spend much time there. What will I do with her for the rest of the afternoon?” He held the boat for me and again, said “Be careful,” as I stepped in, quite easily.
We boated, about 500 yards, to the restaurant. I wasn’t quite sure how this was going to work. Was I supposed to treat him to lunch? Were we going to eat together? I got out of the boat and walked along the dock. A woman was standing at the foot of the stairs. I turned around to see the driver behind me. “You go up,” he said as he motioned toward the restaurant above. I turned back around and followed the woman up the stairs, still unsure as to whether or not he was joining me. When I got to the restaurant, he was gone.
After lunch, I came back downstairs to see him hanging out with a bunch of other drivers, talking and playing what appeared to be a card game. He got up and his brother and a couple of other drivers went down to the dock to get the boat. “Your lunch good?” he asked. “Very good,” I answered. “What you order?” he asked. “That tomato salad- it’s so good! And mixed vegetables- also good. But too much food- always in Myanmar, so much food!” He smiled. “Was yours good?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered.
I considered asking what he had ordered but then wasn’t sure if he had eaten at the restaurant, wondered if he could afford it, wondered if he got a discount, and felt kind of funny about the fact that he had eaten downstairs instead of upstairs, like there was some sort of servants’ entrance or something. And then I thought, “You know what, he and his friends are probably happy to eat down there. They’d rather be there than eating with a bunch of tourists.”  As we walked toward the boat, he said, “Be careful,” as his brother held it close to the dock. I stepped in, nonchalantly, and the boat swayed a little, side to side. As usual, he got in behind me, and sat down.
“Now you want to go to weaving factory?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t tell if this shrugging of the shoulders was a good or a bad thing on my part. To be honest, I didn’t really want to go to some weaving factory, I just liked being on the boat. But it wasn’t like I had any problem with the weaving factory and I figured I’d just let him do what he needed to do to get his job done. As we approached the weaving factory, he explained that they would give me a tour and then they would take me to the show room at the end. We pulled up to the dock, he held the boat, and I stepped up, on to the dock. A woman met me at the base of the steps and I followed her up. The driver and his brother walked halfway up the steps, and stopped at the first floor, where there were a bunch of other men, sitting around a table.
The tour was amazing. It started off with this woman, slicing the stems of a lotus blossom and then pulling the two parts apart to expose this thin, spider-web-like string. She would then roll this string with her fingers across the table and back, then pull it down to another table where it magically dried into a thick piece of string. This string was put on to a skein which was then treated twice, and then dyed. This dyed string was then put on an incredibly intricate wooden loom which was powered by women, sitting at it, and pumping up and down with their legs.
At first, I felt uncomfortable touring the factory, ‘watching’ these women as if they were on display in a museum, as if they were ‘cultural artifacts.’ But then I decided to see them as they were: real people doing their jobs. I watched their work closely and with respect. Their work took great skill and required a lot of physical labor. I greeted each woman in Burmese (MaynGuhLaBah) as we approached and thanked them (JaySuBay) as we left. I couldn’t really tell if they were enjoying their work or not, but they met me with genuine smiles as they looked up from their work to greet me.
At the end, I was brought to the ‘show room’ where I bought a scarf for my friend. The woman then walked me out of the factory and the driver smiled at me and followed me down the steps. As we approached the boat, I started to step down in to it. “Be careful,” he warned. “You don’t want to swim.” I turned around and sat down as he got in to the boat behind me. We pulled away and as we headed down the next inlet he said, “We go to the silver factory now, okay?”
“Okay,” I answered and shrugged my shoulders again.
The silver factory was the same routine: a guided tour of the process, followed by a tour of the showroom where I was expected to buy something. At this factory, the tour guide was a young woman who clearly had been doing this for a while. As she was giving me the tour, she was also handing her cellphone to one of the guys and directing him to charge it on the wall, directing someone else to put away her lunch dishes, and educating me in the fact that their family had created the design for the ‘swimming’ fish, others were just copying them. I felt a little like a number, like one of many American tourists being herded through that day, just a part of her job.
But when we got to the showroom, it changed a bit, we sort of shared with each other. I started looking at the cases along the wall but then she said, “This is the cheap silver, it turns your fingers green.” “Oh yeah!” I said. “My dad always called me a golden girl because when I wear that silver, it leaves a black ring on my skin.” “Yeah, black,” she said and smiled. “No good.”
She directed me to the next case and I walked along slowly, admiring the pieces but knowing that I didn’t really want any jewelry. Then I saw a black pearl pendant hanging. “Oh, black pearl!” I said. She took it out to show me. “My friends,” I said. “They have a pearl farm, In Tahiti!” and I showed her my black pearl ring. She pointed to the pendant she was holding and revealed, “This one not real, cultured,” she explained with a disappointed but honest look on her face. “Real ones expensive.” “I know!” I explained. “My friends always gave me pearls so I never knew but then when I wanted to buy one for someone….lots of money!” She smiled and put away the pendant.
I walked quickly past the rings and then spied what I thought was a pretty necklace. I pointed to it, “How much?” “Thirty five dollars,” she answered. “You try?” she asked as she pulled it out of the case and laid it on the counter. It looked short. “It is a bracelet?” I asked. “No,” she answered. “It is an anklet. If you want it bracelet, you can cut.” “Oh,” I said. I shook my head. “You no like?” she asked. “I like, very pretty,” I explained, “But anklets bug my ankles,” and I motioned to my ankle and made a face. “You no like fish?” she asked. “Oh no, I like the fish, I just didn’t see them yet.” She walked me over and showed me the fish. “Many sizes,” she explained. “Boy fish swim up and down, girl fish swim side to side.” And she showed me how they had designed them will small sequential circles of silver so that they moved when you shook them. “How much?” I asked as I pointed to the small fish. “Fifteen dollars,” she answered. “I buy,” I answered and took out a crisp 10 and limp 5. She examined the five. “I have others,” I said as I pulled out all the American dollars I had and laid out two other fives for her to inspect. I was nervous about pulling out all my money, showing her that I had over $200 and was only spending $15 but then I realized it was the truth. I really was only spending $15, I really did have more, why was I trying to hide that from her? She looked at my fives, traded me for a more crisp one, put the fish in a bag for me, and walked me out.
Again, the driver met me at the stairs and said, “Be careful, you no want to swim,” as I approached the boat.
 “But I like to swim,” I answered this time, and sat down with a smile. He got in behind me and we were off to the floating garden. I watched as we passed other boats: some carrying baskets, others carrying dirt, others carrying fruit or motorcycles. I realized that I was on the freeway and this is how people got around. I noticed a few boats with apparent tourists in them and compared myself to them. Was I like them? Was I being ferried around by the people of this country to ‘gawk’ at the people of this country? I was sitting in a boat just like they were, being driven around just like they were, I was the same: we were tourists.
We came to an apparent intersection because suddenly, there were tons of man-powered boats (as opposed to the ones I had been seeing, powered by an outboard motor), going in every direction, and a din of voices. I looked around to see that in the front of these boats sat a child, wearing a white shirt and green traditional longhis (like a sari: a long piece of fabric wrapped and tied around your waist) and in the back of the boat sat their parent, rowing the boat. I turned around to the driver.
“School is out?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, and smiled. I think we both enjoyed this, these children making a ton of noise, these parents taking care of them, this seemingly international event of the end of the school day. Who knows, maybe I’m imagining, but it was nice.
Once we made it through the intersection, I noticed tomatoes, floating in the water, on both sides of the boat. “Floating garden,” the driver said as he pointed to the tomatoes.
“The tomatoes grow? In the water?” I asked in astonishment.
“Yes,” he said, matter of factly.
“They just grow? Like that?” I asked and pointed to the tomatoes, floating in the water next to us. I started snapping pictures, eager to show my brother when we got home, laughing at us silly Americans trying so hard to grow our tomatoes with posts and special fertilizer…
“The bamboo is very strong,” the driver said as he pointed to the right of us. “It stays in one place.”
I looked above the water to where he was pointing and saw: tomatoes, growing on the vine, on bamboo trellises, the same as we grow tomatoes, on the vine, on wire trellises, in the states. It’s just that here they fall off and you harvest them as they float in the water.
“Oh!” I said, and laughed at myself for thinking that tomatoes could grow by simply floating in water. I sat back in my seat after that, no longer focused so much on sitting up and seeing everything that passed our way.  “We go to hotel now,” the driver said and we motored out of the inlet back to the open lake that lead to the hotel. As we motored along I imagined the boat driver watching me, wondering about this weird woman in front of him. But at that point I also thought, “This is me, watch all you want, I can’t do anything about it.”

TM 6 Being honest with yourself, being honest with others

This is part 6 in my travels in Myanmar. It’s about how in order to feel comfortable being honest with others about my situation, I had to first be honest with myself
Another thing that I have been noticing in my interactions with others has been the power of honesty, both with myself about myself and in presenting myself to others. On my first day in Bagan, we visited tons and tons of pagodas. At each pagoda, there were people selling handicrafts, post cards, pagoda paraphernalia- all things that I didn’t need. In some ways, I justified not buying things from these people by saying that I didn’t need them. But as I listened to the people, I started to hear things like “Only 1000 chats” and “America rich country” and “I have family and no job.” And I know the exchange rate between dollars and chats and I know those postcards cost next to nothing and so it started to feel ridiculous for me to be justifying my shopping by what I did or didn’t need. It was so easy for me to give money that was so valuable to these people and yet I wouldn’t, because I didn’t need what they were selling. But it’s what I did, I only bought things that I actually needed: postcards.
But then I met… the young people. At about the third or fourth pagoda, after I had bought the postcards that I needed, I was approached, inside the pagoda, by a young Burmese woman. She asked me where I was from, then continued to make conversation with me. She would switch back and forth between small talk about our lives and interesting facts about the history of the pagoda we were in. At one point she briefly said, “No money, just tour.”  She lead me to the back portion of the pagoda and up to the top of the monastery where there was a great view. She took a picture of me and then asked me if I wanted to buy a souvenir.
At that point, I had already decided that I wanted to give her something. She had given me a tour and I genuinely wanted to give her money to help her out. She had told me that she and her friend were going to start studying physics at the University of Mandalay in the fall, that she was the youngest in her family, and that her only brother had studied engineering. I don’t know why but something about her story seemed a little fanciful to me but it didn’t matter. If she had figured out that this was what appealed to tourists, that this was what put them over the edge and got them to buy something from her, I had to give her props for that. So I bought a wind chime from her, for 12000 chats- that’s about 12 bucks. I would never have paid 12 bucks for the chintzy wind chime she offered me. Her friend saw the interaction and said, “Now she very happy.” And she probably was, that was a lot of money for a wind chime. After I bought the wind chime, she actually kept trying to sell me stuff and I kept saying no. Finally, she escorted me out of the pagoda. It was kind of nice to have her with me as we passed by the other sellers, she seemed to say something to the effect of “She’s cool, she already bought stuff, let her be,” and the vendors stopped approaching me.
I fell for this “racket” two more times, and ended up buying more postcards, and a sand painting- in both situations paying more than I should have. At the last pagoda, I asked the driver if I could just leave my wallet with him, it was just too hard for me to say no to people. And, as is always the case, the thing that you prepare for, never happens: there was no one else in the last pagoda so I didn’t even need to leave my wallet out of the situation…
But that night, I tallied up my savings. See, there are no ATMs in this country and the only currency is CRISP 100 dollar bills. I had three of them left and was quickly running out of the local currency: chats. It’s difficult to find a place to change your CRISP 100s and when you do, you end up with way more chats then you want. On the one hand, I had $300, on the other hand, I had four more days up here and I couldn’t really use the $300 unless I exchanged it for chats. Plus, I really wanted to save $100 to give to my friends for letting me stay with them.
“Okay, no more spending anything,” I thought- just enough for meals and water. I knew I was visiting pagodas the next day and so I considered leaving my backpack with the driver again. But then I pictured walking through the pagoda, shrugging my shoulders and saying to the people “I have no money,” and knowing that they would know that I was lieing. It was true, I had no money on me, but I’m American I have money, and I can get more.
But then I thought about the truth about myself, that I actually couldn’t get more money because there are no ATMs, that I need American dollars to pay for my water with my meal at the hotel, that I need some chats to pay for lunch each day. This was an awful lot to convey in English to someone who just wants you to give them some money but it was helpful to me to see where I was at in terms of money.
The next day I traveled to the eastern part of Myanmar, and toured a region called Inle Lake. Inle Lake is made up of a bunch of villages and in each village, there are different ‘factories’ where people make handicrafts. At each factory, a guide walks you through the factory, explaining the process involved in making the craft, all the while pointing to the actual people while they perform each step of the process. At the end of each tour, the guide brings you to their ‘shop’ where you see all of these amazing handicrafts made by the people who you just saw, slaving away at some difficult task. It is extremely difficult to have just seen these people making these things and not want to support them by buying something or, even worse, to suggest that you can’t afford it or don’t need it. This was almost more difficult than saying no to the people who gave me tours of the pagodas.
But by this time, I had decided that the only thing I could do was to be true with myself and to share this truth with the people around me. I bought a scarf because my friend and I always buy scarves for each other when we travel. I broke my $100 to pay for it because I needed the American dollars to pay for my water at the hotel. When we went to the silver factory, I didn’t buy the anklet because, pretty as it was, anklets always bug my ankles. And I bought the small fish pendant because I wanted to support the factory but I couldn’t spend all my dollars on my second day.
It was interesting, when I was honest with the sellers about my purchases: sorry, anklets bug me or sorry, I don’t have that much, they just adjusted what they were offering me. I had thought they would be upset with me, would think that I was being a cheap, greedy American, but I wasn’t, I was just being honest. But I think this honesty had to come from myself first. I think I only felt comfortable saying that I couldn’t afford the big fish because I actually understood that I couldn’t afford the big fish because of my circumstances right now: no ATMs, needing American dollars for water, and needing chats for lunch.

Full prostration

At a pagoda yesterday, I saw a statue of a monk, in full prostration to a succession of Buddhas. If you can imagine a series of steps: the top, second, and third step held statues of seated, smiling Buddhas. The fourth step held a laid out statue, long and hour-glass shaped, with a person’s outstretched arms- hands clasped together- at the top, their head and torso next, and their knees tucked beneath their backside, ending with the upturned soles of their feet.
“Oh, wow, full prostration,” I exclaimed in surprise as I saw this. I had not seen this once in all of the pagodas I have seen over the past two days in Myanmar. But the second thing that surprised me, was my affection for it- I almost longed for it. And that was pretty weird, given my prior history with bowing which is, in a nutshell: no thank you, I’d rather not supplicate to you or anyone else, I’ll just stay here standing or sitting but not bowing to you.
 And even in this statue, the guy doing the full prostration was, physically, below the other Buddha statues and, in some ways, he was three times below, since he was on the fourth step. All these things should have made me uncomfortable, should have brought up my issues around assertion of self, loss of independence, loss of control, insistence on equality but instead when I saw it, I felt happy, and I even thought, “Awww, I miss bowing.”
And that surprised me, so I stood there, a little longer, to kind of feel what was going on. I looked at the guy prostrating, and I looked at the Buddha statue above him and what I felt was, that they were connected. That in supplication, in bowing, in giving up the self or one’s assertion of independence, there is a removal of boundaries, a removal of blockings, and that removal allows for touch, for reaching out, for communion between two people.
I have to admit that I pictured Paul as the Buddha statue, sitting there, maybe in dokusan, maybe in a dharma talk, and the person, kind of receiving Paul in their supplication posture, like Paul’s teachings and essence were able to flow out of him and into the other person- and that these teachings were kind of flowing back and forth between them now, that any barriers were gone.
I also thought about the way that I have been bowing lately. It started one morning during service when I was in the front row so I didn’t really have anyone to follow in terms of timing for the full prostrations. I looked to my left and saw the Ino, so I figured I’d follow him, exactly. And it worked, and it was weird. I kind of lost myself in timing with him, like we were one entity, and that felt both surreal and comforting at the same time.
Then lately, I have started to bow in exact timing with the doshi on Friday nights in the zendo. See, I’m the jiko on Friday nights and one of the responsibilities is that you open the doshi door before the doshi leaves. The instructions for this suggest that you start walking toward the door to open it just as the doshi reaches for their zagu (their bowing mat). So I kind of like to watch the doshi like a hawk to see if I can catch them grabbing their zagu and know exactly when to leave (yes, these are the fun games that I make up for myself….)  But now, I don’t just wait for the grabbing of the zagu, I try to watch the entire bowing of the doshi, and match my bows perfectly with them.
And finally, I’ve tried to bow with the crowd. Some days, during service, if everyone is timing themselves perfectly with the bells we are all one entity, we are all one big bow and that is really cool. And I think that all of this bowing in time with others is helping me to see that bowing isn’t about a power imbalance or one person being more or less to another, it’s about doing things together. I would say it’s about giving up the self for the greater good of the community but it doesn’t even feel like that anymore because my self is no longer in competition with the community. I’m not giving up my self when I bow with the community, I’m just as much a part of the community as everyone else is.
As I stood in front of the statue, I imagined myself, in full prostration and it felt like I was floating, like I was hovering at the foot of this statue, this Buddha. But at the same time, I was connected, the Buddha’s hand that was touching the earth was somehow touching me too. And I honestly believe that that the only reason that hand can touch me, the only way that I am finally able to feel that connection, is because of the opening I have I have created in giving up myself and becoming part of the community.

Playing hide and seek with your suffering

I’m going to write about something that doesn’t make sense but that I wish I had known when it was happening. It’s about experiencing your suffering when it comes up; because even though it might not be convenient at the time or it might feel like it’s too much to take, trying to experience your suffering later, sucks- or at least for me it seems to.
 It’s bizarre, I’m actually searching for my own suffering, and I can’t seem to find it, and that’s really weird, and a little sad for me too. Because my suffering is a part of me. My “stuff”’ that’s hard to take, that hurts, it’s there, it’s what makes me me. And in this case, it tried to show itself but I wouldn’t let it because I was afraid it would overwhelm me. And now I’m trying to find it, and it’s gone. But it’s not really gone, it’s just somewhere else inside me, hidden, and probably taking on a new shape, one that I won’t recognize, one that’s shrouded in other stuff, one that’s probably more complicated now or even one that’s taken on a disguise in the hopes that I’ll let it in if I think it’s something else.
Basically, what I didn’t want to see was that my mom, is part of me, that she has always been a part of me, that half of my existence comes from her genes. The reason I don’t want to see this is because I am angry with myself for not knowing this, for spending all this time trying to find my mom when she has been inside of me this entire time, that I have been living her, and yet I looked everywhere except inside myself to try to find her. But I’m also scared to see this because if half of me is her and half of me is my dad, then who am I? Where do I fit in all of this? And which parts of me are my mom? How could the person that I manifest each day, that I live and breathe and think, be the very same person I have been looking for most of my life?
And so I think that’s why I want you to experience your suffering when it comes up for you. Because the first time that I realized that half of me came from my mom (I saw myself in the mirror and saw her eyes looking at me), I could have sat with that loss, that fear, that anger, and actually experienced it. And I think that in experiencing it, I would have learned about myself a little more- I might have even begun to see my mom, in myself. But I didn’t. I chose not to experience that sadness. I didn’t run from it, I just closed off from it, protected myself from it, by diverting my thoughts elsewhere and drinking tea. It came up again, but the second time, I actually pushed it away. I was in the bathroom, at a one-day retreat, and I just couldn’t take the time to stop and feel it- I felt like I needed to get back to the group and again, I was afraid of what would happen if I let myself actually experience the loss.
I’m not actually mad at myself for the way I dealt with it each time. I completely understand why I did what I did. The first time, I thought I was being realistic and compassionate with myself around what I thought I could handle. The second time made sense too- I actually thought that I would break down in tears in the bathroom and no one else would have been able to use it until I had worked my way through this seemingly life- altering event for me. But had I known then, that I would be looking for my suffering now, and that I am unable to find it, I would have gladly doubled over in sadness the first time or hogged the bathroom the second time.
I say this because of a couple of things. First, even though there is sadness and loss in experiencing my feelings around this, there was also an opportunity to connect with my mom, or at least that’s what it feels like might have happened had I experienced it when it first came up. But the second thing is where I am at now. I don’t know that I ever will experience that initial suffering that came up for me. I honestly believe that that suffering is now being added on to, morphed, disguised, or whatever. That initial suffering is gone, and not in the way that suffering is gone when you experience it. This is not a lessening or a lightening of suffering, this is a fragmenting of suffering, an occlusion of it, a splintering or even a cancering of it. I feel like that initial feeling- that fear and anger- has replicated itself into a million little pieces and that those pieces, which once were a clear ball of fear and loss have become little cells hiding throughout my body, feeding off of any insecurity they can find, and then growing into something new.
I’m probably being over dramatic here, I definitely tend toward that when something like this comes up for me but still, I want you to know that your suffering doesn’t really wait around for you. If you don’t feel it when it shows up, it might not be there later when you’re ready to see it. Instead of being there, it’s likely to have grown and hidden and you don’t get to find it anymore, it finds you.

TM 5 Being present to 'servers'

This is part 5 of my travels in Myanmar- it’s about my interaction with others in the service industry throughout my travels in Myanmar
I’ve been thinking about people as I travel. Not people I know, but people I interact with, specifically, people in the “service” or “tourism” industry. This started, on my first day here, when I asked my friends how I should “interact” with the people who worked for them. They work for the embassy so they have a driver, a cook, two nannies, a gardener, and a house cleaner. I know, it seems like a lot of people but there are two things I have discovered about this. First, my friends work ridiculously long days and often have to stay at work to respond to some political situation. Watching them and the hours that they keep, I actually don’t know how else they could maintain a house with three children if they didn’t have all this help. Second, it’s just custom here, it’s what people do, people work to keep up other people’s houses.
But for me, this is awkward. It feels weird to have someone do something for you that you can do yourself. I was mostly nervous about the cook and the house cleaner the first day. I was pretty sure that I would want a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and also pretty sure that I would be waking up long after my friends and their kids had had their breakfast. I asked my friends about this, about when was a good time to be out of the kitchen and whether or not I should let the cook make me a bowl of oatmeal… “Just do what you would normally do- come downstairs and get what you need from the kitchen, ask her for help if you need it but don’t do anything different,” my friend explained.
I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I snuck down at 5 am, made myself a bowl of oatmeal, and brought it back up to my room to eat all by myself. I stayed in my room for most of the morning, but I knew I had to emerge at one point so I timed it to when the boys got home from school, so I’d have a bit of distraction from interacting directly with the nannies and myself.
I came downstairs and reintroduced myself to the nanny I had met the day before. I got kind of nervous about what to say or do but then I remembered what my friend had said, “Do what you would normally do,” so I asked her where the boys were, and went and hung out with them.
We spent the afternoon together; occasionally I would interact with the driver, the other nanny, or the cook and often, we would run into awkward situations: do I clean my snack dishes or do I leave them in the sink, do I open the door for myself or do I wait for the driver to do it, who steps in when one of the boys doesn’t want to put on his swimsuit for swim lessons? I can’t say that I figured this out. There were definitely times when it was awkward, where I stammered or halted, frozen as I attempted to determine the “right” thing to do that would respect boundaries and roles. But there were other times where I just engaged in the activity or interaction and let each of us do whatever we were going to do at the time.
I think that the difference in these interactions, what made it easier or more fluid, was when I stopped looking at these people within their roles, when I started seeing them just as people, who were doing the same thing as me: taking care of the kids, cleaning up the dishes, getting the kids to swim lessons. My focus moved to the event in front of us, and away from focusing on what I could do that was ‘appropriate’ given our different roles in the situation. It wasn’t about the roles, it was about the person in front of me.
This has spilled over into my travels up to the northern part of Myanmar. I got a sweet deal on a fancy tourist package so I have been staying in some swanky places. These are full service hotels, apparently aimed to make you feel like a king. You are constantly met by people who do stuff for you that you could easily do yourself, and it has made me really uncomfortable, but it has been a good dharma gate for me too.
At dinner the first night, I noticed that as soon as I finished the water in my glass, the man standing within a five foot perimeter of my table, would refill it with the bottled water at my table. It was weird for me to have him fill up my glass, like he had to serve me, like I was more important than he was or something. So I decided that I would only drink my water down to a certain point, so that he wouldn’t be able to come and fill it. But then I looked at the ridiculousness of the situation, how I was playing a game of control with this guy, all because of my issues around privilege, or whatever it was that was making me so uncomfortable in the situation. “Just let the guy fill your water,” I told myself. “You’re the only one who’s seeing this as some unequal master/ servant relationship. All this is, is a job for him. He’s going home after this, eating his own dinner and filling his own water bottle, this isn’t his sole identity (and I realized later, neither is it mine). Let him do his job, don’t insult him by trying to do it for him. ”
This showed up in my conversations with people who worked at the hotel as well. People are constantly asking you “How are you?” or “Are you enjoying your stay?” or “How is your meal?” or “Where are you from?” I always felt like this was part of these people’s jobs, that they were doing this because they were supposed to, that it was a reinforcement of the creation of an atmosphere in which my every need was taken care of, in which I felt that I was the sole focus of the interaction. But I’ve been trying to approach this differently. I’ve been trying to see the person talking to me as an individual person, instead of that-woman-in-the-lobby. When each person asks me “How was your day?”, I answer honestly and then ask how their day was.
And you know, the first few times that I tried this, I learned a lot about myself. Because the funny thing was, the people answered me as genuinely as I had asked them- and then I was stuck. I realized that even though I thought I was genuinely asking how their day was, I actually wasn’t doing that. I was asking because I wanted to decrease my anxiety around this, I was trying to ask it so that I could remove the imbalance between us, not because I genuinely wanted to know how their day was, I was actually still seeing them in their roles. But just like we always learn, others are our best teachers; having people sincerely tell me about their day brought me back to the real point of all of this, meeting people as they are and treating them with kindness and compassion.
So I had to slow down, be present to the genuine sharing in front of me, to the person in front of me. I’m not proud that I had to slow down to do this, that I had to put effort into it, it’s no fun to see that it’s me that’s seeing people just as their roles instead of as equals, but it’s the truth about myself, and I’m learning it.