Category: Mindfulness

Assumptions and Brown M&Ms

March 1st, 2010 13 comments

I remember decades ago hearing about Van Halen’s singer David Lee Roth and his outrageously persnickety demand that there be M&Ms waiting for him backstage at all of his concerts, with all the brown ones removed!

I recall thinking, what a dick. This is rockstardom gone too far. How terrible it must be to have to work with or for this creep. Or really to have anything to do with him at all. The thing is, I always liked Van Halen’s music. I was never a huge fan the way I am with some of the other rock bands. But I always listened to their songs when they came on the radio. Even though their lead singer was a prima donna asshole.

Up until yesterday, if you had brought up Van Halen to me, the first thoughts that would have popped into my head were: Great rock band. Spectacular and innovative guitar player. Great drum and bass grooves, and great drum and bass sound. Great singer too, as a singer, but personally, I can’t stand the guy. That final opinion, the one about the singer David Lee Roth, had grown in my mind over the years, without me even realizing it, because of the M&M thing.

Everything changed yesterday in the span of a few sentences. Kay showed me an article by Dan and Chip Heath that was in the March issue of Fast Company. The writers referenced David Lee Roth and the M&M story for their purpose, which was to make a point about businesses. I will reference the M&M story for my purpose, which is to make a point about assumptions. Here is the pertinent part of the Fast Company article:

Consider Van Halen. In its 1980s heyday, the band became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true — confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself — and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to reverse your perception. Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted — Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read “like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.” A typical “article” in the contract might say, “There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.”

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Today, wanting to verify all of this, and also curious as to why Roth would let the M&M story live and thrive since it painted him ugly, I searched the web, and I found everything I was hoping to find in one paragraph at Wikipedia:

In 1997, Roth wrote a well-received memoir, entitled Crazy From the Heat. The 359-page book was whittled down from over 1,200 pages of monologues, which were recorded and transcribed by a Princeton University graduate who followed Roth around for almost a year. Among the book’s revelations, aside from stories about backyard parties, Van Halen, and catching malaria in Third world jungles, was the infamous “Brown M&Ms” clause written into Van Halen’s early contract riders. The clause was included in contracts not because of ego, but rather to make sure that structural stage specifications in the contract were read thoroughly and were adequately provided. Roth writes of a time when he found brown M&Ms in a bowl and subsequently had a fit. In the press, he was accused of causing US$85,000 worth of damage to the arena. Most of the monetary damages were due to Van Halen’s staging sinking through the floor. Roth writes, “they didn’t bother to look at the weight requirements or anything, and this sank through their new flooring and did eighty-thousand dollars worth of damage to the arena floor. The whole thing had to be replaced. It came out in the press that I discovered brown M&Ms and did $85,000 worth of damage to the backstage area. Well, who am I to get in the way of a good rumor?”

If I had a nickle for every time I have made a wrong assumption about someone that caused me or them suffering, I’d have an incalculable sum, because most of the wrong assumptions I make remain wrong forever because I never find out they are wrong. Or at least that’s what I assume.

Here’s what was particularly wrong about my wrong assumption about David Lee Roth and his M&Ms. One of the traits I most admire in a person, and especially in an artist, is someone who, in the words of the Heath brothers, is an “operations expert.” A detail freak. A geek in expressionist clothing. A minutia man. A preparer. Not surprisingly, I admire these qualities because that’s how I want to be. So for 25 years, I have been scolding Roth in my mind, when actually, I should have been praising him for his admirable priorities, and his clever tactic, but I couldn’t, because one wrong assumption has been in the way.

Bottom line: I heretofore commit to continually recommitting to trying to like hell to not make assumptions about people and their priorities and just take things as they are when they are without adding on my usual heaps of judgments and assumptions and other pain-causing crap.

Father Knew Best

February 21st, 2010 5 comments

My first year as an altar boy, the masses were in Latin. It took me a long time to learn all the words. I was very proud to have done it and thereby earned the right to be an altar boy. And I was definitely going to be a priest when I grew up.

My second year as an altar boy, they changed everything to English. I was really pissed off at God for making me learn the Latin mass and then changing his mind.

Soon after that, when I was 10, I had my first doubt about my religion. It sprang directly from one specific bit of logic. I already knew that Jesus was the Son of God. He was divine. At age 10 I learned that the Jews thought that Jesus was merely a prophet. He was special, yes, but he wasn’t divine, according to them. And they were absolutely sure they were right. But my side was sure we were right too. This meant that there was a large group of people – either us or them – that was absolutely sure they were right, but must be absolutely wrong, since both sides could not be right. How could I really know for sure which side was right? Wasn’t it at least possible that my side was wrong? I determined yes, it was possible. In that case, it was simply up to me to pick a side. Yet I really had nothing tangible to go on.

And thus was born on the earth another agnostic.

Over the next ten years I morphed gradually until one day I decided to call myself an atheist based on the grounds that I really, really, really didn’t think there was an interactive all-knowing omni-present universe-creating being.

20+ years after that, I started meditating, which is basically a type of concentration exercise. Because of my mental workouts every morning, I am now able to beam myself back in time and do things like feel the rack of bells in my hand that I used to ring during mass when the priest drank from the chalice and ring again when he ate the Eucharist. I can feel my knees on the hard wood of the first of three stairs that lead up to the altar. From side stage, I look up at the priest. I can see him move ever so slowly. I can hear little bits of throat-clearing and clothes rustling from the cavernous reverberating chamber where people are sitting in silence.

I can see the priest lift the chalice to drink. With two hands. Father always used two hands.

From my books on meditation and mindfulness, I have learned how to pay attention to what I am doing. When I first get up in the morning, I walk slowly to the kitchen sink, I turn the water on, I hear it, I see it, I put a glass under the water and I watch and listen as the glass fills. I turn the water off. I stand straight. I put my feet together and make sure again that I am standing straight. I raise the water to my mouth. With two hands. Always two hands. It is impossible to be unmindful with two hands on the chalice.

so quiet

January 24th, 2010 2 comments

it was so quiet on my bench just now, it stunned me when it stopped, but not because there were any additional sounds at the end, see, i had unplugged the dvr this morning, something I only do sometimes since its hard to reach the cable to unplug it and even harder to plug it back in, and its across the room from where ive been sitting on my bench lately so in terms of decibels it adds approximately zero, but it’s the loudest thing around so i hear it, unless there has been fallen moisture outside, which there was last night, in which case i hear drops clacking around out there, but i can still easily hear the dvr over that, except for today because i unplugged it, and i can hear the refrigerator make occasional sounds two rooms away, and even though i do these long stretches of sitting on my meditation bench every morning, there are some mornings that are quieter than others, sometimes much quieter, like what happened before I decided to start typing, its a quiet that’s independent of whatever rarefaction and compression travels by way of air onto my eardrums, because the quiet i set out to write about here is aided by silence, but not dependent on it, because its all between my ears, where no actual sound is generated unless you count mental activity as sound, and if you do, you could think of what usually goes on between my ears as noise, kind of like the dvr machine, but way louder than that, and anytime you have a loud sound going, one you barely even notice, and then you notice it, you notice how loud it is, and then if all of a sudden someone turns it off, well, you definitely notice that, funny, it was there, and you dont notice it, then its gone, and you notice it, and its stunning, so much so that you might even want to write about it into cyberspace, but then you might think, hmmm, thats kind of weird, to write about something that isnt even there as if it was so important that it was worth writing about, and thinking that is okay too because really thats just the noise getting in the way of the quiet again as usual, so quiet, it was, this morning

Something I Have Never Heard Anyone Say

October 9th, 2009 7 comments

“I started paying attention to my breathing and it made everything worse.”

Reconciling Buddhistic Practice and Poker

September 18th, 2009 18 comments

The meaning of “reconcile” in play here is “to make consistent or congruous.” In other words… How can someone walk the path of harmlessness if it has poker tables on it?

I anticipated that I would be asked this question after The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment came out. The title alone begs the question. Yesterday I was asked the question twice. In the previous weeks, about five other times. During the previous 6 years or so, I have asked myself the same question a few times.

Let’s say there’s a guy who plays poker, and he starts meditating every morning and doing mindfulness stuff all day long and reading about it and talking to knowledgeable people about it. He goes all-in with the practice and the teachings. He learns about harmlessness, intellectually, and it makes sense. He learns about harmlessness, experientially, and he watches himself and his world change. He likes where it’s leading. Eventually a day comes when there are no poker tables on his path. It might have happened suddenly, a quick turn: “Poker harms me and others! Therefore I shall no longer do it!” Or it might have happened gradually, with no forethought, just a natural weaning. In either case, it was the move toward a life guided in part by an attitude of harmlessness that made him move away from poker, which, by his definition, causes harm.

Let’s look at another guy. He is a poker player, and last week he heard some things about meditation. He heard it would improve his concentration and make him less emotionally reactive. He thinks this would be great for his poker game. So he learns more, and he starts doing some of the practices, the ones that he thinks will help him focus better and therefore do better at poker. Over the next ten years, he builds his repertoire of mindful breathing and concentration exercises that he does while he plays poker, and he occasionally does them in regular life during high-stress situations. He and his life are made better (more tiltless) by the practices that he rightly thinks of as stemming from his poker life, in the same way that a businessman might think of poker as something that hones his people-reading skills. The concept of “harmlessness” is nowhere in the mix. Yet when he plays poker now, he harms himself much less than he used to. And when he plays poker, he harms his opponents less than he used to. The things he says. The things he does. The things he thinks. The vibe he sends out. The bitterness is gone. The meanness is gone. The need to make others small is gone.

The first guy quit poker. The second guy has no plans to quit poker. Both are walking the path of harmlessness.

Big Hands

June 10th, 2009 One comment

About once a month or so, when I’m sitting on my meditation bench in the morning, my hands get big. They get, like, really big. Approximately house sized. And sensation seems to subside, except that I am keenly aware of my hands, and everything else. My whole body gets big too, sometimes bigger than a house, but no matter how big my body gets, my hands seem to remain bigger than my body. All the while my focus is on every little scrap of breath, while at the same time it’s on everything else too, including the occasional thought that might begin to pop up, but they hardly have a chance of growing in this environment. It’s all quite something. The borders between me and not me become less defined. It’s not an easy place to describe, or to arrive at, but quite simple and easy to reside there once there.

Vacation High Light

March 16th, 2009 4 comments

Pretty incredible how much I used to hate air travel and now it’s one of my best times.  What a difference a bench makes.

From Friday to Sunday I was in Las Vegas for a long-planned sibling+partners get together.  We did wonderful things.  Visiting.  Eating.  Shows (we saw LOVE and Blue Man Group).  It would be an easy matter to write many words about the events and ideas and feelings of those three days. I could put up some pictures.  I could recall on this page — as I have already done on my bench in the morning using my little hyper-detailed-reconstruction-while-putting-myself-in-the-scene mental memory gadget that I’ve developed — the finest details of the settings and events.

And I probably would.  Except that something happened yesterday, at the end of the trip, that is still kind of sitting on top of everything like the huge flowing white sheet that covered half the audience during part of the LOVE show.  The good news about the thing that happened is that it was really amazing in general and really wonderful and good for me in particular.  The bad news is that by the very definition of the words “thought” and “experience,” the thing that happened cannot, and I mean that literally, cannot be described.  It can, by definition, only be experienced.  To even attempt to describe it reduces it to non-existence and non-reality.  And that’s why it always sounds insane to some people when such attempts are made.  So, because of the limited nature of ideas and words, here come some that know they are insane.

On the flight back from Vegas, Kay was asleep in the seat next to me and I decided to stay with my breathing for a long time.  I do this whenever I fly.  About 3/4 of my flights are alone, so I’ve gotten pretty good at meditating on the plane.  The result is always the same: good.  Good takes different forms.  It changes as it happens.  Good is better than not good, in other words, meditating is better than non meditating.

I’ve gotten used to residual good that follows me off the plane, even after my thinking mind wanders away and gets lost in the not-now.  Good usually keeps wedging its way in there as a walk through the terminal thinking about what I’m doing and where I’m going and all that.  Good usually uses my feet and my breathing, sometimes my vision, to scamper back up and sit on my thoughts.

And that’s what was going on again yesterday.  I was walking alongside Kay, and we were in the middle of a little stretch when neither of us was talking, and I noticed to my left an especially beautiful woman walking toward me.  She was everywhere impeccable and appealing, not just visually, but her walk and her demeanor too.  A thought arose about the labels that my thoughts had assigned to her: attractive, appealing.  I have been giving thoughts like these much thought these last few years, so it didn’t take long to tread this familiar ground.  I understand the evolutionary forces behind the existence of and the determination of attractiveness.  I know that I am an animal organism with a mind that sees and rates.  I know what’s happening while this happens.  And I do like looking at people I like to look at.  It’s pleasing now in the same way that looking at any pleasing thing — such as The Wynn, or a horizon — is pleasing.

I looked at her, and I smiled inside.  I looked at the next person, an obese person, and my smile was unchanged.  I looked at the next people, an anxious couple walking very fast, and I breathed in their tenseness and breathed out my air and my smiling gut widened.  I noticed all the people all at once all together, and they all died.  I noticed the carpet, and it was living.  The floor was as dead and as alive as the people.  I was dead.  I was good.  I was moving, depending on where you stood, and I was still, and the carpet was moving, depending on if you happened to be a human or a wall.  There were no divisions.

A Mindfulness Exercise

January 29th, 2009 6 comments

The next million times you’re alone, try this.

Touch a thumb to the index finger of the same hand, and breathe in. (You can do this with one hand or both. Either way is fine.)

hand rosary1

Then touch thumb to middle finger, and breathe out.

hand rosary2

Repeat a lot.

Now, if you want something harder, do an in-breath AND an out-breath on the index finger, and then move to the middle finger for the next in-out combo.

And if you really want to get exotic, you can work your other fingers into the act.

hand rosary3

Polehenge

October 21st, 2008 3 comments

Here’s a picture I took on my way to Vegas.  (You can click on these pictures for full size viewing.)  I was on the left side of the plane, heading south. I think this picture is very cool because of the low altitude. My flights to Vegas start out going north from San Francisco Airport, then they break into an immediate 180 degree turn directly over The City and head south, giving me a view of home while the plane is still climbing. I estimate this view is from 8000 feet.

If you head east for about three miles from my place, to where the land casually merges into the bay, you’ll see an art installation I call Polehenge:

The poles are different lengths, but they are all the same height.  I mean, the ground has its ups and downs, but the tops of the poles don’t.  I mean, if you sat a huge sheet of wood on top of these poles, it would be level.  The result is eye candy from every angle.

Polehenge is in Silicon Valley, so it’s not too surprising to find out that these poles are implanted in a high tech landfill.  Mountains of trash are covered with earth, in typical landfill fashion, but they do it in a way that recreates wetland, right down to the bugs and birds. Lots and lots of birds come by and act like everything is normal. They pretend not to notice the occasional platter-sized metal plate sitting a couple inches above the grass from which exudes little geyser sounds — pshhhh — pshhhh — evenly spaced.  It’s methane belching from below. It’s the earth farting.

Swans and pelicans and geese and grebes and dozens of other kinds of big birds and small birds and fast birds and slow birds and birds birds birds from all over the place come here.  Way too many kinds for me to want to learn all their names.  Most of them spend some of their time floating around so I just call them all ducks.  Some of them zoom around in formation just barely above the water and they remind me of the Starfighters that Luke and his friends flew in Star Wars. 

I can picture George Lucas sitting in a place like this 40 years ago, watching these birds doing their impressions of fighter jets, thinking, hmmm.

They made a walking path so that I can come and visit the ducks up close.  I call it the duck walk.  Along the main path there are these little offshoot paths that lead down closer to the waterways where the ducks hang out.  At the end of each offshoot path there is a two-tiered wooden deck about the size of two doors.  I sit on these decks.  Sometimes for a long time.

One day I was sitting on this deck and something funny happened.

You couldn’t see me from the main path because I was at the right end of the deck, behind the bush.  I was facing the water, sitting very quietly and very still, and I could hear everything.  I could hear the sounds coming from the mouths of two people walking on the main path.  I could hear their volume go up as they moved closer.   I could hear the sounds of their clothing and I could hear the sounds coming from the ground when their feet were on it.  I heard them stop at my little offshoot path.  I heard one of them slowly walk toward the water, toward the birds, toward a surprise.

Then I heard the sound of feet making a quick stop on the gravel path.  Sounds came from the organism in the form of gaspy, high-pitched, sudden words.  “Oh!  I’m very sorry to have startled you!”

Who Died and Put You in Charge?

September 28th, 2008 One comment

When my dad died in 1996, there was one uproarious moment during the formal mourning period, a story that has been told and retold, tilled and retooled.

First came the evening wake at the funeral home, a highly populated event. The next day there was the funeral at the massive Catholic church with aisles filled. It was our parish church. My siblings and I all went to the grade school next to it. The next day was the burial, a ceremony that began at the church. The immediate family had a final viewing of the body, then we went out the side door of the church to get in a hearse that would lead a procession of cars to the graveyard. There were many emotional spikes during these days, and for me, there were two major ones on this day. One was during the final viewings. The other was the uproarious moment I’m working toward.

My mom died in 1986. Four years later, my dad married an angel. Her name is Jackie. The immediate family that was in the hearse was me, my three siblings — Jude, David, and Paul — Jude’s 16-year-old daughter Josephine, and
Jackie.

The graveyard was several miles due north from the church. But we didn’t take the shortest route. Instead, because of David’s brilliant idea, the caravan went south and west, about a mile, to the fabled Horseshoe Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University, where my dad taught for 31 years without ever missing one day. And he went to every home football game. And he used to play handball with Woody Hayes. People around here like to say “I bleed Scarlet and Grey.” Buckeye fans remind me a little of how poker players can all think they are better than everyone else. I’ve seen Buckeye fans enraged over who is the more maniacally devoted fan. But they’re just fans. They don’t live right next to campus and spend most of their days on it every year for a lifetime. I never saw my dad with an open wound. I can’t help but wonder though, just what color his blood really was.

So this huge trail of cars went down to the stadium and lapped it. It was the right thing to do. No doubt that just like the rest of us, the stadium wanted to say goodbye to Ralph.

Back on High Street, heading north, the mood in the hearse was light. Ups and downs are really just two sides of one coin, I began to notice during this time. We’re driving along, and Josephine said something that was incorrect. I can’t recall what it was. I can’t even recall what kind of error she made. It could have been something grammatical, since that is one of the types of things that people in my family are in the habit of correcting. Or it could have been something stated as a fact that wasn’t. Whatever it was, she said something that was incorrect, and my brother David quickly corrected her.

And Paul said to David, “So who died and put you in charge?”

We laughed and laughed and cried and laughed and did it some more.