From Nudism to Buddhism

When I broke up with my boyfriend last summer, I did what I always do under such circumstances: fled the country. Not everyone considers this the healthiest way to deal with personal crises, but I figure it's my life, and if I want to run from it, I can. Fortunately, I’d recently gotten some moderately lucrative on-camera acting work, so I had enough cash to take off.

Since both morale and funds were low (the on-camera work notwithstanding), I decided to begin my trip where people knew and loved me and would be likely to buy me meals. My father and his wife spend every summer at a nudist colony in the South of France and had begged me to visit for years. Though the thought of being naked with my father made me slightly uneasy, I decided now was the time. Perhaps the stripping away of clothing would help me to cope with the unadorned truth of my break-up.

Doing Yoga with the Buddha

(A Poem)

“Don’t hurt yourself,” he says, as he sits beside me on his mat,

His legs spread out before him,

His arm curved over his head, reaching toward the far wall.

I can’t help noticing his t-shirt, stretched tight over his rounded belly,

Rising up and exposing an inch of jiggling flesh.

He might have chosen sweatpants over spandex, too,

but there he is in shiny blue tights,

a huge grin on his face, a sheen of sweat already gleaming on his brow.

Buddhism, PoetryTanya ShafferFebruary 5, 2022Buddhism, yoga, health and wellness, poetry, humorComment

The Intimate Realm of I Don't Know

A few months ago, I had a discussion with a dear friend that turned into an argument. It started when he told me he was an atheist, and I told him I was an agnostic.

Same thing, he said.

Is not, said I.

Is too, said he. You don’t believe in a deity; therefore you are not a theist, which makes you an a-theist.

I neither believe nor disbelieve, said I, which makes me an agnostic.

From there things got a bit heated, which seems kind of silly in retrospect, but that’s the way we roll.

Reflecting on the conversation later, I asked myself why this was important to me.

More than twenty years ago I heard the Theravadan Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro speak in Golden Gate Park. He said something that struck me so deeply I wrote it down and have thought of it often over the years: Not knowing is most intimate.

Although I’ve been turning those words over within myself for decades, I never thought to research them until after my friend and I had this argument. With little memory of the context in which Ajahn Amaro used them, I’d always assumed he’d come up with them himself. But when I searched the phrase, I learned that it is foundational to many Buddhist thinkers. It comes from an ancient Chinese story in which a monk named Fayan goes on a pilgrimage and stays at a stranger’s monastery. The master at that monatery, Dizang, asks him why he’s making the pilgrimage. I don’t know, says Fayan, to which Dizang nods approvingly and responds, Good.Not knowing is most intimate.

The sentence strikes a powerful intuitive chord, but what does it mean?

When I think of the word intimacy, the first thing that springs to mind is sexuality. Nakedness. Trusting someone enough to reveal yourself, literally and figuratively. Showing the parts of yourself that others don’t see — the tender, delicate parts — and facing down the fear that your most exposed, vulnerable self might not meet with acceptance or approval. (Which isn’t to say you can’t have sexuality without intimacy. You can approach sex — as you can approach anything in life, really — from such a great emotional distance that your innermost self barely feels a thing. But that’s a conversation for another time.)

Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferSeptember 5, 2021Buddhism, spirituality, agnosticism, religion Comments

Never the Less

A few years ago, after reading an article about the impact of climate change on the arctic circle, I had a vision.

A friend had given me a temporary tattoo that read Nevertheless, She Persisted. As I applied it to the smooth skin of my inner arm, I marveled that Mitch McConnell, of all people, in describing his attempt to silence Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor, had inadvertently handed the feminist movement such a powerful and enduring rallying cry.

I was meditating on my living room couch the next day, my eyes closed and the ink on my arm already beginning to fade, when I saw that same sentence written across the sky in puffy cloud letters, with the first word separated into three parts: NEVER THE LESS. Seeing it broken up like that made me understand it in a new way—not only does she persist, she is in no way lessened by all she’s been forced to endure.

What came to me next was an image of the earth as viewed from outer space, that glistening blue-green-brown ball with white swirls of cloud hovering above it. With it came a deep knowing that the words NEVER THE LESS, SHE PERSISTED referred, not to me or women in general or even humankind, but to Her—the earth Herself. She is the one who persists, who will continue to persist, no matter what we do to Her, or to ourselves, or to Her other, non-human inhabitants. Even if we managed to destroy Her ecosystem for a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years, that would be barely a breath compared to the five billion years She has left before Her precious sun burns itself out. She’d have plenty of time to get us out of Her (eco)system. She’s uniquely positioned to sustain life, and sustain it She will, with or without our cooperation. Should we go belly up, no doubt other species will make their way in, or evolve their way up, to fill the void.

Does Ego Get A Seat At The Table?

Twenty-odd years ago, I raised my hand in the large hall at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and asked the renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield a question.

“Is there a role for ambition in the Buddhist cosmology?”

“That’s a good question,” said Jack, and silly as it sounds, the memory of that compliment warms me to this day. Jack said I asked a good question!

He had been talking, as Buddhist teachers do, about the fact that according to the Buddha’s teachings, desire—alternately translated as grasping or clinging—causes suffering. This concept, one of the Four Noble Truths at the core of Buddhist philosophy, had resonated with me ever since I picked up Sharon Salzberg’s book Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness in my early thirties and plunged headlong into Buddhist teachings. Desire or grasping as the root cause of suffering spoke directly to my experience.

At the time, I was working as a regional theatre actor in the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the West Coast. I related intimately to the pain of desiring to snag a particular role or work with a particular company. The desire itself was painful—I could feel it in my body as a visceral ache. Often the waiting period following an audition—the days, weeks, or even months when I didn’t know if I’d gotten the job—was worse than the disappointment on the occasions when I didn’t. And the feeling never stopped. Even when I had an acting job that I loved going to every day, I would hear about roles others were playing and feel a stab of envious longing. I felt it even when the shows they were in conflicted with my own. I wanted to be every place at the same time, and because I couldn’t, I was never satisfied.

When I discovered the Buddha’s teachings, I immediately recognized myself in the image of the Hungry Ghost, a voracious apparition with an enormous belly and a tiny pinhole mouth, who eats and eats but is never full.

Buddhism, Creativity, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferNovember 7, 2019Buddhism Comments

Death Crashes In

I was celebrating my son’s birthday on Mackinac Island when Death crashed in.

Death was not invited. The clear blue sky with its scudding clouds, the bright yet tender sun, the gentle breeze, the crunchy tang of deep-fried pickles, the waves, the rocks, the lighthouse, the bikes: all of these were on the guest list, but Death was not. Nevertheless, Death showed up.

Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferOctober 25, 2018friendship, mortality, buddhism, Buddhism Comments

The Hardest Thing

As a parent, the hardest thing I do is witness my children’s suffering.

Four months ago the Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro—an elvish man with protruding ears, a wicked grin, and a British accent—came to speak in Ann Arbor. He spoke of three principles, espoused by an ancient sage:

1. Don’t push; just use the weight of your own body.

2. Don’t diagnose; just pay attention.

3. Don’t try to help, but don’t turn away.

Since then, I think of these principles regularly with respect to parenting.

As I said, I find my children’s suffering excruciating. So if they’re crying wildly, claiming people don’t like them, or they don’t like themselves, or they don’t like their lives, all I want to do is fix it, as quickly as possible. I want their suffering to stop, and I want the expression of it to stop. Because I can’t stand it.

Off-Leash Writing