as a reminder, every Friday until July 2026 I have these old Q&A excerpts coming out
Ive been contemplating a variety of things related to Maggasekha and one thing ive thought of for a while is robe color. Ive chosen Burgundy and maroon as the main monastic robe colors for Maggasekha.
There is a reason for these colors. they symbolizing what Maggasekha is, a fusion of old and new. Brown for the original color of monks robes, symbolizing early Buddhism, and red, symbolizing the Americas, as you find red in the flags of many nations here.
Burgundy adds a little blue, which makes two colors in the American flag ( and if the cloth starts white like the Thais do it…).
Maggasekha respects the traditions from the Theravada countries, and also recognizes that in a new country, things change and therefore Buddhism must change.
its important to find a fusion of that. Ive seen westerners who want to throw the baby out with the bath water, and born buddhist people who dont want anything to change in a new country. I get both perspectives, but I also feel both are wrong.
Maggasekha, and the chosen robe colors, is an attempt to meld the old and the new together, so Buddhism can flourish in a new place and set roots for centuries to come.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying out to Colorado for a few weeks. 501c3 Approval from the IRS has not come yet ( I’ve been told it stopped completely during the recent shutdown) but the plan for this trip is to setup a few things, like a bank account for the organization etc.
If you’d like to meet while I’m there, send me an email or a contact through the website and we’ll connect.
Those of you who have heard me talk for some time have no doubt heard me speak on the Divine Messengers and how impactful they were for me from a young age. As we come up to November 8th I recently realized that this marks the 20th anniversary of my wife Jackelyn’s death along with my 10th year in robes.
Since turning around 40 (im 47 as of writing) , I noticed the mind naturally starting to incline towards pondering the past, what was, what could of been if life turned out differently etc. This also lead me to starting to analyze all the things in my life that lead me down the path of a Buddhist monastic. Some of you may of heard me say ” if you were writing a story or playing a video game, and you wanted to create a character who would become a Buddhist monk, you’d give them my life”.
This article is just such an accounting of how old age, sickness, and death, aka the Divine Messengers, impacted and informed my life from a young age.
Before the accounting I’d like to discuss The importance of the Divine Messengers as a central impetus for the spiritual path. In the Suttas it is contemplation on aging, sickness, and death that leads the Buddha on the “airya pariyesana”, the “Noble Quest”, for awakening and freedom from suffering.
In the origin story which developed over the millennia, the Buddha wants to go outside his palace against his fathers wishes and in subsequent visits to the outside world, he sees four sights, an old/sick/dead person, and a monk, which are the drivers for him to leave home on his quest.
In the Devaduta sutta (sutta here). The Buddha explains how a man who did bad deeds and was unskillful in life, goes in front of King Yama in the underworld. King Yama asks the man if he had seen the Divine Messengers and the man said he had not. King Yama then asks the man if he had not seen an old or sick or dead person and the man said he had. The man, because of not reflecting on the nature of life, held no concern and had no urgency for developing virtue and doing good deeds thus experiences the results of his actions, as must we all.
Now with some background lets move on to the accounting.
Growing up I had the good kamma to not just have two sets of grandparents, but three. The third grandparents obviously not being blood, but in many ways were closest because they lived next door and became a source of wisdom, support, and friendship for my parents as they were starting their new family.
My paternal (fathers side) grandparents moved to Arizona when I was around three, so I saw them once a year or so, but their influence on my life was no less important. My maternal (mothers side) grandparents lived about 40 minutes away and I was with them and my maternal aunts and cousins every weekend and holiday, immersed in Italian immigrant culture.
It cannot be understated just how influential and impactful older people were in my life. I grew up with the “greatest generation” as grandparents, all three of my grandfathers had been in ww2 in one form or another. My father was a middle school health teacher and had a landscape contracting business. From around the age of eight I often went out with him on his jobs and as I got older became a part time employee. Almost all of our jobs were in 55 and older communities, of which my part of NJ had the highest concentration of in the whole country.
This meant I had contact with hundreds of senior citizens over the years. I met a German U-boat captain, a U.S soldier who’s unit liberated a concentration camp(even saw all his pictures), and a German soldier who spent most of the war in POW camps in the USA and became a citizen later. I also had wonderful experiences with scores of nice old ladies who would spoil me in various ways.
Growing up I felt already like an “old soul”, I felt more comfortable sitting and talking with older people then I did kids my own age. I loved sitting there with older people and listening to stories of their lives. I got to observe first hand how a variety of people dealt with old age and decay. I saw a maternal grandmother who was quite anxious and negative, and a paternal grandmother who was happy and positive. I saw many old people who grew old gracefully and were comfortable in their decay, and others who fell apart when old age arose.
In both cases the choice was clear to me. I wanted to be happy and positive and to grow old gracefully and peacefully. I remember having these thoughts around early teenage years. I was an inquisitive, questioning, big hearted child who wanted to know everything and gain as much wisdom as I could from my elders.
And so I observed the decay of many old people over the course of my life and took it all in, but as we all know, for one able to make it to old age, death is ever close by.
The first death, and one could argue perhaps the most impactful one of my life, was that of my paternal grandfather in 1988 when I was 10 years old. This grandfather was the one whom I was named after, and whom I had heard often growing up “you are all your grandfather”. Even though I only saw him once or twice a year we talked on the phone and he always sent vhs tapes and other ways to keep contact. My strong desire to be a jet fighter pilot growing up was, I’m sure, in no small way influenced by his being a fighter pilot in ww2.
I have only one vague memory of him in my house when I was 4-5 years old, looking up at him sitting at the kitchen table. The strongest memory I have of him however is from a time probably close to the image taken above. I was around 8-9 years old and I drove with my father into New York city, about a two hour drive, after work one night.
My grandfather had been battling cancer and was done with a round of Chemo at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC, a place I would visit many, many more times during the course of my life, including as an Anagarika in my late 30s.
My father and I walked into the main reception area, and there I saw my grandfather sitting in a chair, looking utterly emaciated (you think Chemo is bad now… 1980s..well), with his head slumped over. If i’m being honest this may be the earliest, most impactful memory I have left in my memory banks at nearly age 50. I can close my eyes and so clearly be transported back to that sight.
I also vividly remember an experience around this age, whether its connected to my grandfathers illness or not I don’t recall (8-9 years old is the age where things like death and understanding the implications of death start to become real and solid in a child’s mind). I was up in my room and had this strong realization that my parents would die one day, it hit like a ton of bricks and I remember running downstairs to my mother who was sitting in the living room watching T.V. I ran into her arms crying and saying “don’t die mom, don’t die”. She of course told me she wasn’t going to die, at least not till she was very old, and I felt better.
So through this one grandfather I had the strong divine messengers of old age, sickness, and then not too long after when I was 10 years old, death, when my grandfather was around 69 or 70.
The day it happened I remember family members talking to each other, discussing signs and premonitions, and how my grandfather had chosen to be alone when he died, waiting for a time when no one with there with him. My father was out in Arizona by himself because he got the call my grandfather was worsening, and then the rest of us joined after the death for the funeral.
My father religiously played the lottery his whole life, and he likes to tell the story about how one of the few times he ever actually won some money was around this time, and it was suspiciously close to the amount needed for all the airline fees to bring the family to the funeral. I’ve experienced a number of such “coincidences” surrounding the various deaths i’ve experienced in life.
The next deaths were not nearly as impactful, but they gave me more experience with funerals, open caskets, and the various ways people deal with grief that started with my grandfather. I feel it is a major mistake parents make today in thinking children shouldn’t go to funerals. Children have been around death throughout all of human history, and hiding it from them does them no good, I would even argue it does harm. I am so grateful my parents included me in these family experiences.
A few years later and happening within a year of each other, were the deaths of my grandfathers mother who died in her 90s, and my maternal grandfathers mother who also lived to about the same age. This would of been early 1990s and I’d be around 12-13 years old. I knew who both women were, I had met them probably 7-8 times in my life, but they lived further north in the state and were not people I was very close with. By the time I was born they were quite elderly and I never saw them outside their apartment/house much.
A few years later at age 17, 7 years after my paternal grandfathers death, would come the death of my maternal grandfather. My wonderful Italian grandfather who I use to play bacci ball with and who’s broken English catch phrases I still use to this day. I never got to have any deep philosophical or life conversations with him, but his kindness and quick laugh/smile certainly had an influence on me. Below in the picture is my Italian maternal grandparents, along with my sisters and two cousins.
My Nono’s (Italian for grandfather) illness that took him also pretty early, around age 70 (there is a pattern emerging..), was Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s. I can’t honestly say I remember experiencing my grandfather not remembering me, but this did happen to my mother and aunts. This haunted my mother throughout her life, recalling my grandfathers decay from the father she loved and idolized.
I certainly recall some aspects of my grandfathers sickness, it went on for a few years and I recall some of his physical and mental capacities slowly draining away. I can’t say I have a singular image seared into my mind like I do my paternal grandfather, but observing how the illness and death impacted my family was as influential as my own loss.
Truth be told though at age 17 I was pretty deep into being depressed, hating High School and playing a lot of video games, so I don’t think I was as present for my family as I could of been. In fact for a number of years I did somewhat feel bad for not driving my younger sisters and myself to the hospital in time to say goodbye on the day of his death.
So by age 17 I had been to at least four funerals that I can remember, including my two blood grandfathers, as well as witnessing two major illnesses and their effects. This is not meant to be a comparison of course, I’ve known people who were in their 60s and still hadn’t lost a parent, and people who lost many family members at a young age, we all experience death and loss one way or another in life, it’s inevitable.
The next deaths would be around six years later in 2001, the year I graduated college at age 23, also the year my mother was going through cancer, and the year I met Jackelyn, whom I’d later marry.
My maternal grandmother, Nona, or Nanny as the grandkids called her, was an anxious person, always quite negative. She passed that trait on to my mother, and I think that exactly is what happened to her from my great grandmother, whom I never met. I still have fond memories of her when she would play little racing games with us or give us treats.
Nanny did not suffer from a protracted illness, quite the opposite in fact. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which is to this day about a six month death sentence, as it was for her 24 years ago when she died around age 71.
I have no memories of her being emaciated or overly ill, but I had an experience with her that would be almost as impactful as my grandfathers death at age 10. On the day of her death I was there, not only there, but holding her hand. I remember the doctors giving my mother and aunts a decision, a decision I myself would need to make four years later.
The decision was this, give my nona morphine and let her pass without pain, or intubate her. The decision was made to give her morphine, and I held her hand as I watched her go through the death process, including the death rattle and then she was gone. This was the first time I held a persons hand when they died, it would not be the last.
That same year came the death of my third grandmother, who lived next door and who I saw regularly growing up. I believe she was also around 70 when she died, although due to a botched surgery she had mostly been in a wheelchair with little mobility for ten years, another divine messenger of illness I had growing up.
She, like my third grandfather, was fun, kind, and even with all that happened to her, I always remember he being positive and upbeat. She was in some ways like a second mother, and would often watch us when my parents needed to be out or the once a year they would actually go do something as a couple without the children.
I was not at her death and don’t recall any specifics of her funeral, with her the way she lived was more impactful to me then the way she died, but she was another loss and another funeral in a year already quite busy with the divine messengers.
That year also my mother was going through cancer treatments at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the same place I had been to pick up my paternal grandfather 13 years before at age eight. I believe my mother had to go into NYC probably 5-7 times for treatments and then regularly afterwards for monitoring. I went to Sloan 2-3 of those times, since I was freshly graduated from college and had no career or major responsibilities.
I don’t recall ever being overly scared about my mothers situation. Partially because I had learned by then that it’s not over till its really over, it was also not a very dangerous form of cancer and had a good success rate. I had been down this road before, granted not with a parent, but I had already started to feel somewhat comfortable with having the divine messengers in my life by then, I had already experienced them what seemed like so many times. I hoped for the best and supported my parents as best I could.
In this very impactful, world changing year of 2001, which saw the twin towers fall on September 11th, I had the deaths of two grandparents, a mother sick with cancer, and I met the person whom I knew quite certainly by the end of the first week after meeting her, that I would marry.
Talking about Jackelyn/Jackie is not something I often do. I think in large part because the typical reaction most people have upon hearing that I had a wife who died, is to attribute that to the reason I became a monk. It seems like an easy connection, the average person could understand that kind of great loss as a reason why I would do such a crazy thing like shave my head and put on robes, heck to this day even my father basically tells people this is the reason.
Organizations like the Peace Corps, and the Catholic priesthood wont accept anyone in within a certain time period after a person experiences a death like that, which makes sense. However as you may already noticed by now, by the time Jackie came into the picture, I was no stranger to sickness and death, and in many ways I feel it was that which allowed me to be a caregiver to a dying spouse and hold it together as much as I did. I never felt I did a good job back then to be honest, but as an almost 50 year old now, I’m amazed at what I was able to do for someone in their early 20s who was overweight, overworked, and overwhelmed.
I’ve never verbalized or have written this down, so I don’t know how well it will translate and be understandable, but I see the deaths of my paternal grandfather, and Jackie, as bookends. The first and last deaths of youth as it were. Two very impactful deaths at age 10 & 27, connected through almost two decades of time and including all the family lost in-between. However this accounting will not end with Jackie, just as sickness and death of people I know has not ended.
My experience with Jackie allowed me to see both sickness and death in a deep way, but it also reinforced that old age doesn’t need to come for the other two to be there. This was not just because of Jackie only being 25 when she died, but also the multiple times we ended up on the children’s ward at Sloan Kettering and I saw a sea of bald, sick children.
I had experienced and observed old age, death, and sickness my whole life, but this new dimension made my understanding of the divine messengers more well rounded. It reinforced in me the fact that I should contemplate my death even then in my 20s, not just when I get older.
I knew Jackie four days short of four years, by the end of the first year I was also looking at wedding rings, thinking I’d propose in another year or so when we were a bit older and more stable. Jackie had had cancer when she was 18 but it was supposedly put into remission. This remission ended when about a year in she noticed pains that were familiar, got tested, and it turned out to the utter shock of her doctor that the cancer had “returned”.
Thankfully my mother, who as I’ve already recounted was finishing up her own cancer journey, was able to talk to her doctor and we got Jackie into Sloan Kettering. We had our first meeting scheduled in a few months, but before that we decided it would be best if we were married so I could deal with the hospital and doctors more easily. We had a bit of a home made, family style shotgun wedding after a month or so of planning.
The Doctor, who was a world renowned oncologist, read me well and was able to be straight with me alone from the get go. He told me that even though Jackie’s cancer is typically one of the most survivable, at this point it was a long shot that treatment could help Jackie, although they’d try everything they could. After hearing that I understood why her original doctor was so shocked. I knew that whatever the outcome, I was all in on the journey from here on out.
It was then two and a half years of working crazy hours and driving up and down to NYC, just like I had done with my father in my youth, and with my mother shortly before. Jackie was fairly healthy and energetic during most of that time, but in the last year as things started to wind down, after a failed stem cell transplant, and a failed bone marrow transplant, her health started to decline and she became generally weaker.
She came home for the last time after being given a “1-3 months to live” diagnosis. She did her best to do a variety of activities she loved, and come to peace in her own way in her own mind. I tried to talk to her about these things and we did a little, but I could tell she felt that she didn’t want to burden me. I also knew that she needed to find what she was looking for herself, so I gave her that space. I knew by the end though that she had found what she needed.
In the last week at home she was like an old woman, so weak she couldn’t stand in the shower. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t sleep, the body had started to shut down. When we decided to go to the hospital I had to carry her in my arms to the car because she couldn’t walk at all.
At Sloan the death process had begun, and I was given the choice I mentioned above regarding my maternal grandmother; morphine for a peaceful death, or intubation. It was my choice to make as the husband, however I knew that I couldn’t in good conscience make it alone.
If it were up to me, its let the death process play out. I personally have a living will and a DNR etc, from the experiences I’ve seen in life. It’s one thing to get in a car accident and have a chance of living then intubate, but at the end of a cancer or major illness, it just delays the inevitable.
And thats all it did do. I knew Jackie’s wishes, and I knew her families wishes. I had grown close especially one of her sister’s family, and that sister and I ended up being the only two there at that time (others had gone down to get food and drink). I looked at my sister-in–law and we made the decision to intubate.
For 18 days Jackie was on intubation and slowly the death process kept going until even modern machines could no longer keep her alive. The thing I most disliked about observing a person die on intubation was that all you knew was numbers dropping on a machine screen.
Jackie’s mother and myself held her hands as she died, but it was not like with my grandmother, that tactile death rattle, it just numbers on a machine dropping down until flatline. They tried to resuscitate until we gave permission for them to stop, and then it was over.
The thing about a long illness, both for the sick person and the caregiver, is that you have time to work through the grieving process while you are going through the event. That is of course if you don’t live in complete denial and actually start it. For me by the end I had already long prepared and accepted the inevitable. That’s not to say that I was done going through the grieving process, but it was already long started before she died. I’m sure I would of been much more lost then I was had I not had the experiences I did my whole life up to that point.
After her death I didn’t lay depressed in bed for weeks or the things you see in the movies. Jackie had given me the ultimatum to live, even to marry again and have a family. It was a raw time, a time of deep contemplation about my life and my future, all the people I had lost up to that point, but also all that I had gained and was grateful for. Jackie, and the experience I went through with her, made me a man, I had left the boy behind.
What life was all about? what was the best way to live life? I had contemplated these things since my early teenage years, ever questioning, ever investigating, so it was adding newfound hard earned wisdom on top of what I had already gained.
I very rarely think about Jackie or my grandparents and those i’ve lost these days, time moves on as I live the monastic life, I’ve let go of many attachments, but still its good to reflect like this every few years. My Gratitude and all I’ve learned from them remains however.
The Start of Meditation
I had started to meditate in 2005 while Jackie was still alive as a way to deal with depression and all the stress I was going through, but I wasn’t thinking about Buddhism or having a spiritual path then. Indeed the meditation techniques I had first tried weren’t even Buddhist.
It would not become serious and dedicated until perhaps early 2007, and by that point I had already found Ajahn Brahm on youtube and was in the very beginning of exploring Buddhism before officially becoming Buddhist on Vesak of 2008. As I often say when asked about my spiritual journey, I was raised catholic but by the time I was 16 I knew I was not one. From age 16-29 I considered myself a student of all religions and a practitioner of none, however I’d always say if I had to choose it would be Buddhism.
This is where the bookends I mentioned before came in. I believe the culmination of all I had experienced from my paternal grandfather through to Jackie, acted as a totalizing influence in my decision around age 29 that I wanted a spiritual path. When I had started meditating I was not thinking about becoming a Buddhist. When I became a Buddhist in 2008 I was not thinking about becoming a monastic, but that is how things played out.
After Jackie’s death I had some newfound freedom. I did not have a career yet and so I spent the year after meeting old friends and figuring my new life out. I actually wanted to join the peace corps, thinking it maybe my only chance to do so before I got locked into a career, but the rule I mentioned above precluded me. I had put in applications for a variety of careers and in 2006 I was called by the state to start my CPS career.
in 2006 before I got locked down into my career I decided to go to Arizona to visit my last living blood grandparent, my paternal grandmother in Arizona (pictured above with my paternal grandfather, myself and my sisters).
I spent a week with her and her sister, just me, and it was a time I cherished because it would be the last time I saw her in person as she died in 2009 when I was 31.
Of all my blood grandparents, she had the most influence on me. I remember as a young adolescent into early teens, purposely waking up at 5am ( Im still not a fan of that even as a monk today!) just to have coffee with her and watch the sun rise whenever we were together, just the two of us.
My paternal grandmother is the only 1/4 of my ancestry that is not off the boat Italian and I have no idea how far back in America some of it goes. She was my “Iowa farm girl” grandmother and her joyful, fun, light hearted demeanor was such a contrast to the still somewhat joyful, yet underlying heavier, more anxious Italian air I breathed regularly.
To this day I find it no coincidence that even though she was overweight, ate whatever she wanted and wasn’t extremely health conscious, she outlasted all my other blood grandparents by a decade and a half. I could see from a young age just how anxiety killed, took years from people, and made life miserable. Just like how I saw old people grow old and knew who I wanted to emulate (the ones who grew old graceful and peaceful), I knew from a young age that I wanted to be much more like my grandmother then anyone else I knew.
She was a happy old woman, went to the movies and bowling with her friends, did what she loved. She smoked and ate what she wanted and even towards the end when she had COPD and had to be on oxygen, she always kept her positive joyful attitude.
This I suppose, is yet another example of a persons influence being not how they died (I was not there), but how they lived. Both She, and the next person I’m going to talk about, probably had more influence on whom I chose to become in life as a person then anyone else.
Just five years ago in 2020, when I had been a Bhikkhu four years, I heard of the passing of my third grandfather, Ollie, the last one who outlived all the older people I grew up around until dying around age 95.
Like my paternal grandmother, he was always positive, upbeat, and happy, ever the dedicated husband and caregiver to his wife Ann(who was in the wheelchair for 10 years as I mentioned above). That was something I recalled often when I was caregiver to my own wife years later.
Unlike my paternal grandmother, he was always pretty healthy. He loved to walk everywhere, even to the grocery store and did so until into his 90s when his eyesight made it too dangerous for him. Both Ollie and Bhante Gunaratana are two men I know in their 90s who walked miles and miles every day until they couldn’t anymore (I hear Bhante Gunaratana still does hours of walking meditation with a walker in the hall these days at 98), and I plan to keep walking a mile or two each day myself until I die or i’m too old to manage it anymore.
Ollie was like a second father to me in many ways. My father was/is the consummate family man and a hard worker who provided everything his children could need, and even a good amount of the things we wanted. He was also a very ethical and good person and I am forever grateful to have him as a father. However that did mean that he worked long hours and Ollie would be there when I came home from school.
I remember Ollie teaching me how to ride my bike, something I’m sure my father did as well, but the literal memory I have is of him. I loved sitting and talking with him anytime I could. he was not only a mentor to my parents, but to me. He was always supportive of whatever skillful things I chose to do. Even when I wanted to become a monastic, he didn’t understand it but he knew I was determined, wished me well, and in typical Ollie fashion said something like ” I know you’ll be the best monk out there”.
The Black Widower
The last thing to cover is related to a little joke I say when talking about ordaining. I start out by saying 3 out of the last four women I had a relationship died, and then I say that I didn’t want anymore women to die like I was a black widow spider who killed her mates, so I stopped dating and became a monk!
While this is in jest, it is actually true that only the last woman I dated is still alive, and thankfully she is married, a mother and doing well the last I heard. I gave her my car before I became a samanera as it turned out perfect timing that hers had just died and I no longer needed it as one about to go forth.
Of the four obviously Jackie is the first. The second woman I had a long term friend/romance, on and off, love/hate relationship with. She was a co-worker and someone I was fairly genuinely close to. She was in a car accident and lingered for almost a year in hospitals before finally succumbing to her injuries, I believe she was around 28 or 29.
The next woman I dated for about six months. She was a few years older then me and had two children. I broke off the relationship when I recognized I didn’t have strong feelings for her but I liked her kids and we remained friends. I would visit them when I could.
Right before I left for the monastery in 2014, I found out she was diagnosed with ALS. I would visit her whenever I was home and watched how far and how quickly the disease advanced each time, until the last visit when I was newly ordained a Bhikkhu and she was mostly non functioning, she died about a month after that at age 40 if I recall.
Final Thoughts
In 2015, as I became an Anagarika, I was told the news that my father had prostate cancer. Once again in my life on a trip home I traveled with my family to Sloan Kettering in NYC, but this time as a lay person in white robes. The prognosis was good ( and indeed after treatment my father is still healthy and well to this day) and the doctor was very respectful towards me. It was an interesting test for me to see if I still knew my way around the building I came to know so well since my first visit at age eight and had last been a decade prior.
I believe all of these experiences, and my Buddhist practice, has turned me into someone who is willing and able to sit with anyone as they die, to know how to be with loved ones grieving a loss. When a death happens It’s like something kicks In and it’s go time. I enter into an arena I’m very familiar with and look to be what help I can be.
I feel so comfortable around death, that I know that I can be the person who is helpful and beneficial when everyone else is at a loss of what to do. There is a psychologist I listened to years back who said something like “be the person who can support others at your fathers funeral”.
Meaning be a person who can be anti-fragile in the face of tragedy, to the point that you don’t fall apart when everyone else around you is. This doesn’t mean you don’t grieve or feel bad, simply that you hold it together enough to support those who can’t. It’s not something you can just do at will, only through experience and training your mind, but it is someone I feel I can be.
My latest experience with death happened just last year, with the death of my mother after a few years of degrading health from the same illness that took her father, Alzheimer’s (the same illness I have a heightened chance of due to heredity).
In my nomad life i’ve been able to spend time with my parents and be what support I could for them, knowing that eventually I’d most likely be living far away and not see them often. I watched my mothers slow decline, but I am thankful that she died after not too long of an Illness, both for her sake and my fathers sake as an overwhelmed, elderly caregiver.
As of writing I had just spent a number of months with my father, seeing what help I can be as he figures out his new life. As a long term practitioner it’s been an interesting experience to observe someone close to me growing old, noticing the normal decay of memory, forgetfulness, and weakness of the body, and becoming a person different in a number of respects then I remembered growing up.
As for my reaction to my mothers death, well, how do I write this without the average person taking it the wrong way…. I cannot recall one thought or moment of suffering in my mind regarding her since my mother died.
This frankly continues to surprise even me, not that it is possible per say, just that I’M experiencing it. When I knew my mother was close to the end I was in California staying at a hermitage. My mind kicked into gear like I mentioned above “alright its time, let the grieving process play out how it will, no repression or suppression” etc, recalling all i’ve learned my whole life.
Yet not one tear, or thought of suffering. Just for clarity I had a pretty good relationship with my mother as an Italian oldest child and only son, a mommas boy. She was the first person in the world whom I told of my desire to become a Buddhist monastic.
However I recall years ago having an experience while doing walking meditation at work as a lay person, where my mind brought up a line of thinking regarding my mother and instead of saying mom the mind said ” this being”, I realized then that I had broken down some attachment in my mind. Around that time I had similar experiences regarding a number of family members, including Jackie, when I wished her freedom from suffering as a samsaric being, and that I would be letting any kammic connections I had to her go as I strove for awakening.
I know this kind of thinking sounds horrible to the average person. It’s not that I don’t hold my family members in any less regard, it’s just that my mental attachment to them is much, much less then the average person who has not done 20 years of practice. How can I explain to someone who doesn’t know for themselves? I probably cant.
My family was the most important thing in my life by leagues… until the Dhamma. As I told my family when I left to become a monk, they are still very important to me, but the Dhamma, and this path is something I must follow, as I can’t imagine living any other way.
I still cant.
It’s been a few years since I made a video in my “Journey into Homelessness” series, where I document my monastic journey starting in 2012 as a lay person up until today. With me just making 10 years in robes a few days ago, and 9 years as a Bhikkhu, I figured it would be a good time to make an accounting of my path.
as of this morning the forms are submitted, now it’s just a matter of waiting some weeks for a response as to whether it will be approved.
Here are the links to all four talks & guided meditations for the recent retreat
1- https://youtube.com/live/D39DZiWQbBo
2-https://youtube.com/live/P8n8U1MSPTc
Maggasekha now officially exists in Colorado as an incorporated non-profit entity. The Next step is to create it as a 501c3 with the IRS. I explain the process and plans in this short video below.
not feeling too well tonight, going to take the night off the stream.
Last weekends retreat on the Three Characteristics of Existence is now public and up. Each video consists of a half hour dhamma talk followed by an hour long guided meditation.
part 1 – https://youtube.com/live/rEg_hHE-X00
part 2 – https://youtube.com/live/8QIOYjv_z9Q
part 3 – https://youtube.com/live/uVFmUK53MIU
Part 4 – https://youtube.com/live/JJStC-PRFTM
This retreat covers a very important sutta where the Buddha gives 10 perceptions that help Girimandana get over his sickness, but more importantly aid on the quest for freedom from suffering. Space still available –