Introduction by Chris Hammond: I met Jamie around 2007. He had moved to Baltimore from Kansas City and was heading the registration for a local 3 day course I attended.  He later contacted me asking if he could sublet at my acupuncture space for seeing counseling clients.  That ended up working out and we shared space until he found a space of his own.  He’d met up with a couple of psychologists and they’d found a very nice space across from Baltimore Harbor. For sometime I flirted with the idea of renting a room from them and that finally materialized in Sept. 2016.  It’s been nice to work alongside a good dhamma friend who shares similar aspirations in dhamma.

We have a similar background of extensively traveling in the east and intensively sitting and serving over a long period in our younger years. We both reentered the householders life and have since been charting our lives forward, finding the balance between maintaining our meditation, being successful practitioners, and leading good family lives.  Jamie and I have occasionally sat together at our practices spaces and we sit one Saturday morning a month with another meditator friend.  Jamie has also been a great initiator in organizing a recent canoeing trip and several hikes. He’s helped to fill a real need of bringing dhamma friends together off the cushion to have fun and grow friendships.  I’m grateful to have him as friend.

Dhamma Story: I first heard about Vipassana and S.N. Goenka during my travels in Asia. I had just completed a year of teaching English in China and was visiting my aunt and uncle who were living in Nepal. Part of my intent in being in India and Nepal was to explore various types of meditation, likely not too different from many others drawn to the East. After asking my uncle for advice on different spiritual traditions, he directed me to a priest friend of his that had lived and worked in India for some time. One of the 10 suggestions for spiritual teachers was Goenka. So when a friend I met in Calcutta mentioned that there was a Vipassana retreat happening close by, I immediately jumped at the chance to take a course.

My first Vipassana course was like most others, very difficult but also very eye opening. I thought I had found something very significant and was motivated to give this technique a try. But what really stands out to me was my experience of returning to Calcutta’s main train station (from the “suburbs”) straight from the course. The cacophony and press of hundreds of people was overwhelming. I immediately began missing the peace and serenity of the 10 days of silent meditation I just left. I was of course craving what I had lost.

This experience reminds me of how often the difficulties and distractions of a householder’s life seem to pull me out of a more peaceful space. It can be discouraging, like the proverbial two steps forward and one step back. Which sets me up for aversion to life’s hardship. However, over the course of my practice I have come to learn that though adversity can seem like a hinderance to our practice and equanimity, it can also provide motivation to use our practice to overcome obstacles. When I notice negativity triggered by hardship arising, I try to retell “the internal story” to one of hopeful meaning: “Oh, this suffering is just an opportunity to grow in Dhamma”. I see these daily struggles as a gradual, lifelong process of letting go of my reactive need to fix and control my life to that of “letting go”, a continual lesson of finding a path to acceptance and equanimity in the face of suffering.

Introduction by Jonathan Penn: I met Chris when I was coming back to the DC area after sitting my first course in Australia. At the time I didn’t know whether there were even other old students or opportunities for group sittings in my home town. I met Chris pretty quickly, very likely at a 1-Day course at the Mehta’s home and then saw him at different group sittings after that. I was just returning and starting my career as an engineer, and Chris was just arriving in Maryland and starting his advanced degree and then career in acupuncture. We quickly started hanging out and discussing our desire to meet someone and then we both did! In a somewhat bizarre parallel path we both met a partner, got married, had kids… and then both got divorced around the same time. I’m deeply grateful to have had such a constant and grounded friend through all of my life events over the past many years in Chris. These days our daughters (my daughter Layla age 5 and Chris’s daughters Lilly age 6 and Zoe age 4) are close friends as well and we just enjoyed a great pool day all together this past weekend.

Dhamma Story: I’ve had an epiphany lately. It’s an epiphany that’s come and gone before. It’s the role of what I eat, how much water I drink and maintaining a consistent eating schedule each day affects my meditation practice and my life. I was feeling tired, restless and foggy on a regular basis and was observing that a lot in my sitting practice.

As we know from the discourses, the sensations we experience are due to the current sankaras, past sankaras, the food we’ve eaten and the climatic conditions that surround us. I was feeling that my diet was playing a significant role in my experience so I tightened things up. In the morning I would have lemon water, some chlorella and some fruit, which has a cleansing affect. At 1pm I would have a salad, steamed veggies, lentils, and potatoes. Mid pm would be some nuts and a piece of fruit. Then 6pm would be a lighter version of lunch. After that there was no later evening eating, which allows the body over 12 hours to cleanse and rest the digestive system. Also during the day I would drink lots of water. This has some resemblance to intermittent fasting that has gotten lots of good press lately. I learned of doing this from Terri Kerr who was a nutritionist and an assistant teacher in Massachusetts. She had a book out called Terri Kerr’s Ultimate Detox Diet. She has since passed and there are used versions of the book on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Teri-Kerrs-Ultimate-Detox-Diet/dp/B002O6YHR0.

I noticed an immediate affect of having more energy, a clearer mind, much more rested and calm and able to sleep more deeply. The body felt more fluid and less tight, I also experienced the mind as more fluid. The factors of diet, water intake and daily rhythm play such a supportive role in the quality of our meditation practice and our lives. I realized that i’d been dehydrated, hadn’t been nourished enough and my eating schedule had been off. Sure our job is always to observe reality as it is but then we need to ask what are we doing to create reality as it is. If we are angry, we work to come out of that. If we aren’t drinking enough water or not nourishing ourselves, we need to work on that. Our body is constantly alerting us to what is or what isn’t in balance and we need to listen with wisdom.

Dhamma Friends: Jamie Metzler

One of the most important assets on the dhamma path is friendship. In a world unfamiliar with the benefits of meditating 2 hours a day, it can be hard to find people to walk with on this life altering journey. In the early stages, and sometimes even later on, this practice can feel isolating and lonely. Since the number of people on the path is small, the relationships forged along the journey are deep and strong. If you continue on the path long enough, serving at your local Center when you can, you start seeing similar faces. These similar faces will develop into dhamma friendships, and these friendships will be the foundation of your dhamma community.

To help inspire you to continue along the path of dhamma, I’m going to start a Friendship Chain, sharing the friendships and stories that myself and others have accumulated along the way. After sharing one of my dhamma stories, I’ll invite a few of my friends to share one of their dhamma stories. I will then ask my friends to introduce a few of their dhamma friends to do the same. I hope this will start a long chain of stories passed from one friend to the next as we travel across the country and beyond through the diverse dhamma community.

The Dhamma Chain will start next week here.