Bartending As Daoism

Bartending as Daoism

So one of my day jobs is that I work as a bartender for a nice local wine and beer lounge in the city. I had to miss last week's shift because of a meeting I had to attend, and coming back today I felt incredibly clumsy and awkward from just that little break.

But as I got back into the swing of things, I found myself floating through the bar almost instinctively. My hands knew where all the bottles were, how we were doing on snacks, how often to check on patrons, and so on. It was pretty busy for a Sunday night, but somewhere during the shift I came to the realization that bartending is a rather perfect example of Daoism in action. It requires a pretty focused mindfulness of the present moment as the bar fills up. You can't plan too far ahead and you can't focus much on past mistakes. You've got to keep your attention on the patrons you have in front of you, and making sure they're happy at that exact moment. The "now" moment is constantly there, and without proper training or perspective, it can be pretty overwhelming to deal with everything. But with the right mindset and practice, I felt like I was just able to move and flow with everyone in the bar at the same time. Making sure drinks are going there, bills are going here, glasses ready to be dried, tables to be cleaned, on and on there's always something to do. And with a sort of effortless effort (I can speak in paradoxes too!), you're able to just surrender yourself to the moment and keep the pace.

I have a feeling at least a few of you also have had this sort of experience with your own work. I think it's a mistake when people call this sort of thing "mindless," as anything that requires your hands to move or your brain to function must involve your mind being active on some level. Feel free to submit your own stories about being within the present moment at work, I'm sure we could all learn from each other's experiences. 

This goes nicely with the last post. It's nice when themes show up in my feed.

The only thing I would want to add is that even as we know anger as a negative and generally harmful emotion, you still must recognize and accept that you are experiencing it. Trying to deny that reality, whether to others or to yourself, can be very harmful as well. As with my thoughts on sorrow and loss, once you accept the emotions you are feeling, you can then observe what triggered them and let them pass by. What has made you angry? Is it something external, or did that simply set off something pent up within? See the truth of your feelings and your ability to control and check your ego will improve drastically.

Controlling Anger

Controlling anger is no different than control of any other harmful emotion.  First and foremost, our anger subsides naturally as we progress spiritually. It becomes very difficult to react with anger when we live our lives with compassion and kindness. 

Second, what is anger and where does it come from? Anger is a natural defensive response when we feel threatened or frustrated and our ego senses danger. When we become angry several physical things happen to us. We release adrenalin.  Our breathing and heart rate increases so our muscles are prepared for conflict.  We sometimes get the urge to void our bowels or bladder to better prepare for internal injury. 

You see, anger is a very primitive emotion it’s purpose is not to help you win an argument with your Mom but to fight a predator.  So, for this reason, anger is often a very poor response in a non lethal setting.  Anger shuts down the reasoning part of our minds and sends us into an action mode.  I guess the body figures that the time for talk and reason has passed.

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Remember, Daoism isn't about following your impulses, it's about seeing and aligning with truth. This article is a great explanation on the hows and whys.

The separation between the two, like the separation between many other things, is but an illusion.

An intriguing video about gender roles, violence, and rite of passage. Let's break it down as such, with a Daoist lens.

Being a member of modern society, the idea that men specifically have a duty to either impress others (males or females) with displays of masculinity is a bit disappointing to me. The fact that this video focuses so much on the self-imposed trials of Men not only illuminates the prevalence of this idea, but reinforces it. Are there truly no examples of female proving grounds? Or is it enough that they wed a man and bear his children? I do not believe that the Path particularly cares what sort of genitalia you possess; we all walk along it regardless of what our bodies look like.

Violence, on the other hand, is quite relevant to the Dao. It is, has been, and always will be an integral part of the human experience. We can choose to either ignore this, as the narrator (and the series as a whole) have implied, or we can recognize it and moderate it within our society. It takes place either in the form of athletic sports or violent rituals or actual combat, and there's a reason it has never left our societies. Rejecting it as a part of our identities would be as foolish as denying ourselves music or art; it is in our nature to fight. You might watch the stories presented and think the people and practices barbaric, but what defines barbarism? How does the absence of such violence in your life make you more civilized? In fact, it is more than likely that violence has simply taken a different form in your activities, making the line between civilized and barbaric essentially arbitrary.

With that said, however, the reason and cause behind violence in our lives becomes much more important. Once we accept that violence will exist as a part of our culture whether we want it or not, identifying the true nature of that violence is what allows us to create a harmonious state with it. More specifically, the idea that a group needs to express violence in order to prove themselves worthy of their peers is the most trouble I have with the episode. We are worthy enough to be ourselves, and should be judged by our own merits. None of the groups shown are in a state of war, and none are auditioning to be soldiers. Their performance in pseudo-combat is less about their actual skill and more like a quick way to discover traits about their character under duress. This is indeed useful, but a society following the Dao would need no such test, which is a second-handed way to learning one's true nature. A person's actions should be judged by how they live their normal everyday life, not by arranging circumstances around them to force them to act differently. The necessity to seek admiration and praise, to run from failure, to take oneself out of their actual reality so that they might be more than themselves in a different set of rules; these are indicative of an unstable base of persona. If we accept who we are without the need for others to approve us, then we can exist and perform as the person we choose to be.

This is not to say that the practices themselves are not beneficial to those that participate. The rigors of physical training, the tempering of combat, the satisfaction of executing a flawless gameplan or adapting to an unexpected setback; these are all incredibly useful and healthy for people to have, especially with violence being such an ingrained part of our nature. But they should be sought out and practiced by our own personal choices along the Path, not because they are needed to gain social status. If a people forge themselves to be stronger and sharper than they were before by their own choices, success and social status will follow.