I am off to Spirit Rock for a ten night Thanksgiving retreat, so I posted the gratitude dharma talk early, and recorded it for my students to listen to when they gather together this Tuesday.
If reading that I am off on retreat makes you feel envy, it's an invitation to yourself to make time in your life for, if not a ten night retreat, perhaps a seven, four or one day retreat. There's a link to Spirit Rock right on this page. Check it out! Or if that doesn't feel possible, just take ten minutes right now to close your eyes and listen in.
I wish you all a very happy fully present Thanksgiving where you fall in love with the very foibles that usually drive you crazy about your families! Just knowing that all of this is fleeting reminds us of how precious these times together are, even fraught with tension or disagreement about politics or anything else. Why not set the intention to simply be present, simply listen, let go of the need to take a stand, change a mind, prove anything, or be heard? You may be amazed at how it changes the family dynamic.
As we lose the ones we love, we begin to see it is those very foibles, the things that drove us crazy, that we chuckle about in the end. So chuckle now! And enjoy them in the flesh.
Many blessings,
Stephanie
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Gratitude for Everything
We come together this time of year in a celebration of giving thanks. Many of us have cherished traditions. Probably just as many would be happy to skip the whole season. But whatever our feelings about the holiday of Thanksgiving, most of us enjoy feeling gratitude and the act of counting our blessings even if the rest of the year we are complaining about our lack of blessings. This one day is a day of accounting, checking in and doing a little tally. We tell ourselves that even though we lost a job, got ill, lost a loved one or any of a myriad of other situations that might befall us in any given year, still, at Thanksgiving we seek out those things that are going well, polish them up, list them and take comfort in them.
And there’s nothing wrong with a little comfort. But this kind of gratitude is finite and conditional. What if the balance sheet doesn’t come out? What if the awful things that have happened cannot be compensated by any small comfort we may have? What if we have tried and tried to look on the bright side of seeming disasters, and have just not been able to find it? Then where’s the gratitude? Gone!
To have nothing and then not to even have gratitude? That really sucks! It feels better not to even go there! Forget gratitude. It’s unreliable.
I’ve talked before about the value of noticing when we are operating from a finite source, how the results are shallow rooted, unsatisfying and unreliable. So then, let’s look to see if we can discover gratitude from a deeper source.
Gratitude from that deep source, that sense of connection to all of life becomes gratitude for everything. Everything. This is not just reflecting back and saying well, this bad thing happened, but now good has come of it, so now I am grateful for it. This is deep complete gratitude for everything. Everything!
Suddenly a resounding ‘No!’ is proclaimed across the land. We can’t be grateful for the horrors of the world, for the evil that is done, for the devastation that is wrought, for the injustices – the list is long of all the things we refuse in any way to acknowledge one iota of acceptance, let alone gratitude. Really, Stephanie, you’ve gone too far this time.
Maybe so. Let’s investigate. I’m sitting with it now and asking in deeply. You do the same. I am asking myself, ‘How can I be grateful for the horrors of the world?’ Well, I can be grateful they are not happening to me in this moment. But that is clearly a self-serving, blind, finite answer. So what is the infinite answer?
It begins, as always, with coming fully into this present moment, this spacious awareness. In this relaxed state we can sense in to our bodies and all sensory experiences become illuminated. We notice sounds and sense into the rhythms, the volume, the tones, the pitch, the pulsing, the beat, the variety, the layering. We look around and notice light and shadow, color, texture, distance, shapes and the interaction of all of these in space. Closing our eyes we sense in to the pressure where our body meets whatever is supporting it. We feel the texture of whatever clothing or furniture comes in contact with our skin. We feel the temperature of the air, and the stillness or movement of it. We feel whatever is going on inside our body -- pain, tension, energy, pleasant sensations and numbness. We taste the inside of our mouths. We smell the air. Some of our senses in this particular moment may be subtle, but still present if we stay with them. We become aware of our breath, rising and falling.
When we are able to release fully into this moment, savoring each sensation with a beginner’s mind, really noticing how this moment, the very one we thought was so ordinary, is in fact extraordinary because of our attention.
In this open spacious moment where we experience all that arises with a freshness we didn’t even know we were capable of experiencing, we feel gratitude.
This isn’t a gratitude conditioned on whether what we are seeing and hearing and sensing is pleasant, ordered in the way we like things to be. We have access to a less critical noticing. The impulses we might normally have -- to tidy up the mess of newspapers on the floor or to bang the broom on the ceiling to get the loud radio upstairs to stop, or any other fault-finding rescue mission we might think up -- all that falls away. In this moment, everything is just fine, even the mess, the noise, and all the things that usually irritate us.
We feel gratitude for simply being alive in this moment. Because this moment is the only thing that is real. Everything that has passed, both our personal history and the collective history of the world is just memory turning to compost. Whatever is in the future is currently simply potential, trending toward possible directions, always subject to the unseen and unknown, thus beyond our ability to imagine with any useful accuracy.
But this moment, this is our one and only reality. On a finite level we can enjoy it and wish it would last, or dislike it and rush to get past it. When we pause and release the tension that has us so tightly wrapped, we tap into the infinite: This moment, fully relaxed, is the gateway to our sensing the infinite.
From this deep connected place, we bring forth an authentic response to whatever arises in our experience. This is the only place where we can interact with the world, to sow peaceful seeds that might nourish the world of our great grandchildren. We can’t do that from the past or the future. There’s no power there. We can only be effective right here and now, by staying present and connected in deeply rooted moment. From this singular point of power, the present moment, when all our preferences and judgments have fallen away, we can see the universal dance and our place in it.
Raging at the horrors of the world we are stuck in a finite limited powerless rant. We feel like helpless victims in a storm of intense chaos. Going deep and quiet, touching the infinite, that is what makes real change possible. It is where Gandhi went and where Martin Luther King Jr. went before taking powerful peaceful action that changed the world. It is where Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi have gone time and again, both able to draw sustenance and even freedom in physical incarceration – turning inward to the silence, finding patience and compassion instead of bitterness – and then allowing that sense of connection to inspire wise action.
From this place we are able to spot leaders who are authentic and deeply rooted. Instead of ranting at these leaders as if they singularly hold all the power and we, who were powerful in our ability to work to elect them, are suddenly cranky demanding children angry at mommy. We encourage our leaders to remain unseduced by the shallow-rooted calls to finite power that surround them, and to stay deeply connected both to that deep wisdom and to the community that elected them in order to make wise decisions that affect us all. And we continue to stay connected, using that access to be the change we want to see in the world.
Whatever injustices we face in the world can be met from this deep place in a truly transformative way. So first on our Thanksgiving list of gratitude might be our own ability to access this font of quiet connected wisdom, grateful that it is possible in any moment to access this place.
But what if we are new to the practice and this access to the moment is just a pipe dream? Be with the pipe dream, see it for what it is. Let it inform your experience of this moment. Keep practicing being present with whatever is. Stay focused on the senses, noticing. Notice everything. Notice the judgments, notice the emotions, notice the thoughts. Just notice. Maybe it feels like a big tangle, a tight knot, inaccessible. Be with that! Notice and notice again.
When we begin to meditate it is like any new skill. At first paying attention to the present moment feels as if staying present is like trying to balance on the head of a pin. The moment we realize we’re on it, we fall off. But with patience, intention, compassion and consistent practice, we begin to notice the head of the pin getting larger until we feel present for longer and longer periods.
This sensing in to this moment is the practice that gives access to the infinite source within ourselves, the connected place that has gratitude for everything. There’s no hurry to get there. There’s just the practice. Wanting to be there, rushing to get ‘there’ only seals the door and locks us out of the possibility of accessing it. For there is no ‘there,’ only ‘here.’ Just this experience. Can you feel gratitude for the rise and fall of your breath?
We don’t have to feel grateful for the Holocaust, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the sexual predator living near the neighborhood playground. But finding wise ways to respond to them includes recognizing that the world is now, has always been and always shall be full of what the Tao calls ‘the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows.’ Without the sorrows, there are no joys. That is the nature of earthly existence.
Over and over again in our lives we see that good times can cause bad things. A booming economy is perceived as a good thing, but it also causes overworked people to feel they don’t have time for each other and then they fill their sense of lack with purchasing material things.
And we’ve all had the experience of bad times causing good things, bringing strangers together as one people to address the challenge or weather the storm together. The yin and the yang freely flow from black to white and back again, and that’s the nature of life.
As we observe this flux and flow in our own lives and in the world around us, we may find we have a more open ‘don’t know’ mind about things. When I was younger knowing seemed so important. Now that I’m older, not knowing feels even more delicious!
There’s that wonderful old story told in Buddhist and Taoist traditions, of the farmer whose neighbors told him he was so unlucky because his horse ran away. They were surprised when he replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Then the horse returned with a lot of other horses to fill his corral, and his neighbors said, “Oh, what great fortune!” He still answered, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” When his son fell off one of the horses and broke his leg, the neighbors said, “What terrible luck!” And even then the farmer said, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Well, the neighbors thought him very strange indeed. But then the military came to the village seeking young men for conscription into the army, and the farmer’s son was exempted because of his broken leg. The neighbors now saw that healing leg differently, as their sons marched off to war. “You are so lucky,” they told the farmer. And he said, of course, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” And so the story goes on throughout life.
While taking full responsibility for our own behavior and vowing to do no harm to ourselves or others, with a don’t know mind we can be less outraged at the poor choices of others, and certainly at the inconstancies of nature. Events we might perceive as good fortune, we can vest with less power to enslave us. (Enslave us? Yes, because we say, “Now that I have this great job, this great relationship, this great house, how can I keep it? How can I make this happiness last?” And suddenly we’re caught up in fear and suffering again.) It is said that the greatest suffering is caused by striving for a perfect world or by running away in fear from the imperfect world we see around us.
Here’s a thought! Let’s just stop striving for a moment! Let’s stop running away from what is! Instead, let’s simply focus on our breath and the various senses. Fully present in this moment, we feel gratitude for just this, whatever form it takes in this moment. We access the place deep within ourselves that is beyond the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Each moment, with all its sensory offerings, offers access to this vantage point, from which we recognize the fleeting gift of the wild, the monstrous and the wondrous nature of earthly existence. And we have ringside seats!
On this fine fall day, we might enjoy looking at this idea as a multitude of leaves flying around in the wind, each leaf in some state we call beautiful autumn foliage or dried up, dead, and ugly.
And we see ourselves in this turbulent swirl, sometimes in our leaf nature being acted upon and sometimes in our wind nature, causing a stir. But only when we are able to stand in the middle of the whirl, in the quiet stillness of the eye of this ongoing storm of life, can we relax into a state of gratitude for everything.
In this centered stillness we can see with fresh eyes the multi-layered dimensions of all things. We can see into the fearful hurting heart of the being who hates and hurts others in turn, and we can see the strength and resilience of the being who has been hurt but is able to access connection and compassion for all beings, spreading joy. We see those who would divide to conquer, and we recognize their fear and how they are conquered by it. We see those who see the unity and act out of that sense of unity for the well being of all. We see the natural disasters and are awed by the power of nature, and the fragileness of our brief lives, and the strength of the human spirit when challenged.
This rich alive moment that until we relaxed into it seemed so ordinary fills us with a sense of abundance. From this perspective, everything that brought us to this point softens in its wake.
We see that all those events we would not have chosen are now just stories, stories that we have clung to as proof of the veracity of our tightly held beliefs, stories that have left us scarred but still standing, or perhaps lessons we are still trying to learn from. They exist, along with cherished memories, only in our minds. And we can hold them lightly, letting them go when they no longer serve us, feeling gratitude for whatever gifts they brought us. Or we can cling to them tightly, empowering them to define and confine us.
When we relax into simple awareness of this moment, we fully inhabit our bodies and minds in a way that enables us to live an authentic, heartfelt generous and meaningful life. Accessing the infinite wisdom of simple presence, simple awareness, brings clarity and gratitude for everything.
And there’s nothing wrong with a little comfort. But this kind of gratitude is finite and conditional. What if the balance sheet doesn’t come out? What if the awful things that have happened cannot be compensated by any small comfort we may have? What if we have tried and tried to look on the bright side of seeming disasters, and have just not been able to find it? Then where’s the gratitude? Gone!
To have nothing and then not to even have gratitude? That really sucks! It feels better not to even go there! Forget gratitude. It’s unreliable.
I’ve talked before about the value of noticing when we are operating from a finite source, how the results are shallow rooted, unsatisfying and unreliable. So then, let’s look to see if we can discover gratitude from a deeper source.
Gratitude from that deep source, that sense of connection to all of life becomes gratitude for everything. Everything. This is not just reflecting back and saying well, this bad thing happened, but now good has come of it, so now I am grateful for it. This is deep complete gratitude for everything. Everything!
Suddenly a resounding ‘No!’ is proclaimed across the land. We can’t be grateful for the horrors of the world, for the evil that is done, for the devastation that is wrought, for the injustices – the list is long of all the things we refuse in any way to acknowledge one iota of acceptance, let alone gratitude. Really, Stephanie, you’ve gone too far this time.
Maybe so. Let’s investigate. I’m sitting with it now and asking in deeply. You do the same. I am asking myself, ‘How can I be grateful for the horrors of the world?’ Well, I can be grateful they are not happening to me in this moment. But that is clearly a self-serving, blind, finite answer. So what is the infinite answer?
It begins, as always, with coming fully into this present moment, this spacious awareness. In this relaxed state we can sense in to our bodies and all sensory experiences become illuminated. We notice sounds and sense into the rhythms, the volume, the tones, the pitch, the pulsing, the beat, the variety, the layering. We look around and notice light and shadow, color, texture, distance, shapes and the interaction of all of these in space. Closing our eyes we sense in to the pressure where our body meets whatever is supporting it. We feel the texture of whatever clothing or furniture comes in contact with our skin. We feel the temperature of the air, and the stillness or movement of it. We feel whatever is going on inside our body -- pain, tension, energy, pleasant sensations and numbness. We taste the inside of our mouths. We smell the air. Some of our senses in this particular moment may be subtle, but still present if we stay with them. We become aware of our breath, rising and falling.
When we are able to release fully into this moment, savoring each sensation with a beginner’s mind, really noticing how this moment, the very one we thought was so ordinary, is in fact extraordinary because of our attention.
In this open spacious moment where we experience all that arises with a freshness we didn’t even know we were capable of experiencing, we feel gratitude.
This isn’t a gratitude conditioned on whether what we are seeing and hearing and sensing is pleasant, ordered in the way we like things to be. We have access to a less critical noticing. The impulses we might normally have -- to tidy up the mess of newspapers on the floor or to bang the broom on the ceiling to get the loud radio upstairs to stop, or any other fault-finding rescue mission we might think up -- all that falls away. In this moment, everything is just fine, even the mess, the noise, and all the things that usually irritate us.
We feel gratitude for simply being alive in this moment. Because this moment is the only thing that is real. Everything that has passed, both our personal history and the collective history of the world is just memory turning to compost. Whatever is in the future is currently simply potential, trending toward possible directions, always subject to the unseen and unknown, thus beyond our ability to imagine with any useful accuracy.
But this moment, this is our one and only reality. On a finite level we can enjoy it and wish it would last, or dislike it and rush to get past it. When we pause and release the tension that has us so tightly wrapped, we tap into the infinite: This moment, fully relaxed, is the gateway to our sensing the infinite.
From this deep connected place, we bring forth an authentic response to whatever arises in our experience. This is the only place where we can interact with the world, to sow peaceful seeds that might nourish the world of our great grandchildren. We can’t do that from the past or the future. There’s no power there. We can only be effective right here and now, by staying present and connected in deeply rooted moment. From this singular point of power, the present moment, when all our preferences and judgments have fallen away, we can see the universal dance and our place in it.
Raging at the horrors of the world we are stuck in a finite limited powerless rant. We feel like helpless victims in a storm of intense chaos. Going deep and quiet, touching the infinite, that is what makes real change possible. It is where Gandhi went and where Martin Luther King Jr. went before taking powerful peaceful action that changed the world. It is where Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi have gone time and again, both able to draw sustenance and even freedom in physical incarceration – turning inward to the silence, finding patience and compassion instead of bitterness – and then allowing that sense of connection to inspire wise action.
From this place we are able to spot leaders who are authentic and deeply rooted. Instead of ranting at these leaders as if they singularly hold all the power and we, who were powerful in our ability to work to elect them, are suddenly cranky demanding children angry at mommy. We encourage our leaders to remain unseduced by the shallow-rooted calls to finite power that surround them, and to stay deeply connected both to that deep wisdom and to the community that elected them in order to make wise decisions that affect us all. And we continue to stay connected, using that access to be the change we want to see in the world.
Whatever injustices we face in the world can be met from this deep place in a truly transformative way. So first on our Thanksgiving list of gratitude might be our own ability to access this font of quiet connected wisdom, grateful that it is possible in any moment to access this place.
But what if we are new to the practice and this access to the moment is just a pipe dream? Be with the pipe dream, see it for what it is. Let it inform your experience of this moment. Keep practicing being present with whatever is. Stay focused on the senses, noticing. Notice everything. Notice the judgments, notice the emotions, notice the thoughts. Just notice. Maybe it feels like a big tangle, a tight knot, inaccessible. Be with that! Notice and notice again.
When we begin to meditate it is like any new skill. At first paying attention to the present moment feels as if staying present is like trying to balance on the head of a pin. The moment we realize we’re on it, we fall off. But with patience, intention, compassion and consistent practice, we begin to notice the head of the pin getting larger until we feel present for longer and longer periods.
This sensing in to this moment is the practice that gives access to the infinite source within ourselves, the connected place that has gratitude for everything. There’s no hurry to get there. There’s just the practice. Wanting to be there, rushing to get ‘there’ only seals the door and locks us out of the possibility of accessing it. For there is no ‘there,’ only ‘here.’ Just this experience. Can you feel gratitude for the rise and fall of your breath?
We don’t have to feel grateful for the Holocaust, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the sexual predator living near the neighborhood playground. But finding wise ways to respond to them includes recognizing that the world is now, has always been and always shall be full of what the Tao calls ‘the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows.’ Without the sorrows, there are no joys. That is the nature of earthly existence.
Over and over again in our lives we see that good times can cause bad things. A booming economy is perceived as a good thing, but it also causes overworked people to feel they don’t have time for each other and then they fill their sense of lack with purchasing material things.
And we’ve all had the experience of bad times causing good things, bringing strangers together as one people to address the challenge or weather the storm together. The yin and the yang freely flow from black to white and back again, and that’s the nature of life.
As we observe this flux and flow in our own lives and in the world around us, we may find we have a more open ‘don’t know’ mind about things. When I was younger knowing seemed so important. Now that I’m older, not knowing feels even more delicious!
There’s that wonderful old story told in Buddhist and Taoist traditions, of the farmer whose neighbors told him he was so unlucky because his horse ran away. They were surprised when he replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Then the horse returned with a lot of other horses to fill his corral, and his neighbors said, “Oh, what great fortune!” He still answered, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” When his son fell off one of the horses and broke his leg, the neighbors said, “What terrible luck!” And even then the farmer said, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Well, the neighbors thought him very strange indeed. But then the military came to the village seeking young men for conscription into the army, and the farmer’s son was exempted because of his broken leg. The neighbors now saw that healing leg differently, as their sons marched off to war. “You are so lucky,” they told the farmer. And he said, of course, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” And so the story goes on throughout life.
While taking full responsibility for our own behavior and vowing to do no harm to ourselves or others, with a don’t know mind we can be less outraged at the poor choices of others, and certainly at the inconstancies of nature. Events we might perceive as good fortune, we can vest with less power to enslave us. (Enslave us? Yes, because we say, “Now that I have this great job, this great relationship, this great house, how can I keep it? How can I make this happiness last?” And suddenly we’re caught up in fear and suffering again.) It is said that the greatest suffering is caused by striving for a perfect world or by running away in fear from the imperfect world we see around us.
Here’s a thought! Let’s just stop striving for a moment! Let’s stop running away from what is! Instead, let’s simply focus on our breath and the various senses. Fully present in this moment, we feel gratitude for just this, whatever form it takes in this moment. We access the place deep within ourselves that is beyond the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Each moment, with all its sensory offerings, offers access to this vantage point, from which we recognize the fleeting gift of the wild, the monstrous and the wondrous nature of earthly existence. And we have ringside seats!
On this fine fall day, we might enjoy looking at this idea as a multitude of leaves flying around in the wind, each leaf in some state we call beautiful autumn foliage or dried up, dead, and ugly.
And we see ourselves in this turbulent swirl, sometimes in our leaf nature being acted upon and sometimes in our wind nature, causing a stir. But only when we are able to stand in the middle of the whirl, in the quiet stillness of the eye of this ongoing storm of life, can we relax into a state of gratitude for everything.
In this centered stillness we can see with fresh eyes the multi-layered dimensions of all things. We can see into the fearful hurting heart of the being who hates and hurts others in turn, and we can see the strength and resilience of the being who has been hurt but is able to access connection and compassion for all beings, spreading joy. We see those who would divide to conquer, and we recognize their fear and how they are conquered by it. We see those who see the unity and act out of that sense of unity for the well being of all. We see the natural disasters and are awed by the power of nature, and the fragileness of our brief lives, and the strength of the human spirit when challenged.
This rich alive moment that until we relaxed into it seemed so ordinary fills us with a sense of abundance. From this perspective, everything that brought us to this point softens in its wake.
We see that all those events we would not have chosen are now just stories, stories that we have clung to as proof of the veracity of our tightly held beliefs, stories that have left us scarred but still standing, or perhaps lessons we are still trying to learn from. They exist, along with cherished memories, only in our minds. And we can hold them lightly, letting them go when they no longer serve us, feeling gratitude for whatever gifts they brought us. Or we can cling to them tightly, empowering them to define and confine us.
When we relax into simple awareness of this moment, we fully inhabit our bodies and minds in a way that enables us to live an authentic, heartfelt generous and meaningful life. Accessing the infinite wisdom of simple presence, simple awareness, brings clarity and gratitude for everything.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Mudita, Sympathetic Joy: Yet Another Gift of Meditation Practice
This exploration of freedoms we have been doing for the past couple of months has much in common with the Four Brahmaviharas, or ‘heavenly abodes.’ These are states that are the gift of the practice, just as our freedoms we’ve been discussing are gifts of the practice. They are states that can’t be achieved by goal setting, by trying to be ‘good,’ or by pretending to be kind, compassionate, happy or wise. They arise out of the practice of being present, and in that being present, guided by the wisdom of the Eightfold Path, we may find ourselves in these states of connected authentic generosity of spirit: happy, kind, truly compassionate and well-balanced.
We have explored two of these Brahmaviharas in this class: Metta, loving-kindness and Karuna, compassion. Now we turn to Mudita which means sympathetic joy.
Sympathetic joy is feeling happy for the happiness of others. Not because we think we should feel it in order to be a nice person, but because we sense our underlying unity. From this deep rooted sense of connection, we feel their joy as if it were our own. And then we drop the ‘as if.’ Because the shared joy melts the possessive edges that can never adequately contain true happiness.
The other day I was driving home from Spirit Rock and was descending White’s Hill into Fairfax behind two cyclists. Usually bicycle riders stay to the side of the road in their designated lane, but these two rode in the middle of the car lane, and since they were descending at a pretty rapid rate, they weren’t causing me to slow down.
I was coming home from a lovely morning of yoga, meditation and dharma, more relaxed and connected than I might have been, so it felt quite natural to purposely keep my car at enough of a distance so they would not feel I wanted them to get out of my way.
In fact, I wanted them to feel that they truly had the road to themselves, as a reward for all their uphill exertions. Then I enjoyed watching them and I relaxed into feeling in my body the sympathetic sensation of their hunkering down to be aero-dynamic, their leaning left or right on the curves. I relished the whole rich sensate experience of speed and freedom.
And that is a form of mudita: Letting go of any sense that the cyclists were obstructing my ability to get home to eat lunch, I allowed myself to share in the pleasure they were experiencing, to be truly happy for them having this lovely ride on a beautiful autumn day.
But sometimes we are faced with situations that don’t easily inspire mudita. Even in that fairly benign situation, I could just as easily have fallen into a story of personal loss, since I love bike riding, a childhood joy I had to give up many years ago as it is too hard on my knees. I could have felt envy, sadness, depression. I could have mourned the feel of the wind in my face, instead of enjoying it through sharing in their experience. And maybe on another day, in a different situation, my thoughts might have gone there. But on this day, they didn’t. On this day, I was delighted to find myself in the state of mudita.
Each of us has our personal losses and unfulfilled dreams that have the capacity to haunt us whenever we are confronted with someone who seems to be living that dream or still has what we have lost. Perhaps we weren’t able to have a child, or lost a child, and when we see someone with children or a pregnant woman, we may not feel sympathetic joy at all. The sight only stirs up our story, causing emotions and thoughts that unsettle us. If we weren’t caught up in the story, we could enjoy all the children we meet, delight in the sight of babies in strollers or trick-or-treaters in their costumes. But because they aren’t ours, because we can’t tuck them into bed at night, because they don’t call us mommy, we can’t appreciate them. Maybe we can see that it would make sense to reach out to other people’s children as teachers, care givers or aunts, but we just can’t do it. The story seems to be so tightly woven that it feels solid, impermeable, and we are caught in the middle of it, as if a spider had wrapped us up for dinner.
Most of us at some time have been in a position of hoping for a job, a promotion, a relationship, acceptance in a program or a competition of some kind. And most of us know what it is like to be denied the prize we sought. What happens then when we meet the person or persons who received whatever prize it was we wanted. How does that feel? Maybe we want to feel happy for them because we don’t want to be a sore loser. Maybe we feel embarrassed by the strength of our aspirations and the way we feel sucked out to sea by the undertow of that great wave of hope we had been surfing.
We have all experienced this to some degree at some time in our lives. We can all remember how it feels. Maybe we don’t even have to remember, maybe we have some experience of it in our current situation. Whatever it is, we need to be present with it, noticing the arising thoughts, emotions and sensations; noticing any harsh judgments that arise; holding ourselves with compassion, remembering that we are only human, vessels through which these kinds of emotions, thoughts and sensations flow.
Because it is so normal to feel envy, it comes as a surprise when mudita arises within us. What a delight is this unexpected gift of feeling joy at the sight of a child not our own! How sweet to truly feel happy for the person who receives recognition, knowing that that person too was hungry for acknowledgment, worked hard, suffered, feared failure – just as we did, and we are the same in that way. And many other ways as well. So the joy is simply joy, simply happiness, simply a celebration we can attend without feeling we weren’t invited.
If sympathetic joy seems unachievable it’s because it is. Totally unachievable! Like all the freedoms we’ve been discussing and the other three Brahmaviharas, this sympathetic joy for the happiness of others is a gift, not a goal. Mudita is not a practice so much as a fruit of metta and awareness practice. If we try to treat it as a goal or try to don it like a garment, draping ourselves in the pretend glow of happiness for others, we fail in our true practice: to be present for whatever arises.
Noting whatever feelings arise – envy, jealousy, anger, then noticing the disappointment we feel at discovering them in ourselves, then noticing any shame or sense of failure: That’s the practice. We begin to see the previously unconscious habitual patterns of thought and the reactive behavior they trigger. Making the patterns conscious starts to dissolve the tightly wrapped threads, so that there seems to be more time and space to see and make wise choices.
Instead of battling our thoughts and trying to change them, we just bring full awareness to them. We see them for what they are and begin to feel less threatened by them. We see that they are not us. We are not defined by them.
These thoughts and emotions are simply a part of the universal human condition, and conditioning. When we are able to be compassionate with our feelings we are less likely to feel the need to express these emotions through our words or actions. We might share our noticing of feelings arising, but we do so in a conscious way that doesn’t make the other person responsible for them.
As children our parents were made responsible for all these unacceptable situations and emotions. My mother saved a note I wrote when I was eleven in which I described everything that had gone wrong that day and how it was ‘ALL YOUR FAULT!’ Why did she save it? Years later I found myself saving a similar note from one of my own children. Strangely mothers often find these rants endearing.
But they are really only endearing in children, these tantrums. In adults not so much. Archie Bunker used to say, ‘Stifle!’ to his wife Edith whenever she was expressing her emotions. But that’s not what we are going for in our practice. Instead, when we discover these volatile emotions throwing a tantrum inside ourselves, we want to bring the compassionate bemusement of a mother whose child is ranting. The mother knows she is not really responsible for all the awful things that happened in her child’s school day, so there’s no reason to get caught up in defending herself. She can recognize the humanness, and the dearness of this loved one, struggling with her emotions.
So we don’t stifle our emotions. Instead we create a place for them to play within our spacious mind. We watch with loving curiosity, noticing, listening, even asking questions, but not scolding or trying to shut the process down. (When we notice we are scolding or trying to shut down the process, we simply note that as well.) We feel as much compassion and understanding as we are capable of feeling, but, just like my mother and mothers around the world when dealing with an exhausted child on a rant, we don’t succumb to the story that’s being told. We don’t need to react, or bring it out in the world, making others responsible for the internal chaos we are experiencing. We don’t have to be harsh or indulgent. We simply sit with the experience until the tantrum passes.
If we slip into unskillfulness and do act upon these feelings, we acknowledge them as soon as we recognize them, and apologize for our behavior to whomever we may have hurt in the process. We silently send metta to those we have harmed and to ourselves. Ultimately this metta practice has the capacity to bring the experience of sympathetic joy for all beings, as we become attuned to the bountiful nature of the universe and see that another person’s good fortune does not deplete our own.
On a very practical level, we can bring into question the very idea that what the prize-winner has is actually the source of happiness that we imagined it to be. Does any event, possession or relationship truly have the ability to make a person permanently happy? We know from our own lives that that is not the case. And knowing so, we can see if we are making the mistake of projecting happiness onto these ‘winners’ when, in fact, they are suffering in ways we might not have imagined. We dehumanize them by making assumptions that they should be happy because of what they have. They should be happy, damn it, because they are now holding the stuff of our dreams and they better appreciate it! If they were to complain about anything, we would get out our air violins and play a few notes for them, the universal sign of, “I am SO not sorry for you, you little whiner.” But with just a little sensing in to the nature of things, we can see that they are still beings deserving of our compassion. And seeing that the prize they have is not happiness incarnate helps to put our loss in perspective.
Feelings of envy or schadenfreude, the German word meaning enjoyment of the misfortune of others, sometimes especially those we may have envied, since now they have been brought low (where we apparently feel we are,) offer us the opportunity to explore strong emotions. We can ask questions of them as if they are messengers with important information to share. We can personify them if that makes it easier to do inner dialog work, giving them a recognizable personality and nickname so that we will easily recognize them in the future. With curiosity and compassion, we can ask, ‘What do you really want?’ ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ “What are you afraid of?” ‘What do I need to know?’ Taking a little quiet time for this kind of inner exploration helps to release the tight threads that are making us a spider’s dinner instead of aware beings.
We can also use the good fortune of others to clarify a path we ourselves would like to embark upon. Perhaps we are surprised to feel a spark of envy at someone’s receiving an award for something we had no idea we were interested in. Perhaps a path is illuminated by their experience, and we recognize that if it is possible for them, it is more likely to be possible for us as well. And if we feel otherwise, we can question in to see why we don't believe this to be true. If we do want to pursue the path they are on, we can take the bold step of asking them how they did it, find others who also did it and learn from their inspiring stories as well. Throughout the process, we continue asking in to see if it is the direction itself that is of interest or craving similar acknowledgment in another area, perhaps one we can't even bring ourselves to name, so unworthy do we feel to have these aspirations.
Whenever we are experiencing any distressing emotion, we can send ourselves metta, loving-kindness. And from this practice, when we least expect it, mudita surprises and delights us, as it did for me that beautiful autumn day, feeling the thrust and lean of those cyclists on a joyous downhill run.
We have explored two of these Brahmaviharas in this class: Metta, loving-kindness and Karuna, compassion. Now we turn to Mudita which means sympathetic joy.
Sympathetic joy is feeling happy for the happiness of others. Not because we think we should feel it in order to be a nice person, but because we sense our underlying unity. From this deep rooted sense of connection, we feel their joy as if it were our own. And then we drop the ‘as if.’ Because the shared joy melts the possessive edges that can never adequately contain true happiness.
The other day I was driving home from Spirit Rock and was descending White’s Hill into Fairfax behind two cyclists. Usually bicycle riders stay to the side of the road in their designated lane, but these two rode in the middle of the car lane, and since they were descending at a pretty rapid rate, they weren’t causing me to slow down.
I was coming home from a lovely morning of yoga, meditation and dharma, more relaxed and connected than I might have been, so it felt quite natural to purposely keep my car at enough of a distance so they would not feel I wanted them to get out of my way.
In fact, I wanted them to feel that they truly had the road to themselves, as a reward for all their uphill exertions. Then I enjoyed watching them and I relaxed into feeling in my body the sympathetic sensation of their hunkering down to be aero-dynamic, their leaning left or right on the curves. I relished the whole rich sensate experience of speed and freedom.
And that is a form of mudita: Letting go of any sense that the cyclists were obstructing my ability to get home to eat lunch, I allowed myself to share in the pleasure they were experiencing, to be truly happy for them having this lovely ride on a beautiful autumn day.
But sometimes we are faced with situations that don’t easily inspire mudita. Even in that fairly benign situation, I could just as easily have fallen into a story of personal loss, since I love bike riding, a childhood joy I had to give up many years ago as it is too hard on my knees. I could have felt envy, sadness, depression. I could have mourned the feel of the wind in my face, instead of enjoying it through sharing in their experience. And maybe on another day, in a different situation, my thoughts might have gone there. But on this day, they didn’t. On this day, I was delighted to find myself in the state of mudita.
Each of us has our personal losses and unfulfilled dreams that have the capacity to haunt us whenever we are confronted with someone who seems to be living that dream or still has what we have lost. Perhaps we weren’t able to have a child, or lost a child, and when we see someone with children or a pregnant woman, we may not feel sympathetic joy at all. The sight only stirs up our story, causing emotions and thoughts that unsettle us. If we weren’t caught up in the story, we could enjoy all the children we meet, delight in the sight of babies in strollers or trick-or-treaters in their costumes. But because they aren’t ours, because we can’t tuck them into bed at night, because they don’t call us mommy, we can’t appreciate them. Maybe we can see that it would make sense to reach out to other people’s children as teachers, care givers or aunts, but we just can’t do it. The story seems to be so tightly woven that it feels solid, impermeable, and we are caught in the middle of it, as if a spider had wrapped us up for dinner.
Most of us at some time have been in a position of hoping for a job, a promotion, a relationship, acceptance in a program or a competition of some kind. And most of us know what it is like to be denied the prize we sought. What happens then when we meet the person or persons who received whatever prize it was we wanted. How does that feel? Maybe we want to feel happy for them because we don’t want to be a sore loser. Maybe we feel embarrassed by the strength of our aspirations and the way we feel sucked out to sea by the undertow of that great wave of hope we had been surfing.
We have all experienced this to some degree at some time in our lives. We can all remember how it feels. Maybe we don’t even have to remember, maybe we have some experience of it in our current situation. Whatever it is, we need to be present with it, noticing the arising thoughts, emotions and sensations; noticing any harsh judgments that arise; holding ourselves with compassion, remembering that we are only human, vessels through which these kinds of emotions, thoughts and sensations flow.
Because it is so normal to feel envy, it comes as a surprise when mudita arises within us. What a delight is this unexpected gift of feeling joy at the sight of a child not our own! How sweet to truly feel happy for the person who receives recognition, knowing that that person too was hungry for acknowledgment, worked hard, suffered, feared failure – just as we did, and we are the same in that way. And many other ways as well. So the joy is simply joy, simply happiness, simply a celebration we can attend without feeling we weren’t invited.
If sympathetic joy seems unachievable it’s because it is. Totally unachievable! Like all the freedoms we’ve been discussing and the other three Brahmaviharas, this sympathetic joy for the happiness of others is a gift, not a goal. Mudita is not a practice so much as a fruit of metta and awareness practice. If we try to treat it as a goal or try to don it like a garment, draping ourselves in the pretend glow of happiness for others, we fail in our true practice: to be present for whatever arises.
Noting whatever feelings arise – envy, jealousy, anger, then noticing the disappointment we feel at discovering them in ourselves, then noticing any shame or sense of failure: That’s the practice. We begin to see the previously unconscious habitual patterns of thought and the reactive behavior they trigger. Making the patterns conscious starts to dissolve the tightly wrapped threads, so that there seems to be more time and space to see and make wise choices.
Instead of battling our thoughts and trying to change them, we just bring full awareness to them. We see them for what they are and begin to feel less threatened by them. We see that they are not us. We are not defined by them.
These thoughts and emotions are simply a part of the universal human condition, and conditioning. When we are able to be compassionate with our feelings we are less likely to feel the need to express these emotions through our words or actions. We might share our noticing of feelings arising, but we do so in a conscious way that doesn’t make the other person responsible for them.
As children our parents were made responsible for all these unacceptable situations and emotions. My mother saved a note I wrote when I was eleven in which I described everything that had gone wrong that day and how it was ‘ALL YOUR FAULT!’ Why did she save it? Years later I found myself saving a similar note from one of my own children. Strangely mothers often find these rants endearing.
But they are really only endearing in children, these tantrums. In adults not so much. Archie Bunker used to say, ‘Stifle!’ to his wife Edith whenever she was expressing her emotions. But that’s not what we are going for in our practice. Instead, when we discover these volatile emotions throwing a tantrum inside ourselves, we want to bring the compassionate bemusement of a mother whose child is ranting. The mother knows she is not really responsible for all the awful things that happened in her child’s school day, so there’s no reason to get caught up in defending herself. She can recognize the humanness, and the dearness of this loved one, struggling with her emotions.
So we don’t stifle our emotions. Instead we create a place for them to play within our spacious mind. We watch with loving curiosity, noticing, listening, even asking questions, but not scolding or trying to shut the process down. (When we notice we are scolding or trying to shut down the process, we simply note that as well.) We feel as much compassion and understanding as we are capable of feeling, but, just like my mother and mothers around the world when dealing with an exhausted child on a rant, we don’t succumb to the story that’s being told. We don’t need to react, or bring it out in the world, making others responsible for the internal chaos we are experiencing. We don’t have to be harsh or indulgent. We simply sit with the experience until the tantrum passes.
If we slip into unskillfulness and do act upon these feelings, we acknowledge them as soon as we recognize them, and apologize for our behavior to whomever we may have hurt in the process. We silently send metta to those we have harmed and to ourselves. Ultimately this metta practice has the capacity to bring the experience of sympathetic joy for all beings, as we become attuned to the bountiful nature of the universe and see that another person’s good fortune does not deplete our own.
On a very practical level, we can bring into question the very idea that what the prize-winner has is actually the source of happiness that we imagined it to be. Does any event, possession or relationship truly have the ability to make a person permanently happy? We know from our own lives that that is not the case. And knowing so, we can see if we are making the mistake of projecting happiness onto these ‘winners’ when, in fact, they are suffering in ways we might not have imagined. We dehumanize them by making assumptions that they should be happy because of what they have. They should be happy, damn it, because they are now holding the stuff of our dreams and they better appreciate it! If they were to complain about anything, we would get out our air violins and play a few notes for them, the universal sign of, “I am SO not sorry for you, you little whiner.” But with just a little sensing in to the nature of things, we can see that they are still beings deserving of our compassion. And seeing that the prize they have is not happiness incarnate helps to put our loss in perspective.
Feelings of envy or schadenfreude, the German word meaning enjoyment of the misfortune of others, sometimes especially those we may have envied, since now they have been brought low (where we apparently feel we are,) offer us the opportunity to explore strong emotions. We can ask questions of them as if they are messengers with important information to share. We can personify them if that makes it easier to do inner dialog work, giving them a recognizable personality and nickname so that we will easily recognize them in the future. With curiosity and compassion, we can ask, ‘What do you really want?’ ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ “What are you afraid of?” ‘What do I need to know?’ Taking a little quiet time for this kind of inner exploration helps to release the tight threads that are making us a spider’s dinner instead of aware beings.
We can also use the good fortune of others to clarify a path we ourselves would like to embark upon. Perhaps we are surprised to feel a spark of envy at someone’s receiving an award for something we had no idea we were interested in. Perhaps a path is illuminated by their experience, and we recognize that if it is possible for them, it is more likely to be possible for us as well. And if we feel otherwise, we can question in to see why we don't believe this to be true. If we do want to pursue the path they are on, we can take the bold step of asking them how they did it, find others who also did it and learn from their inspiring stories as well. Throughout the process, we continue asking in to see if it is the direction itself that is of interest or craving similar acknowledgment in another area, perhaps one we can't even bring ourselves to name, so unworthy do we feel to have these aspirations.
Whenever we are experiencing any distressing emotion, we can send ourselves metta, loving-kindness. And from this practice, when we least expect it, mudita surprises and delights us, as it did for me that beautiful autumn day, feeling the thrust and lean of those cyclists on a joyous downhill run.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
The Problem with 'Positive Thinking'
We have been talking for a while about the freedoms that arise naturally out of the simple daily practice of meditation: Freedom from struggle, freedom from fear, freedom from the fortress of defensiveness. But it could sound as if we are actively trying to get away from struggling, fear or defensiveness, instead of just noticing them as they arise in our experience and fall away. So I want to be sure we are clear that when we try to escape, when we try to push away, when we try to achieve freedom, or try to hold onto fleeting glimpses of freedom we may experience, then the freedom is gone.
This is frustrating, I know. It's like some kind of fun house mirror set up, where when we go after what we see, it disappears! This is not how it should be, we say. Things should be clear cut and straight forward. And perhaps we know from personal experience that we can achieve things by setting goals, that that is in fact the way life is. I certainly have set goals and achieved them. The very house we are sitting in was imagined, found and purchased in just that way. And there’s nothing wrong with undertaking such a project, experiencing it fully. It can be exciting, invigorating and fun.
But where we get into trouble is when we expect achieving any goal to set us free, make us truly happy or change the way we experience life in any fundamental way. We are just pouring our way of being from one container into another. Maybe the new container is bigger, prettier, more comfortable, or better in some other way. And perhaps the ways in which it is better cause us conditional happiness, that may last a while or may not, depending on our basic temperament. But no house, job, geographical setting or personal relationship will alter to any degree our conditioned set of responses to whatever experience arises in our lives. Changing the conditions is like changing the wallpaper on our prison cell. It doesn’t really change anything! And when we achieve a goal and then discover that nothing has changed on the deep level that we crave, we can sink into despair. This despair is only amplified if we believe that plastering positive messages all over our cell will set us free, when really they just mask the truth of our situation.
We can pour ourselves from one container to another, but we need to notice if we are vesting the experience with powers it cannot deliver. Setting goals and achieving them can deliver some degree of physical comfort and material well being, and these are valid uses of it, but to rely on it habitually for all our needs, emotional and spiritual, is setting ourselves up for suffering. Once we have a modicum of material stability, what we really want beyond that is the kind of freedom or happiness that comes from a different source.
So yes, pour all you want from one container to the other. Pour yourself into that new dress or pair of shoes and dance around in front of the mirror. Enjoy your cute self! But understand that what we are talking about when we look at real freedom is dissolving the container itself. This a joy that can’t be purchased, that can’t be achieved through goal setting or positive thinking.
We are all aware that there is a whole huge industry of motivational speaking set up to promote these principles of positive thinking. It promotes dreaming big, getting what we want by setting our sights, taking aim and achieving our goals. Sometimes people assume that Buddhism is about positive thinking. It’s easy to make assumptions and lump all the various self-help streams of thought together. But Buddhism is most definitely not about positive thinking. Buddhism is quite specifically about facing the truth of things head on. Whatever it is. Not in a confrontational way, but in a way that never shies away from the tough stuff – the uncomfortable, scary thoughts and feelings that can leave gun-toting musclemen quaking in their boots.
When we face whatever arises in our experience head on, we are interested in the facts of the situation. We have no interest whatsoever in changing the facts. A ‘positive thinker’ may look at the situation and immediately spot the silver lining. That’s fine. It’s there too, but Buddhists don’t want to skip over anything in a rush to get to the happy bits. Neither do we want to dig around in the muck. And if we have a tendency to focus on the negative, we can benefit from challenging ourselves to 'incline our mind' (as the Buddha says) toward what is that in our current experience that is pleasant, since otherwise we might not notice it. We really are just opening to whatever is, noting pleasant and unpleasant alike, and staying curious.
Our method is not to rush to judgment, sum up the situation, say, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and move on. We stay present for the whole experience. We sit with it. We make room for all of it in our awareness. We notice the subtle complexities, the multiple layers, the threads that run through it, the light and the shadow, and the truth. And even when we perceive the truth of something, we don’t dismiss it, saying ‘case closed’ with a sense of satisfaction. Instead we continue to stay present with whatever is until it changes or leaves of its own volition. Then we stay present with whatever arises in that moment. In each moment we simply stay present with the rich unfolding of experience.
You may say that the positive thinker cuts to the chase, gets to the good stuff, catches the gold ring. No argument there. But it relies pretty heavily on the positive thinker’s ability to recognize ‘good stuff’, doesn’t it?
Positive thinking puts energy behind embracing an ideal vision of how we want to change ourselves and our world to conform to that vision. That’s not Buddhism. Buddhism sees ideal visions as too rigid, too narrow, too limited, even if that vision is world peace and harmony. Now if you know anything about Buddhism, you will say, but wait, what about all the metta - loving kindness you send out into the world, “May there be every good blessing,” “May all beings be well,” and all that?
Strange, isn’t it? It’s not necessarily that we don’t recognize that there is energy that can be directed. (Though Buddhists disagree among themselves about the existence of such energy, and belief in it doesn’t seem to be an absolute requirement. You can be ‘a secular Buddhist’ like teacher/author Stephen Batchelor.) The majority of Buddhists acknowledge the existence of a universal energy, but see the problem with directing the energy in a narrow selective way instead of generous universal well wishing for all life. It’s just way too limiting! It sets up a narrow trough of possibility. We do not send out phrases such as, “May my daughter do well on her test today, may the stock market rise, may I get that job.” We say “May the merits of our practice be for the benefit of all beings, may all beings be well, may all beings be happy.”
Buddhists value all of life, the great manifestation of life in all its myriad forms. Yet most Buddhists also sense that there is more than just this earthly human existence, that this existence is a gift in whatever form we receive it, that to be born into this life is a rare and wondrous experience to be savored, appreciated and then released when it is over. For this life that seems finite is just a phase we’re going through in the infinite dance of universal energy of which we are all an integral part. (And if you are aren't comfortable with the idea of universal energy, you can still recognize that in nature, death is not the end of any life form's existence as it cycles through and is transformed into more life.)
Because we value the experience of earthly life itself, we recognize that preconceived judgments about what makes a successful life are limited, erroneous. The positive thinking movement is often focused on becoming wealthy. Grasping at wealth is one of the habits of mind Buddhists notice when it arises in our experience, and we notice also how much suffering arises out of any assumption we may have that great wealth brings great happiness. (Did I just hear you say, Oh good, Buddhists like to be poor! More for us!?)
Stop and think about your own experience, whether the course of your pocketbook’s fullness or emptiness has matched your own sense of fullness or emptiness throughout your life. For most of us, the two have no correlation. Our happiness is not dependent on our bank account. Yet, even so, because it is so easy to go unconscious, we may still buy into the idea that adding extra zeros to our bottom line will make us happy. It’s an assumption that corporations enforce at every turn, because corporate workers are operating under the same delusion.
Positive thinking is considered a transformative power. No doubt it is. Yet focusing our energy on the power to change ourselves or our circumstances from what they are to what we believe to be better camouflages the truth. The truth is, as Jon Kabat-Zinn so aptly coined, ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’
All the positive thinking in the world may change things but when we get to that changed place, we will still be us, still interacting with the world in the same way, still finding it unsatisfactory and in need of changing, because that is our habit of mind.
Buddhists instead prefer to sit with what is, noticing our habit of mind. As compassionately as possible, sitting with the causes and conditions of our lives, the flow of emotions, thoughts and sensations, and from that deep place of sitting performing actions that are loving and compassionate: that’s the Buddhist way.
Positive thinking gets in the way of the great unfolding of life. That is mostly because none of us really have sufficient imagination to set a goal to positively think into being anything that would be near so wondrous at what actually happens in our lives. The narrow focus of the goal keeps all other wondrous avenues through which we might stroll out of our view. We’re on a specific track, a specific wave length, and nothing else appears within our scope. With our eye on the prize, we miss a world of wonder for the sake of the end destination that we may not be able to enjoy when we reach it because we are out of the habit of enjoying what is.
We are limited by our view of ourselves, who we are in the world. We want something: happiness, freedom, love, and we set our sights on it. A.H. Almaas, the (non-Buddhist, but respected by Buddhist teachers) Diamond Approach™ founder, gave a wonderful analogy. Think about the larva that transforms into a butterfly. How could such a creature ever conceive of becoming a butterfly? That would be absurd to imagine anything so completely different! Maybe if it were into imagining the future, into goal setting, it would imagine being a bigger larva, a happier larva. But a beautiful flying creature? How absurd!
Just like that larva, we are inherently limited in our ability to imagine the transformation possible within ourselves. And the striving, goal-setting mind set is really an encumbrance. If we don’t allow our lives to unfold naturally, giving whatever arises our full attention, then we are likely to be clinging to the chrysalis that held so much promise, not realizing that if we let go, we could fly.
This is frustrating, I know. It's like some kind of fun house mirror set up, where when we go after what we see, it disappears! This is not how it should be, we say. Things should be clear cut and straight forward. And perhaps we know from personal experience that we can achieve things by setting goals, that that is in fact the way life is. I certainly have set goals and achieved them. The very house we are sitting in was imagined, found and purchased in just that way. And there’s nothing wrong with undertaking such a project, experiencing it fully. It can be exciting, invigorating and fun.
But where we get into trouble is when we expect achieving any goal to set us free, make us truly happy or change the way we experience life in any fundamental way. We are just pouring our way of being from one container into another. Maybe the new container is bigger, prettier, more comfortable, or better in some other way. And perhaps the ways in which it is better cause us conditional happiness, that may last a while or may not, depending on our basic temperament. But no house, job, geographical setting or personal relationship will alter to any degree our conditioned set of responses to whatever experience arises in our lives. Changing the conditions is like changing the wallpaper on our prison cell. It doesn’t really change anything! And when we achieve a goal and then discover that nothing has changed on the deep level that we crave, we can sink into despair. This despair is only amplified if we believe that plastering positive messages all over our cell will set us free, when really they just mask the truth of our situation.
We can pour ourselves from one container to another, but we need to notice if we are vesting the experience with powers it cannot deliver. Setting goals and achieving them can deliver some degree of physical comfort and material well being, and these are valid uses of it, but to rely on it habitually for all our needs, emotional and spiritual, is setting ourselves up for suffering. Once we have a modicum of material stability, what we really want beyond that is the kind of freedom or happiness that comes from a different source.
So yes, pour all you want from one container to the other. Pour yourself into that new dress or pair of shoes and dance around in front of the mirror. Enjoy your cute self! But understand that what we are talking about when we look at real freedom is dissolving the container itself. This a joy that can’t be purchased, that can’t be achieved through goal setting or positive thinking.
We are all aware that there is a whole huge industry of motivational speaking set up to promote these principles of positive thinking. It promotes dreaming big, getting what we want by setting our sights, taking aim and achieving our goals. Sometimes people assume that Buddhism is about positive thinking. It’s easy to make assumptions and lump all the various self-help streams of thought together. But Buddhism is most definitely not about positive thinking. Buddhism is quite specifically about facing the truth of things head on. Whatever it is. Not in a confrontational way, but in a way that never shies away from the tough stuff – the uncomfortable, scary thoughts and feelings that can leave gun-toting musclemen quaking in their boots.
When we face whatever arises in our experience head on, we are interested in the facts of the situation. We have no interest whatsoever in changing the facts. A ‘positive thinker’ may look at the situation and immediately spot the silver lining. That’s fine. It’s there too, but Buddhists don’t want to skip over anything in a rush to get to the happy bits. Neither do we want to dig around in the muck. And if we have a tendency to focus on the negative, we can benefit from challenging ourselves to 'incline our mind' (as the Buddha says) toward what is that in our current experience that is pleasant, since otherwise we might not notice it. We really are just opening to whatever is, noting pleasant and unpleasant alike, and staying curious.
Our method is not to rush to judgment, sum up the situation, say, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and move on. We stay present for the whole experience. We sit with it. We make room for all of it in our awareness. We notice the subtle complexities, the multiple layers, the threads that run through it, the light and the shadow, and the truth. And even when we perceive the truth of something, we don’t dismiss it, saying ‘case closed’ with a sense of satisfaction. Instead we continue to stay present with whatever is until it changes or leaves of its own volition. Then we stay present with whatever arises in that moment. In each moment we simply stay present with the rich unfolding of experience.
You may say that the positive thinker cuts to the chase, gets to the good stuff, catches the gold ring. No argument there. But it relies pretty heavily on the positive thinker’s ability to recognize ‘good stuff’, doesn’t it?
Positive thinking puts energy behind embracing an ideal vision of how we want to change ourselves and our world to conform to that vision. That’s not Buddhism. Buddhism sees ideal visions as too rigid, too narrow, too limited, even if that vision is world peace and harmony. Now if you know anything about Buddhism, you will say, but wait, what about all the metta - loving kindness you send out into the world, “May there be every good blessing,” “May all beings be well,” and all that?
Strange, isn’t it? It’s not necessarily that we don’t recognize that there is energy that can be directed. (Though Buddhists disagree among themselves about the existence of such energy, and belief in it doesn’t seem to be an absolute requirement. You can be ‘a secular Buddhist’ like teacher/author Stephen Batchelor.) The majority of Buddhists acknowledge the existence of a universal energy, but see the problem with directing the energy in a narrow selective way instead of generous universal well wishing for all life. It’s just way too limiting! It sets up a narrow trough of possibility. We do not send out phrases such as, “May my daughter do well on her test today, may the stock market rise, may I get that job.” We say “May the merits of our practice be for the benefit of all beings, may all beings be well, may all beings be happy.”
Buddhists value all of life, the great manifestation of life in all its myriad forms. Yet most Buddhists also sense that there is more than just this earthly human existence, that this existence is a gift in whatever form we receive it, that to be born into this life is a rare and wondrous experience to be savored, appreciated and then released when it is over. For this life that seems finite is just a phase we’re going through in the infinite dance of universal energy of which we are all an integral part. (And if you are aren't comfortable with the idea of universal energy, you can still recognize that in nature, death is not the end of any life form's existence as it cycles through and is transformed into more life.)
Because we value the experience of earthly life itself, we recognize that preconceived judgments about what makes a successful life are limited, erroneous. The positive thinking movement is often focused on becoming wealthy. Grasping at wealth is one of the habits of mind Buddhists notice when it arises in our experience, and we notice also how much suffering arises out of any assumption we may have that great wealth brings great happiness. (Did I just hear you say, Oh good, Buddhists like to be poor! More for us!?)
Stop and think about your own experience, whether the course of your pocketbook’s fullness or emptiness has matched your own sense of fullness or emptiness throughout your life. For most of us, the two have no correlation. Our happiness is not dependent on our bank account. Yet, even so, because it is so easy to go unconscious, we may still buy into the idea that adding extra zeros to our bottom line will make us happy. It’s an assumption that corporations enforce at every turn, because corporate workers are operating under the same delusion.
Positive thinking is considered a transformative power. No doubt it is. Yet focusing our energy on the power to change ourselves or our circumstances from what they are to what we believe to be better camouflages the truth. The truth is, as Jon Kabat-Zinn so aptly coined, ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’
All the positive thinking in the world may change things but when we get to that changed place, we will still be us, still interacting with the world in the same way, still finding it unsatisfactory and in need of changing, because that is our habit of mind.
Buddhists instead prefer to sit with what is, noticing our habit of mind. As compassionately as possible, sitting with the causes and conditions of our lives, the flow of emotions, thoughts and sensations, and from that deep place of sitting performing actions that are loving and compassionate: that’s the Buddhist way.
Positive thinking gets in the way of the great unfolding of life. That is mostly because none of us really have sufficient imagination to set a goal to positively think into being anything that would be near so wondrous at what actually happens in our lives. The narrow focus of the goal keeps all other wondrous avenues through which we might stroll out of our view. We’re on a specific track, a specific wave length, and nothing else appears within our scope. With our eye on the prize, we miss a world of wonder for the sake of the end destination that we may not be able to enjoy when we reach it because we are out of the habit of enjoying what is.
We are limited by our view of ourselves, who we are in the world. We want something: happiness, freedom, love, and we set our sights on it. A.H. Almaas, the (non-Buddhist, but respected by Buddhist teachers) Diamond Approach™ founder, gave a wonderful analogy. Think about the larva that transforms into a butterfly. How could such a creature ever conceive of becoming a butterfly? That would be absurd to imagine anything so completely different! Maybe if it were into imagining the future, into goal setting, it would imagine being a bigger larva, a happier larva. But a beautiful flying creature? How absurd!
Just like that larva, we are inherently limited in our ability to imagine the transformation possible within ourselves. And the striving, goal-setting mind set is really an encumbrance. If we don’t allow our lives to unfold naturally, giving whatever arises our full attention, then we are likely to be clinging to the chrysalis that held so much promise, not realizing that if we let go, we could fly.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Daily Meditation Practice: A life saver not just a life enhancer
We’ve been talking about the freedoms that arise naturally out of the regular practice of meditation. I could go on in this vein indefinitely, but I think you get the idea. Meditation has real value. It can enhance your life in every moment. Yay, for meditation! Isn’t that nice!
I have noticed that the most committed meditators are those who come to it out of crisis. They know first hand that meditation is not just a life enhancer, but a life saver.
Many years ago I came back to daily meditation after several years away. I returned to it because I was desperate. I was in a health crisis brought on by stress and mourning. In this state, the value of meditation was crystal clear. I took refuge in it and as my practice grew, it supported me.
When I went through another loss a few years later, my meditation practice was firmly in place and I noticed that instead of being lost and tossed on the waves of emotional turmoil, instead of gasping for breath and feeling like I was drowning, I was able to surf the rough waters, fully present as I rode the waves of my many emotions as they arose and fell. I didn’t escape pain or sorrow, but I didn't add more suffering. I found in each moment a way to hold sadness, joy and whatever else arose as they arose, neither dreading, nor clinging, nor grasping. What a difference!
So when I hear people say they to want to fit a regular daily practice of meditation into their busy lives, but haven’t managed to do so yet, I can't help myself from wondering what could I say, what could I do, to get them to take that next step toward a daily practice. How can I get them to see its akin to putting a well stocked life on board to be there for them when hard times come?
For hard times come to us all. Life deals up a panoply of challenges indiscriminately. Suddenly we are facing a loss – of a loved one, a way of life, our health, a relationship – and if we don’t have that life boat chances are we sink into the sea of misery, denial, fear and guilt that rises up around us. We lose perspective, we lose faith, we lose so much more than just that which we initially lost. We can’t seem to find a way to be with what is happening and not be crushed by it. And when we do eventually recover, it’s like having been out at sea for a long time before the life boat comes to the rescue. Yes we survive, but our recovery from the experience is hindered by the fact that we went for so long exposed to the sun, the cold, the lack of drinking water and food to eat.
In that crisis state many of us get the bright idea to take up meditation. Suddenly we see where we could fit regular practice into our daily schedule. But at that point it’s like rebuilding a house that’s lost its very foundation, instead of having done regular maintenance all along to keep the house in good shape. It is hard! So hard! Imagine trying to sit in silence with a storm raging in your mind, with your body feeling the weight of overwhelming emotions! It is so much easier to train our minds now when we are dealing with the little emotional ups and downs, the little judgments, the little irritations that make life seem less than pleasant.
So today I want to do more than paint more rosy pictures of all the enhancements brought on by meditation, these freedoms we’ve been discussing. I want to really confront the resistance to regular practice, to look at the reasoning that arises when we decide to put off putting this life boat aboard.
Perhaps we don’t believe anything bad will happen to us, even though we know that we are human and subject to all the challenges life brings to us all.
Perhaps we are concerned that daily practice will change us somehow, make us different from who we are, and we are very comfortable with who we are, thank you very much.
Perhaps meditation seems boring compared to other more stimulating choices of activity.
Perhaps we just don’t see where we can fit it into our busy schedules.
Perhaps we get started on a practice but haven’t been able to make it a habit because our schedule varies a great deal.
Perhaps we don’t want to be a ‘meditator,’ whatever that means to us.
Perhaps we like to meditate in a group and it’s not the same when we are alone.
Perhaps one of these reasons resonates with you, if you don’t have a daily practice, or perhaps some other reasoning arises as you sit quietly and ask yourself, “What is keeping me from developing a regular daily practice of meditation?”
I don’t want to rush in and offer rebuttals to any of these thoughts that might arise, but I do ask that you sit with them, and question them a little more deeply. Ask for more clarity. Ask “Is this true?” Ask “What am I afraid of?” And as in every process of this nature, be compassionate and respectful of the answers. If this are the honest feelings, then there is no arguing with them. Accept the truth of them.
Then perhaps you may find that openly expressing these feelings give you the opportunity to see them more clearly. If you hear yourself saying, “Meditation is boring,” you can ask what it is you want to be distracted from, what could possibly be richer and more interesting than this moment with all its sensory options?
If you have a scheduling challenge, you can ask if there are any activities during your day that are less nourishing than a regular practice of meditation. (Sometimes we think we need to have periods of watching mindless television or internet surfing as a way to relax, when if we were meditating daily we wouldn’t have gotten so stressed or exhausted in the that we needed that escape in the first place!)
Clearly I believe that meditation is a powerful and easily accessible tool that offers impressive benefits. But I also know that there are other forms, other ways that we can come home to our quiet inner spaciousness. Perhaps there is some way you are already accessing this spaciousness, or some way that with slight adjustments you could make an already existing activity more meditative – walks in nature, swimming, gardening, knitting, yoga, etc. Look for solitary activities that you could infuse with more mindfulness, practicing staying fully in the moment. It might simply be removing the iPod, creating an agreed upon period of silence in a nature walk with friends, or pausing before beginning a physical activity to set the intention to be present and to really sense in to the body.
But in all honesty, nothing I have ever seen can truly take the place of a regular sitting practice. So I urge you to give it a chance in your own life if you haven’t done so already. If you already have a daily practice, then you understand exactly what I’m talking about. If you had a practice, then let it go, then discovered yourself struggling again, you really know the benefits first hand. And if you started up again and found the benefits again, what a wondrous homecoming to this moment.
I have noticed that the most committed meditators are those who come to it out of crisis. They know first hand that meditation is not just a life enhancer, but a life saver.
Many years ago I came back to daily meditation after several years away. I returned to it because I was desperate. I was in a health crisis brought on by stress and mourning. In this state, the value of meditation was crystal clear. I took refuge in it and as my practice grew, it supported me.
When I went through another loss a few years later, my meditation practice was firmly in place and I noticed that instead of being lost and tossed on the waves of emotional turmoil, instead of gasping for breath and feeling like I was drowning, I was able to surf the rough waters, fully present as I rode the waves of my many emotions as they arose and fell. I didn’t escape pain or sorrow, but I didn't add more suffering. I found in each moment a way to hold sadness, joy and whatever else arose as they arose, neither dreading, nor clinging, nor grasping. What a difference!
So when I hear people say they to want to fit a regular daily practice of meditation into their busy lives, but haven’t managed to do so yet, I can't help myself from wondering what could I say, what could I do, to get them to take that next step toward a daily practice. How can I get them to see its akin to putting a well stocked life on board to be there for them when hard times come?
For hard times come to us all. Life deals up a panoply of challenges indiscriminately. Suddenly we are facing a loss – of a loved one, a way of life, our health, a relationship – and if we don’t have that life boat chances are we sink into the sea of misery, denial, fear and guilt that rises up around us. We lose perspective, we lose faith, we lose so much more than just that which we initially lost. We can’t seem to find a way to be with what is happening and not be crushed by it. And when we do eventually recover, it’s like having been out at sea for a long time before the life boat comes to the rescue. Yes we survive, but our recovery from the experience is hindered by the fact that we went for so long exposed to the sun, the cold, the lack of drinking water and food to eat.
In that crisis state many of us get the bright idea to take up meditation. Suddenly we see where we could fit regular practice into our daily schedule. But at that point it’s like rebuilding a house that’s lost its very foundation, instead of having done regular maintenance all along to keep the house in good shape. It is hard! So hard! Imagine trying to sit in silence with a storm raging in your mind, with your body feeling the weight of overwhelming emotions! It is so much easier to train our minds now when we are dealing with the little emotional ups and downs, the little judgments, the little irritations that make life seem less than pleasant.
So today I want to do more than paint more rosy pictures of all the enhancements brought on by meditation, these freedoms we’ve been discussing. I want to really confront the resistance to regular practice, to look at the reasoning that arises when we decide to put off putting this life boat aboard.
Perhaps we don’t believe anything bad will happen to us, even though we know that we are human and subject to all the challenges life brings to us all.
Perhaps we are concerned that daily practice will change us somehow, make us different from who we are, and we are very comfortable with who we are, thank you very much.
Perhaps meditation seems boring compared to other more stimulating choices of activity.
Perhaps we just don’t see where we can fit it into our busy schedules.
Perhaps we get started on a practice but haven’t been able to make it a habit because our schedule varies a great deal.
Perhaps we don’t want to be a ‘meditator,’ whatever that means to us.
Perhaps we like to meditate in a group and it’s not the same when we are alone.
Perhaps one of these reasons resonates with you, if you don’t have a daily practice, or perhaps some other reasoning arises as you sit quietly and ask yourself, “What is keeping me from developing a regular daily practice of meditation?”
I don’t want to rush in and offer rebuttals to any of these thoughts that might arise, but I do ask that you sit with them, and question them a little more deeply. Ask for more clarity. Ask “Is this true?” Ask “What am I afraid of?” And as in every process of this nature, be compassionate and respectful of the answers. If this are the honest feelings, then there is no arguing with them. Accept the truth of them.
Then perhaps you may find that openly expressing these feelings give you the opportunity to see them more clearly. If you hear yourself saying, “Meditation is boring,” you can ask what it is you want to be distracted from, what could possibly be richer and more interesting than this moment with all its sensory options?
If you have a scheduling challenge, you can ask if there are any activities during your day that are less nourishing than a regular practice of meditation. (Sometimes we think we need to have periods of watching mindless television or internet surfing as a way to relax, when if we were meditating daily we wouldn’t have gotten so stressed or exhausted in the that we needed that escape in the first place!)
Clearly I believe that meditation is a powerful and easily accessible tool that offers impressive benefits. But I also know that there are other forms, other ways that we can come home to our quiet inner spaciousness. Perhaps there is some way you are already accessing this spaciousness, or some way that with slight adjustments you could make an already existing activity more meditative – walks in nature, swimming, gardening, knitting, yoga, etc. Look for solitary activities that you could infuse with more mindfulness, practicing staying fully in the moment. It might simply be removing the iPod, creating an agreed upon period of silence in a nature walk with friends, or pausing before beginning a physical activity to set the intention to be present and to really sense in to the body.
But in all honesty, nothing I have ever seen can truly take the place of a regular sitting practice. So I urge you to give it a chance in your own life if you haven’t done so already. If you already have a daily practice, then you understand exactly what I’m talking about. If you had a practice, then let it go, then discovered yourself struggling again, you really know the benefits first hand. And if you started up again and found the benefits again, what a wondrous homecoming to this moment.
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