Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (6 page)

When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don’t magically disappear. Over the years, I’ve come to call resting with the discomfort “the detox period,” because when you don’t act on your habitual reactions, it’s like giving up an addiction. You’re left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that.

The underlying anxiety can be very strong. You may experience it as hopelessness or even terror. But the basic view is that if you can remain with the feeling, if you can go through the fear, the hopelessness, the resistance in its various forms, you will find basic goodness. Everything opens up. A poem by the late Rick Fields speaks to this process:

This world—absolutely pure

As is. Behind the fear,

Vulnerability. Behind that,

Sadness, then compassion

And behind that the vast sky.

With this practice, this exploration of inner renunciation, we can gradually see beyond our fear-based fixed identity. When we make a compassionate, fearless relationship with the reality of the human condition—with our habits, our emotions, with groundlessness—then gradually something shifts fundamentally, and we experience the sky-like, unbiased nature of our mind. Chögyam Trungpa said that this state of mind is completely fresh, completely new, completely unbiased, and we call it enlightenment. In other words, enlightenment is already here; we just need to touch it and know it and trust it. But first we make a journey through our resistance, knowing its every nuance, its strategies and exits. In this way we uncover that awareness.

But what happens if we break this commitment? What happens, for instance, when we act or speak in a harmful way? What do we do then? If falling into habitual patterns, habitual escapes, is inevitable from time to time, how do we return to the path?

There’s a practice in Buddhism called Sojong that gives us an opportunity to reflect on where we are in terms of refraining and, when we feel that we’ve really made a mess of things, to put that behind us and start anew. Traditionally, Sojong takes place twice a month, on the full and new moon days. The day before, each person reviews the preceding two weeks and reflects:
What have I done with my body? What have I done with my speech? What about my
mind: is it steady or all over the place and never present?
As much as possible, we explore these questions without self-criticism or blame. At Gampo Abbey, on the day before Sojong, we come together and talk about what we’ve been working with over the past two weeks. We share our insights about what helps and what hinders.

Sojong itself is a little like the fourth and fifth steps in a Twelve Step program, which call for making “a searching and fearless” self-inventory, recognizing where we’ve gone off course, then sharing this with another person. Sojong is a kind of antiguilt process that allows us to assess ourselves honestly, acknowledge what we’ve done and where we are, then let go of self-judgment and move on. Instead of holding on to the view, “I’m hopeless. Week after week, month after month, year after year go by, and I can never stop lying” (or whatever your habit is), you can say, “Well, this is where I am now. I fully declare what’s happened now and in the past, and I go forward with a sense of a fresh start.”

You don’t have to say this aloud to a group or another person, but most people find it easier to let go of self-judgment if they share their observations with someone else—a friend, perhaps, or a spiritual advisor. However you do it, the aim is to be fully honest and, at the same time, to shed feelings of guilt. One time, a group of students were asking Chögyam Trungpa about guilt. Among them was a man who had killed people in the Vietnam War and was tortured by self-loathing and guilt. Chögyam Trungpa told him, “That was then. This is now. You can always connect with your true nature at any time and be free of everything that went before.” Instead of letting our regrets drag us down, we can use them to spur us on to not repeat harmful acts but to learn from them how to be wiser in the future. We are fundamentally
good, not fundamentally flawed, and we can trust this.

It’s never too late to restore your vow, to renew your commitment to refrain. But at the same time, if you’re not fully aware and conscious of what you’re doing, then the patterns will just become stronger and stronger, and you’ll continue to do the same things over and over again. So the process that begins with the first commitment is an opportunity to gain clarity about your mind and speech and actions and, at the same time, acknowledge honestly and gently what has happened in the past, then lay your harmful deeds aside and go forward.

Nobody’s perfect in keeping the commitment to not harm. But still, students often ask me, “How can I make this vow with any integrity? If I’m going to break it at all, then what’s the point?” Patrul Rinpoche, a Buddhist master who lived in the eighteenth century, basically said there is no way to escape harming. He devotes an entire section of his book
The Words of My Perfect Teacher
to all the ways we cause harm: countless beings suffer from making the clothes we wear, from bringing us the food we eat. Beings suffer even when we walk. “Who is not guilty of having crushed countless tiny insects underfoot?” he asks. Our situation is inescapable because of our interconnectedness with all things. What makes the difference is our intention to not harm. On an everyday level, the intention to not harm means using our body, our speech, and our mind in such a way that we don’t knowingly hurt people, animals, birds, insects—any being—with our actions or words.

And we not only vow to not harm, Patrul Rinpoche says, we also commit to doing the opposite: We help. We heal. We do everything we can to benefit others.

4

Be Fully Present, Feel Your Heart, and Leap

T
HE ON-THE-SPOT
practice of
being fully present, feeling your heart, and greeting the next moment with an open mind
can be done at any time: when you wake up in the morning, before a difficult conversation, whenever fear or discomfort arises. This practice is a beautiful way to claim your warriorship, your spiritual warriorship. In other words, it is a way to claim your courage, your kindness, your strength. Whenever it occurs to you, you can pause briefly, touch in with how you’re feeling both physically and mentally, and then connect with your heart—even putting your hand on your heart, if you want to. This is a way of extending warmth and acceptance to whatever is going on for you right now. You might have an aching back, an upset stomach, panic, rage, impatience, calmness, joy—whatever it is, you can let it be there just as it is, without labeling it good or bad, without telling yourself you should or shouldn’t be feeling that way. Having connected with what is, with love and acceptance, you can go forward with curiosity and courage. I call this third step “taking a leap.”

In order to do this practice, most of us need a bit of support. It’s not always easy to be fully present—or even partly present. It’s not always easy to extend warmth to ourselves. It’s even less easy to let go of our habitual ways of being in the world and take a leap. Fortunately, meditation provides
us with exactly the support we need. It’s a practice for staying present, for nurturing our heart, and for letting go.

Just as we might practice the piano to cultivate our musical ability or practice a sport to cultivate our athletic ability, we can practice meditation to nurture the natural ability of the mind to be present, to feel loving-kindness, to open beyond fixed opinions and views. The meditation that I was taught and that I practice has three main parts: posture, the object of meditation, and the way we relate to thoughts. As I go through these instructions, I’ll point out the aspects that pertain to staying present, feeling your heart, and letting go.

The basic instruction starts with posture—with the way our body supports us while we’re meditating. We begin by being fully present in our body with awareness of our seat, our legs, our arms, our torso. We take a noble, upright but relaxed posture, which helps us settle internally and contact a feeling of confidence and dignity within ourselves. We are claiming our warriorship, claiming our bravery, claiming a fundamental feeling of all-rightness. If the body is uplifted, the mind will be uplifted. The six points of good posture taught by Chögyam Trungpa help us in this process. They are the seat, the legs, the torso, the hands, the eyes, and the mouth.

The first point is
the seat.
Sometimes meditation is referred to as taking your seat. Taking your seat means sitting in meditation with the confidence that you have the right to be there, the right to be fully awake. Literally speaking, the seat should be flat and well balanced. If you prefer, you can sit with a meditation cushion tucked under your buttocks to lift your pelvis and tilt it slightly forward; this helps you sit comfortably without slumping. Whichever way you sit,
your body should be in alignment—leaning neither too far forward nor too far backward nor to the right or left. The idea is to find a comfortable position so that you won’t wiggle or keep changing position during your meditation period.

If you find sitting on a cushion uncomfortable, you can sit in a chair, preferably one with a straight back and a flat seat. Sit slightly forward on the seat so that you’re not leaning against the back of the chair and place both feet flat on the floor.

The second point of good posture concerns
the legs
. If you’re sitting on a cushion, your legs should be folded comfortably in front of you. To reduce strain on your back, it’s best to make sure that your knees are not higher than your hips. You can experiment with different leg positions until your find one that is comfortable. If, while you’re meditating, you become very uncomfortable, you can temporarily assume the resting posture: keeping your back straight, bend your knees and draw your legs up toward your chest. You can wrap your arms around your legs to keep them steady.

The next point of good posture is
the torso
(your body from the neck to the seat). Whatever posture you choose, the idea is to keep the torso upright. Chögyam Trungpa’s instruction was “open front, strong back.” Strong back doesn’t mean a rigid back but rather an erect spine and shoulders that aren’t hunched. This leaves the heart area wide open and allows you to feel your heart. If you begin to slump, the heart area becomes constricted, as if you were closing your heart. So you sit upright again and open, ready to welcome whatever arises. Some people keep the torso upright by visualizing the vertebrae stacked one on top
of the other. Others imagine an invisible cord attached to the crown of the head, pulling the body upward. The chin should be tucked slightly, not jutting forward.

The hands
are the fourth point of good posture. One classic position is to place your hands on your thighs, palms down. Traditionally, this is called the “resting the mind” position. Arm lengths vary, so you will need to experiment to see where on your thighs you can comfortably rest your hands so that your body stays in alignment.

Then we come to
the eyes,
the fifth point of good posture. Some people like to meditate with their eyes closed, but in the tradition I trained in, we keep the eyes open, gazing softly downward about four to six feet in front of us. Keeping the eyes open is a way of cultivating open receptivity—open receptivity to whatever thoughts and emotions arise in the mind during meditation, open receptivity to the immediate environment. This aids us in being fully present and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.

The final point of posture is
the mouth
. The mouth stays open very slightly. The purpose of this is to allow the jaw to relax and to let the breath pass easily through both the nose and the mouth.

When we first sit down to meditate, we begin by running through the six points of good posture, checking each one in turn. This is sometimes called “flashing back to the sense of being.” It allows us to be present in our body as we watch the movie of life unfold.

We can practice being present throughout the day: we don’t have to be meditating formally. The object or focus of mindfulness can be anything that brings us back to right where we are. If we’re out walking, the object of meditation could be the motion of our legs and feet. If we’re washing
dishes, it could be our hands. We can bring mindfulness to anything—opening a door, washing our hair, making the bed.

The object or focus of formal meditation is the breath. Being mindful of the breath keeps us present. When we become distracted, as we probably will, we don’t make it a big deal. Our attitude toward the practice is always one of warmth and acceptance. As my teacher Sakyong Mipham often says, we should meditate from our heart. When the mind wanders, we simply bring it back to the present, over and over again. We don’t try to breathe in some contrived way but let the breath flow in and out naturally. By its very nature, the breath is not graspable; there is nothing at all to hold on to. Our breath, therefore, provides an immediate connection with impermanence as we experience it continually arising and dissolving back into space. Using the breath as the object of meditation introduces us to the fundamental groundlessness of life and to the experience of letting go. This provides training in the third step of the three-step practice, taking a leap. Because meditation is a training in being open to and relaxed with whatever arises, it also gives us the proper foundation for self-acceptance and warmth toward others. In other words, it gives us practice in feeling our heart.

Without straining, we rest our attention lightly on the breath as it goes in and out. Some people prefer to focus only on the out breath. Either way, the attention should be so light that only one-quarter of our awareness is on the breath, while three-quarters is on the space around the breath. The breath goes out and dissolves into space, then we breathe in again. This continues without any need to make it happen or to control it. Each time the breath goes
out, we simply let it go. Whatever occurs—our thoughts or emotions, sounds or movement in the environment—we train in accepting it without any value judgments.