Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (12 page)

As well, I became a hospice volunteer. My job is to go to the homes of terminally ill patients, to simply be with them or help them in any way I can. This “practice” has been invaluable to me, in that the intensity of the situation helps keep me at my edge. Seeing others in pain, seeing others struggling with the often intense suffering surrounding death, serves to bring whatever unhealed pain remains back to the surface. But now I can experience this with the understanding that pain simply is and that when we resist it, when we believe the thoughts that arise
out of it, we turn our pain into the heaviness of “my suffering.”

Each hospice visit reminds me that what is required for real healing is that instead of pushing away our pain, we acknowledge it, experience its texture as best we can, and allow it to penetrate to the open heart. This kind of healing does not come from forced effort, nor from doing battle with ourselves. It comes from a soft effort born of the understanding that there is no enemy. As this understanding deepens, as we become more willing to allow life to just be, we discover one essential ingredient in the process: kindness.

Although I have been basically healthy for the last several years, occasionally the old symptoms reappear full-blown and intense, lasting from several hours to several days. Sometimes, when I’m reduced to lying in a fetal position, I watch, on an almost microscopic level, how I try to turn this pain into suffering. Thoughts of resistance flood my mind, followed by the voices of fear and self-pity. As soon as I hear these voices for what they are, they lose their hold. My awareness goes directly to the center of the chest—breathing into the heartspace on the inbreath and extending loving-kindness to my body on the outbreath.

Although I believe that awareness is instrumental in bringing the body back into balance, who is to say how these processes really work? One thing I can say with certainty is that as long as we resist our pain, as long as we see our difficulties as obstacles, as long as we continue to struggle against ourselves, we can never really heal. We will remain forever locked inside our own diving bell of suffering.

Working with our pain and suffering requires both the precision of seeing clearly through our believed thoughts and a softening awareness that allows us to enter with a light touch into those areas we have tended to avoid. Working in this way, we see how much of our suffering is unnecessary. This clarity, in turn, gives us the courage to continue working with suffering, even through those moments when it seems as if it will never
end. What arises is an increasing compassion for both ourselves and the whole human drama. We see that pain and suffering are not the endgame; they are simply the most effective vehicles for awakening our hearts.

11

Practicing with Distress

T
HE FEELING THAT LIFE
is out of sync and that there is too much to do is not new. As Buddha pointed out more than twenty-six hundred years ago, we’ll always have to deal with pain and suffering. We will always have our “eighty-three problems”—concerns about financial security, difficulties in relationships, fears about our health, anxious striving toward success and acceptance, and so on. Perhaps it’s the “eighty-fourth problem”—that we don’t really want to have any problems—that makes our current time seem so full of distress.

Many people come to meditation practice with the expectation that it will calm them and relieve their stress. Certainly meditation can do this to some extent; even the most superficial meditation practices can induce feelings of calmness. And the more comprehensive forms of meditation can move us well beyond superficial calmness into a wider container of awareness. Within this more spacious context, we can experience daily ups and downs with equanimity.

However, when we’re knee-deep in emotional distress, we’re fortunate if we can remember to practice at all. When caught in the middle of swirling thoughts and rampant emotions, how can we really practice? We can’t just remove ourselves from the difficult situation and go off to meditate. Even if we could, sitting down to follow the breath is unlikely to bring peace of mind at times when we are using emotional reactivity as a Band-Aid to cover our deeper difficulties.

When the clarity of practice becomes obscured by the dark and swirling energy of emotional distress, it is useful to have some clear and concise reminders to bring us back to reality. We need to learn how, specifically, we can effectively practice when caught in our own mess. Although practice can never be reduced to a formula or a collection of techniques, there are certain guidelines that can be useful for practicing with difficult emotional reactions, especially our most deep-seated reactions—those that arise directly from our core fears and pain. The following four reminders embody the understanding that will help us when we feel most lost.

The first reminder is to
awaken aspiration
. On an elementary level, to awaken aspiration means simply that we remember to practice. Once we remember to practice, to awaken aspiration means that we see our particular distress
as our path
. Instead of seeing our distress as the enemy, as something to get rid of; instead of giving it juice by solidifying the thoughts around it into the heaviness and drama of “me,” we learn to view distress as our opportunity to see and to open. We relate to it as our path to awakening.

When we find ourselves in a mess, we might have the thought, “This isn’t how life is supposed to be.” Our present discomfort doesn’t conform to our picture of how life should unfold. When life doesn’t fit our picture, we usually feel that something is wrong. But it is not so much that something is wrong as it is that we’re relating to life from the narrow, fear-based perspective of “I want.” What we want is to feel good, and when our emotional distress does not feel good, we almost instinctively move away from it. Our discomfort generates fear, and in that fear there is even more discomfort. No wonder we tend to see distress as the enemy, as something to get rid of.

We have to turn our upside-down view right-side up to understand what it means to see difficulties as our path. When I first understood this teaching experientially—not just as a good intellectual insight—I felt my relationship to life shift 180
degrees. The main issue was no longer just about whether I felt good or whether I liked what was happening. The main issue was to be more awake, to learn what I had to learn to stop holding back my heart in fear. This didn’t mean that I had to like what was on my plate; what it meant was that the willingness to open to life’s difficulties does not depend on
having
to like them. Seeing our difficulties as our path, allowing them to awaken our aspiration, means that we are willing to let them in, regardless of how we may be feeling. It means that our main priority is to learn, to open, to awaken.

The second reminder is to
awaken curiosity
, asking the practice question “What
is
this?” This is not an expression of idle curiosity, nor is it an analytical exploration. It’s awakening the desire to know the truth of the moment through experiencing. We cannot know the truth of the moment through experiencing as long as we’re blaming, wallowing in “poor me,” trying to escape, or giving credence to powerful thoughts such as “This isn’t fair” and “I can’t do this.” The thought realm is where we stay stuck; it’s where things become solid, dark, and unworkable. In awakening curiosity, we return over and over again to the bodily experience of the moment, to the physical “whatness” of our experience, which is movable, light, and workable.

Several years ago I was faced with an alarming reading on a screening test for prostate cancer. Instead of having a biopsy, I chose to treat myself with a combination of healing meditation, acupuncture, and herbs for six months. Then I took another test to see to what extent the cancer cells remained, if at all. Aware that it would be very unpleasant to have my prostate removed and that I might then be incontinent and impotent, I felt a great deal of fear while waiting for the results. I practiced staying with the body, asking over and over, “What
is
this?” The combination of fear and self-pity was powerful, as was the desire to escape, but my continuous effort to return to the physical reality of the moment began to undercut the solidity of my fear. The question “What is this?” worked like a laser
in focusing on the experience of fear itself. After two days of practice, I realized that none of what I feared was happening now, nor had it ever happened! There was no real pain other than that generated by my thoughts. This realization effectively burst the bubble of my fears. The insight did not come from thinking but from staying with the “whatness” of the moment. It came from being curious about reality.

The third reminder in working with distress is to
awaken humor,
or at least some wider perspective. Anytime we’re obsessing over something that’s happening mainly in our thoughts, it is helpful to remember Mark Twain’s words: “I’m a very old man. I’ve had lots of problems. Most of them never happened.”

One way to broaden our perspective is to see the difficulties as just another aspect of our conditioning playing itself out. When we remember this, we can say to ourselves, “Here it comes again. What will it be like this time?” This is not a trick to avoid facing our issues; rather, it is a means of getting just enough perspective to be able to enter into the difficulty without being overwhelmed by it. We can also ask ourselves, “Have I ever had this problem before?” Of course, we have—probably over and over. Can we see it for what it is, just our conditioning? Looking at a difficulty like this breaks our identification with it; it provides some spaciousness, a bigger context; it broadens the narrow tunnel vision that often accompanies distress.

Once when my Pandora’s box was opening wide, I went to Joko to describe what was happening. I felt dark and grim and was embarrassed to reveal that I was experiencing so much fear. She smiled at me and said, “That’s pretty interesting. Let’s look at this.” I got the sense that it wasn’t me we were talking about but just “stuff.” Here was a wider perspective. It’s not that the fears were an illusion and could therefore be ignored, but that they were simply my particular conditioning. Putting them in this context allowed me to look more lightly at “my fears.” I
even saw the humor in the fact that my father, in repeatedly quoting to me the line “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself,” had succeeded in convincing me that I should be afraid of fear—quite the opposite of his benign intention. Cultivating humor and a larger perspective was instrumental in helping me to emerge from what had been a lifelong tunnel of fear.

Since then I’ve developed an exercise, which I practice on occasion, usually for a whole day. Every time I find myself caught in a reaction or a judgment, especially about myself, I become aware on the inbreath and say the words “not me.” It helps me see my reactions and judgments as just conditioning. Then I use the outbreath to soften the edges around my suffering.

Unlike a positive affirmation, this exercise is not a cosmetic overlay. It requires that we still see our thoughts clearly, with precision. To do it, we still need to reside in the physical aspect of our experience. But it lightens the myopic and self-centered perspective that often accompanies the process of learning to know ourselves. In the process it serves as a reminder of the bigger view and helps generate compassion.

Much of the heaviness of our distress comes from the belief that we should be different. Especially after practicing for a few years, we think we shouldn’t still be so reactive. We think we should be beyond our conditioning. But practice doesn’t work that way. A more accurate view of what happens in practice is that at first we have a willful Great Dane on a leash who pulls us along whenever and wherever it wants to go. After many years we still feel the tug on the leash, and we still hear the dog yapping to go. Our conditioning is still there. But when we look at the dog, we see that it’s just a Chihuahua now. To work with it, all we have to do is let it yap as it will and jerk the leash lightly.

The fourth reminder is to awaken
loving-kindness
. This is the ability to bring nonjudgmental awareness from the heart to the unwanted aspects of “me.” This reminder can’t be overemphasized. It’s so natural to want to confirm what is most negative
about ourselves that we don’t even think about activating compassion or kindness. Yet when we soften our self-judgment with loving-kindness, the sense of drama and heaviness lightens considerably.

For example, when confusion arises, instead of condemning ourselves, we acknowledge and experience what’s happening, learning to extend compassionate awareness to this confused being called “me.” When illness arises, instead of seeing ourselves as defective or analyzing why we are ill, we can come from the heart to extend loving-kindness awareness into this physical body. The effect can be an increased sense of softening and spaciousness. As we practice awakening loving-kindness regularly, it becomes more and more a part of our being, our natural response to life.

Sometimes when emotional distress is particularly powerful, nothing we’ve learned about practicing with distress seems relevant. Dense and intense emotional reactions can leave us feeling lost and overwhelmed. In these darkest moments, the practice is to bring awareness to the center of the chest, breathing the painful emotions, via the inbreath, directly into the heartspace. It’s as if we were breathing the swirling physical sensations right into the heart. Then, on the outbreath, we simply exhale. We’re not trying to do or change anything; we’re simply allowing our heart center to become a wider container of awareness within which to experience distress.

It’s when we become lost in these darkest emotions that we’re likely to judge ourselves most harshly. We solidify our negative core beliefs that we are unworthy, weak, and hopeless. There seems to be no way out of our shame. Breathing the painful sensations right into the heartspace undercuts the power of these deeply held core beliefs. Breathing into the heart is an act of compassion; by opening to our negative self-judgment in this way, we are opening to the universal pain of being human.