Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (3 page)

The gardener has spent half a century working in a wealthy woman’s extensive garden, manually pruning large bushes into incredible animal-shaped topiary. Yet a single storm could destroy years of his work. The movie portrays him walking helplessly through his garden in the midst of an icy rainstorm, an image that evokes the gut feeling of groundlessness that comes when we realize how flimsy our control strategies are. Despite his diligence, he can never control the damage that nature’s forces might wreak.

Like these four men, all of us are doing whatever it is we do to shape our world in accordance with our illusion of control. Our world becomes small and insulated as we focus on some little corner of our self-centered dream, trying to bolster our sense of comfort and security. And yet no matter how tight our strategy is, we’re all just one doctor’s visit away from losing control.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön likens our ego to a room, a protective cocoon we spin exactly as we’d like it. The temperature is always just right, we hear only the music we want to hear, we eat only the food we want to eat, and perhaps best of all, we only allow the people we like into our room. In short, we make our life exactly the way we want it—pleasing, comfortable, and safe.

But when we step outside the room, what happens? We meet the messiness of everyday life, particularly all those irritating people we’re trying to shut out of our room and all the difficult and unwanted situations we’re trying so hard to avoid. The more we meet this unpleasantness, the more we want to retreat into our room, our protective cocoon. We close the windows and even cover them with bars and shutters. We put special locks on the doors. We do whatever we can to shut life out.

But if we’re fortunate, one day we might wake up to the realization that our room is a substitute life. In trying to control our world to make it comfortable and safe, we’ve narrowed our existence to the point where we’re living a substitute life, one built on the foundation of our desire to avoid our deep core fears—fears of helplessness, of being alone, of being unworthy, of experiencing the anxious quiver of being. And the extent to which we wish to avoid these fears is reflected like a mirror in how we experience our life, because they close us down and hold us back. They numb us to our desire to live a genuine life. They block our aspiration to live from our naturally open heart. And consequently, even as we maintain our control strategies, we slowly stagnate in dissatisfaction, frustration, and a sense of disconnectedness. These are the signs that we are living in the self-imposed prison of a substitute life.

When we are lucky enough to wake up to our situation, we gradually understand that it is only through living a practice life that this substitute life can be transformed into a more genuine life. A practice life might include meditation, but it certainly can’t be limited to that. It must also include working with all the ways we keep ourselves from living a genuine life: our idealized pictures of how life is supposed to be, our pretenses, our self-images, our blind spots, our protective behavioral strategies, our knee-jerk reactions of anger, fear, and confusion.
There’s a Native American proverb that expresses awakening to this heartfelt desire to live an open and genuine life:

Of the many paths that there are in this life,

There is only one that is worthwhile—

The path of the truly human being.

Interestingly one of the essential ingredients of a genuine life is the understanding that everything in our life is the path, that whatever we encounter can be used to help us awaken. In large part our efforts at control are geared toward preventing us from feeling our core pain, our core fears. All our ideals, all our expectations become a demand that life be a particular way. But this demand—this fear-based effort to control our life, this ego drive to build a protective cocoon—has to be seen for what it is. And objective self-knowledge is the way we begin to see where and how we’re protecting and defending. This is why it is such an important aspect of the path of awakening.

We awaken to this self-knowledge through the practice of self-observation, whereby we begin to observe ourselves relentlessly, almost as if we were outside ourselves. Unlike our ordinary focus on ourselves, in which we spin repetitively—thinking about ourselves, analyzing ourselves, and identifying with our situation—the “observer’s” focus is objective. It is not analytical, nor is it judgmental. It simply sees what we do, how we think, what we think about, how and when we react, what our basic personal strategies are, what our basic identities are, what our core fears are. In observing ourselves objectively in all kinds of situations, we can begin to see clearly the components of our substitute life: fear-based ideas about how we’re supposed to be, how others are supposed to be, how life is supposed to be. We can begin to see the requirements we make of life and how we use them to gain the illusion of control.

The observer helps us look objectively at what’s happening: what our thoughts are, what specific reaction we’re having, what we do with it. This is not introspection; it’s just awareness,
awareness of our conditioning in all its manifestations. Nor are we looking at our conditioning as history, focusing on why we are the way we are, but simply as part of what is going on. In observing objectively, without our usual tendency to see everything as good or bad, we develop a sense of spaciousness that allows us to observe from a broader vista than our usual narrow identification. We’re able to recognize that whenever we’re having an emotional reaction, there’s something within us—something running us—that we don’t quite see. Knowing this and approaching our emotional reactions with curiosity offers us a clue about where and how we are trying to control our world to suit us.

For example, imagine that someone criticizes us publicly. We react immediately with anger. Then we might move directly to self-justification and blaming, locked into a tape loop of thought. As feelings of rage rise to the surface, we might obsess on how unfair this person is or even on how unfair life is. But if something in us remembers the practice life, we will recall that our emotional reaction is an alarm clock to wake us up to what’s actually going on. Then the observer will kick in and start noticing the repeating thought “This isn’t fair,” even as the internal turmoil continues. We might then see that our emotional reaction is arising directly from our requirement that life
should
be fair. As this becomes clear, it may be possible to observe and then experience the layer of fear from which this requirement is born: the fear of being helpless when we lose control. All our lives we’ve tried to make life fit our pictures so that we wouldn’t have to experience core fears like this one.

Where are we lion-taming—trying to create the illusion of control to hold back the tide? Where are we creating inner robots—following mechanical patterns to just live efficiently or securely, unaware of what really makes us tick? Where are we creating protected habitats or pruning bushes into animal shapes—pretending that the elephant’s foot or the icy rains
will not touch our secure world? To find the answer, we need only look at our emotional upsets, which are always a clue that there’s some picture, some identity, that we’re still holding too tightly.

We can then ask ourselves the simple practice question “What is going on right now?” Are we just trying to look good? Are we motivated by the need simply to be comfortable or secure? Are we ruled by the desire for money or possessions? Does our distress come from our pursuit of status or power? Does our anxiety tie in to our craving for approval? Are we just holding on, trying to maintain control? All these patterns lead to a life of no real satisfaction—in other words, a substitute life.

When we understand the connection between our emotional distress and our expectations of what life should be, we can enter more deeply into an experiential practice life. Our path will take us directly to our core pain—into the helplessness of the loss of control, our fear of rejection or abandonment, our basic belief of separateness. As we enter into this place that we’ve avoided for so long, we discover our capacity to just be there without getting lost or overwhelmed. We experience that it’s our
willingness to just be
with the difficult place that engenders a spaciousness around it. We learn that we can let this place penetrate our hearts.

Until we turn and face what we’ve spent our whole lives avoiding, what are we really doing with our lives? Practice is not some pretty thing we do just on a meditation cushion. Until we learn to observe ourselves objectively, we will remain prisoners of our substitute life. Yet as we live the practice life, looking with increasing honesty at all the ways that we’ve held ourselves back in fear, we can also begin to experience the freedom of stepping outside our protected room and into the genuine life that awaits us.

3

Swiss Cheese

L
ET
’
S IMAGINE OURSELVES
as a big piece of Swiss cheese, including all the holes. The holes are our identities, mental constructs, desires, blind spots, stuck places—all those aspects of ourselves that seem to get in the way of realizing our “cheese nature.” Sometimes when a meditator gets a glimpse that he’s the whole cheese, he forgets that he’s also the little holes and instead sees himself as a big cheese. However, we are more likely to identify solely with the little holes—being fearful, being a victim, being confused, being right, and so on. In doing so, we forget our basic cheese nature—the vastness, God, call it what you will. We are the little holes; we can’t ignore that. But we’re also the whole cheese, and we can’t ignore that either. When we finally see the little holes for what they are, then we see they are truly holes—that is, of no substantial reality.

As with all analogies, this one falls short of presenting a complete or accurate view of the practice life, but the point of self-observation is to see which little holes we find ourselves believing in. We might then also see how our belief in the substantiality of these little holes prevents us from experiencing the big whole. This understanding is not theoretical; it has to be experiential. How does the practice life take us there?

One common approach to practice is to emphasize breakthrough or “enlightenment” experiences, in which we pierce the bubble of our normal consciousness, seeing clearly and
profoundly into what is real. One problem with this approach is that often we mistakenly take these openings for some higher reality, other than the natural order of things. The whole focus of practice then centers on having an experience, assuming that only with this experience will come permanent freedom—enlightenment. This is a very romantic view. It is also a fantasy. No experience is permanent. Nor can any singular experience make us permanently free. This is not to say that these experiences are not useful. They can be inspiring; they can help point the way. But unless our practice filters directly into our everyday life, what’s the point?

There is another approach to practice, one that is not nearly as romantic as seeking after enlightenment. It involves practicing directly with what is, whatever it is. I call this living the practice life. It particularly involves coming back again and again to the present moment, which, of course, has always been an essential aspect of Zen and other contemplative traditions. What separates this approach from seeking experiences is the emphasis on working with issues that we would normally not regard as “spiritual.” In fact, they’re often the issues we wish would go away. They’re all the moldy little holes in the Swiss cheese.

Do we walk around in anxiety or confusion? Do we get angry whenever we’re criticized? Do we live our life with a deep and pervasive sense of shame? In what activities are we driven by fear? Can we extend kindness toward ourselves? Is there even one person we can’t forgive? In practicing with these sticky questions—in allowing the messiness of our everyday lives to clarify them
experientially
—the bigger picture naturally becomes clearer.

For example, when anger arises in our everyday life circumstances, we can let anger be our practice. As much as we would prefer to be calm, peaceful, and clear, the reality of the present moment is anger. Until we attend to that anger from a practice perspective, it will continue to narrow our life and close our
heart. On the other hand, working directly with the anger cultivates our ability to open to the willingness to just be.

How do we work directly with anger—or for that matter with any strong emotion? How can we work with all the holes in our “cheese nature”? In working with my teacher, Joko Beck, I have learned two particular approaches. The first involves clarifying our belief systems, and the second is experiencing the physical reality of the present moment. Clarifying our belief systems is simply modern terminology for the ancient and universal teaching “Know thyself.” It involves precise self-observation—seeing how we think, what we think, how we react, what our personal strategies are. As we practice observing ourselves, we gradually become intimately familiar with our particular system, including all the beliefs and attitudes that run our life.

Clarifying our beliefs is not about analyzing or eradicating or changing them. It’s about seeing clearly what they are (not what they’re about).

The primary tool that we use to clarify our beliefs is
thought-labeling
. In many meditation practices, the instruction is: When thoughts arise, let them go. The instruction is to try to calm and clear the mind. This is nice if we can do it, but often we can’t simply let thoughts go. Our minds can be very busy and stay that way for long periods of time. It seems that we humans cannot so easily bypass our evolutionary inheritance of an overactive brain. In some meditation practices, the instruction for dealing with these ever-rising thoughts is to say, “Thinking”—thereby breaking the identification with the thinking—and then return the attention to the breath or some other focus point. Although this is a definite improvement on just trying to let thoughts go, it still doesn’t really help clarify what we’re up to. This is where thought-labeling comes in.