Comfortable With Uncertainty (8 page)

By practicing tonglen, you develop your sympathy for others. You begin to understand them better. Your own pain is like a stepping-stone that makes your heart bigger. It starts with creating space in which to relate directly to specific suffering—yours or someone else’s. You expand the practice to understand that suffering is universal, shared by us all.

Lest we condescendingly do tonglen for the other one who’s
so
confused, remember: this is a practice where compassion begins to arise because we’ve been in the other one’s shoes. We’ve been angry, jealous, and lonely. We do strange things when we’re in pain. Because we’re lonely, we say cruel words; because we want someone to love us, we insult them. Exchanging self for other, or tonglen, begins when we can see where someone is because we’ve been there. It doesn’t happen because we’re better than they are but because human beings share the same stuff. The more we know our own, the more we’re going to understand others’.

50

Slogan: “If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained”

W
HEN THE BOTTOM
is falling out we might suddenly recall the slogan, “If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained.” If we can practice when we’re jealous, resentful, scornful, when we hate ourselves, then we are well trained. Again, practice means not continuing to strengthen the habitual patterns that keep us trapped; doing anything we can to shake up and ventilate our self-justification and blame. We do our best to stay with the strong energy without acting out or repressing. In so doing, our habits become more porous.

Our patterns are, of course, well established, seductive, and comforting. Just wishing for them to be ventilated isn’t enough. Mindfulness and awareness are key. Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity? When we are distracted by a strong emotion, do we remember that it is part of our path? Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a warrior. And when we can’t practice when distracted but
know
that we can’t, we are still training well. Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.

51

Deepening Tonglen

I
N TONGLEN
, after genuinely connecting with the pain and your ability to open and let go, then take the practice a step further and do it for all sentient beings. This is a key point about tonglen: your own experience of pleasure and pain becomes the way that you recognize your kinship with all sentient beings. Practicing tonglen is the way you can share in the joy and the sorrow of everyone who’s ever lived, everyone who’s living now, and everyone who will ever live.

Whatever discomfort you feel becomes useful. “I’m miserable, I’m depressed. Okay. Let me feel it fully so that nobody else has to feel it, so that others could be free of it.” It starts to awaken your heart because you have this aspiration to say, “This pain can be of benefit to others because I can be courageous enough to feel it fully so no one else has to.” The joy that you feel, the sense of being able to open up and let go, also becomes a way you connect with others. On the out-breath you say, “Let me give away anything good or true that I ever feel, any sense of humor, any sense of enjoying the sun coming up and going down, any sense of delight in the world at all, so that everybody else may share in this and feel it.”

If we are willing—even for one second a day—to make an aspiration to use our own pain and pleasure to help others, we are actually able to do it that much more. We can do this practice in any situation. Start with yourself. You can extend the practice to situations in which compassion spontaneously arises, exchanging yourself for someone you want to help. Then you move on to a slightly more difficult area, one in which compassion is not necessarily your first response.

52

The Empty Boat

T
HERE’S A ZEN STORY
in which a man is enjoying himself on a river at dusk. He sees another boat coming down the river toward him. At first it seems so nice to him that someone else is also enjoying the river on a nice summer evening. Then he realizes that the boat is coming right toward him, faster and faster. He begins to yell, “Hey, hey, watch out! For Pete’s sake, turn aside!” But the boat just comes right at him, faster and faster. By this time he’s standing up in his boat, screaming and shaking his fist, and then the boat smashes right into him. He sees that it’s an empty boat.

This is the classic story of our whole life situation. There are a lot of empty boats out there. We’re always screaming and shaking our fists at them. Instead, we could let them stop our minds. Even if they only stop our mind for one point one seconds, we can rest in that little gap. When the story line starts, we can do the tonglen practice of exchanging ourselves for others. In this way everything we meet has the potential to help us cultivate compassion and reconnect with the spacious, open quality of our minds.

53

The Three Poisons

I
N THE
B
UDDHIST
teachings, the messy emotional stuff is called
klesha
, which means poison. There are three main poisons: passion, aggression, and ignorance. We could talk about these in different ways—for example, we could also call them craving, aversion, and couldn’t care less. Addictions of all kinds come under the category of craving, which is wanting, wanting, wanting—feeling that we have to have some kind of resolution. Aversion encompasses violence, rage, hatred, and negativity of all kinds, as well as garden-variety irritation. And ignorance? Nowadays, it’s usually called denial.

The three poisons are always trapping you in one way or another, imprisoning you and making your world really small. When you feel craving, you could be sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, but all you can see is this piece of chocolate cake that you’re craving. With aversion, you’re sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and all you can hear is the angry words you said to someone ten years ago. With ignorance, you’re sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon with a paper bag over your head. Each of the three poisons has the power to capture you so completely that you don’t even perceive what’s in front of you.

The pith instruction is, whatever you do, don’t try to make the poisons go away. When you’re trying to make them go away, you’re losing your wealth along with your neurosis. The irony is that what we most want to avoid in our lives is crucial to awakening bodhichitta. These juicy emotional spots are where a warrior gains wisdom and compassion. Of course, we’ll want to get out of those spots far more often than we’ll want to stay. That’s why self-compassion and courage are vital. Without loving-kindness, staying with pain is just warfare.

54

On-the-Spot Tonglen

D
OING TONGLEN
throughout the day can feel more natural than doing it on the cushion. For one thing, there is never any lack of subject matter. Daily-life practice is never abstract. As soon as uncomfortable emotions come up, we train ourselves in breathing them in and dropping the story line. At the same time, we extend our thoughts and concern to other people who feel the same discomfort, and we breathe in with the wish that all of us could be free of this particular brand of confusion. Then, as we breathe out, we send ourselves and others whatever kind of relief we think would help. We also practice like this when we encounter animals and people who are in pain. We can try to do this whenever difficult situations and feelings arise. Over time it will become more automatic.

It is also helpful to notice anything in our daily life that brings us happiness. As soon as we become aware of it, we can think of sending it out to others, further cultivating the tonglen attitude.

As warrior-bodhisattvas, the more we train in cultivating this attitude, the more we uncover our capacity for joy and equanimity. Because of our bravery and willingness to work with the practice, we are more able to experience the basic goodness of ourselves and others. We’re more able to appreciate the potential of all kinds of people: those we find pleasant, those we find unpleasant, and those we don’t even know. Thus tonglen begins to ventilate our prejudices and introduce us to a more tender and open-minded world.

55

Start Where You Are (Again and Again)

S
TART WHERE YOU ARE
. This is very important. Tonglen practice (and all meditation practice) is not about later, when you get it all together and you’re this person you really respect. You may be the most violent person in the world—that’s a fine place to start. That’s a very rich place to start—juicy, smelly. You might be the most depressed person in the world, the most addicted person in the world, the most jealous person in the world. You might think that there are no others on the planet who hate themselves as much as you do. All of that is a good place to start. Just where you are—that’s the place to start.

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself. When you exchange yourself for others in the practice of tonglen, it becomes increasingly uncertain what is out there and what is in here.

56

Experience Your Life

A
WOMAN IS RUNNING
from tigers. She runs and she runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. She comes to the edge of a cliff. She sees a vine there, so she climbs down and holds on to it. Then she looks down and sees that there are tigers below her as well. At the same time, she notices a little mouse gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries emerging from a nearby clump of grass. She looks up, she looks down, and she looks at the mouse. Then she picks a strawberry, pops it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.

Tigers above, tigers below. This is the predicament we are always in. We are born and sooner or later we die. Each moment is just what it is. Resentment, bitterness, and holding a grudge prevent us from seeing and hearing and tasting and delighting. This might be the only moment of our life, this might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could feel depressed about this or we could finally appreciate it. We could delight in the preciousness of every single moment.

57

See What Is

H
OLDING ON TO BELIEFS
limits our experience of life. That doesn’t mean that beliefs or opinions or ideas are a problem. It’s the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and opinions, that causes the problems. Using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.

As people who want to live a good, full, unrestricted, adventurous, real kind of life, there is concrete instruction we can follow: see what is. When you catch yourself grasping at beliefs or thoughts, just see what is. Without calling your belief right or wrong, acknowledge it. See it clearly without judgment and let it go. Come back to the present moment. From now until the moment of your death, you could do this.

58

The Buddha

W
HEN PEOPLE
decide to become Buddhists, they participate in an official ceremony in which they take refuge in the three jewels—the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. I’ve always thought it sounds theistic, dualistic, and dependent “to take refuge” in something. However, the fundamental idea of taking refuge is that between birth and death we are alone. Therefore taking refuge in the three jewels doesn’t mean finding consolation in them. Rather, it’s a basic expression of our aspiration to leap out of the nest, whether we feel ready for it or not, to go through our puberty rites and be an adult with no hand to hold. Taking refuge is the way that we begin cultivating the openness and the good-heartedness that allow us to be less and less dependent.

The Buddha is the awakened one, and we too are buddhas. We are the awakened one—the one who continually leaps, who continually opens, who continually goes forward. Being a buddha isn’t easy. It’s accompanied by fear, resentment, and doubt. But learning to leap into open space with our fear, resentment, and doubt is how we become fully human beings. There isn’t any separation between samsara and nirvana, between the sadness and pain of the setting sun and the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun, as the Shambhala teachings put it. One can hold them both in one’s heart, which is actually the purpose of practice.

Taking refuge in the Buddha means that we are willing to spend our life reconnecting with the quality of being continually awake. Every time we feel like taking refuge in a habitual means of escape, we take off more armor, undoing all the stuff that covers over our wisdom and our gentleness and our awake quality. We’re not trying to be something we aren’t; rather, we’re reconnecting with who we are. So when we say, “I take refuge in the Buddha,” that means I take refuge in the courage and the potential of fearlessness, of removing all the armor that covers this awakeness of mine. I am awake; I will spend my life taking this armor off. Nobody else can take it off because nobody else knows where all the little locks are, nobody else knows where it’s sewed up tight, where it’s going to take a lot of work to get that particular iron thread untied. You have to do it alone. The basic instruction is simple: Start taking off that armor. That’s all anyone can tell you. No one can tell you how to do it because you’re the only one who knows how you locked yourself in there to start.