The Authentic Life (20 page)

It's worth repeating that this practice, although in a way very simple, is also very difficult to do. Why? Because the mind is simply not inclined to let things be. It wants to hold on to its opinions and judgments of how things
should
be. The small mind would rather analyze and blame, and there's often a compulsion to find ways to control and fix our experience so that we
can feel better. However, as we learn to let our experience just be, it gradually becomes clear that we don't have to feel
any
particular way. This understanding is the essence of inner freedom, and it's an integral part of what it means to live most genuinely.

One problem with just watching our experience and letting it be is that there is sometimes the tendency for sitting practice to become amorphous or spacey. That is why it's so important to stay focused. To help with this, the practice is to rest the mind in the breath and to feel it fully. It is also to rest the mind in the environment—feeling the air, hearing the sounds, sensing the spaciousness of the room. Whenever we drift off into daydreaming or thinking, we use the breath and the environment as anchors to help bring us back to the reality of the present moment. In using these anchors, however, we hold to them lightly, so that we can still let our experience just be. The more we can refrain from trying to control our experiences, the more we can rest our minds in the silence—a silence that is big enough to include the endless mental chatter. It's important to note that we are not
trying
to enter the silence; we enter through the constant soft effort of just being here.

Learning to reside in the stillness, the silence, of
just being
allows us to taste the sweetness of doing nothing. This is not a state of passivity or laziness. The deeper sweetness of doing nothing requires an ability to be at home with ourselves, no longer trying to fill up an inner absence through staying busy or seeking pleasure. Interestingly, “doing nothing” still requires that we make efforts, lots of efforts, and that we make them for a very long time. Nonetheless, in making the soft effort to just be, we are not trying to do or to accomplish anything in particular. In other words, we are giving up our endless effort to control who we are and what we feel. The willingness to just be means exactly that—that we're willing to have things be as they are.

This doesn't mean we can do whatever we want. We still have to refrain from harming ourselves and others. But instead of trying to change what we don't like within ourselves, we're willing instead to observe it, feel it fully, and let it be as it is. For example, when we get angry, we first have to recognize that we're angry. And we certainly have to refrain from expressing it—acting it out—either in actions or in words. This is where a behavioral effort is, in fact, necessary. But once we refrain, the effort is much softer. It's to return to the experience of what anger actually is. This entails observing the thoughts that are trying to grab our attention and physically feeling the energy of anger coursing through the body. We don't have to judge the anger as bad or try to get rid of it. Instead, with the warmth of a gentle curiosity, we observe it as simply deep conditioning playing itself out. And then we let it be.

Because letting ourselves be as we are is not easy, one way of approaching it is to do it piecemeal. For example, to work with our tendency to want to control everything, we can start by learning to let the breath be as it is. Instead of trying to control the breath—to slow it down or make it be smooth or deep—we let the breath breathe itself. Even if it's shallow and erratic, we simply feel what that is.

The following guided meditation is one I've adapted from Stephen Levine. I did this meditation every day for over a year when I was very ill. Sometimes I would ask Elizabeth or one of my daughters to read it to me. Since then I've changed many of the lines to fit with my current practice understanding. The bigger point of this meditation is to actually experience what it is to give up control and just be, and to experience the equanimity of dwelling in the heart of awareness.

 

Learning to let life just be is one of the most important efforts we have to make in practice. But it's a soft effort—the kind of effort that's described in the Song of Meditation: “Be here. Just be.” Here we learn to dwell in the heart of awareness, giving up the requirement that we feel a particular way. Learning to let life be as it is and to be at home in our own skins is one of the most satisfying benefits of living authentically.

18

The Most Important Thing

W
hen Elizabeth and I were in Rome, we came across an old church called Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, beneath which lies what's known as the Capuchin Crypt. When the monks arrived there in 1631, they brought three hundred cartloads of the bones of deceased monks and proceeded to arrange the bones in decorative motifs throughout the several underground chapels. It's quite a sight, but the thing that struck me the most was a phrase on the wall above some of the bones: “What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be.” It was a particularly effective wake-up to what's most important.

I imagine Alfred Nobel had a similar wake-up when he opened the newspaper to find his own obituary in it. It may have been doubly shocking because the obituary stated, “Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, died this week.” It was actually his brother who had died, but what was most upsetting to Alfred was the realization that he would be remembered for inventing dynamite. The shock of this realization motivated
him to reflect on what he considered to be most important. As a result of his reflections he sponsored what came to be known as the Nobel Peace Prize. Sobered by reading his premature obituary, he thenceforth put his time, money, and energy into supporting what he valued most—people who were learning to live from the awaked heart, as evidenced by their pursuit of world peace.

When I reflect on what I consider to be the most important thing, the answer I keep returning to is learning to live from the gratitude and kindness of the awakened heart. Unfortunately this is not so easy to do; often, to awaken the heart, we first have to experience adversity. We may have to lose things we cherish, where we feel our secure future dissolving right in front of us. There's a famous story about the wife of a wealthy man whose sorrow was so great when her only child died that she came close to losing her mind. Someone told her to talk to the Buddha. The Buddha told her that he could help her, but first she had to bring him some white mustard seeds from a family where no one had died. She desperately went from house to house, but everywhere she went someone had died. At first she was disappointed, but then it struck her that no one was spared the loss of someone they loved. When she returned to the Buddha, she was able to relate to her sorrow with compassion for others as well as for herself. It was the beginning of moving from self-centeredness to the awakening of the heart.

When we experience great difficulty, either on a societal or on a personal level, it often helps break down our self-protectiveness and sense of separation. There are many historical examples on a societal level—from World War II, 9/11, and others—where people come together in shared purpose and shared heart when faced with overwhelming adversity. This is certainly true on the individual level as well. When we
consciously face our deepest tragedies or suffering, we often feel a sense of connectedness with others who are in pain. Like the woman who went to see the Buddha, we can begin to appreciate our common humanity. The experience of “my pain” is transformed into “the pain”—the pain all human beings share. This is the essence and definition of compassion.

One particular difficulty, which is one of the most effective catalysts to awakening the heart, is experiencing the pain of remorse. Sometimes we get a glimpse of the fact that we're living from vanity or unkindness or pettiness, and we feel a cringe of conscience. This is the experience of remorse, which arises when we become acutely aware that we are going against our true nature—against the heart that seeks to awaken. We can feel the pain we cause others, as well as ourselves; and this experience is almost always sobering. In fact, perhaps as much as anything, the pain of remorse can motivate a profound desire within us to live more awake and more genuinely. From the pain of deep humiliation—from seeing how we go against our true nature—real humility can awaken. Several years ago I had an experience of remorse that had a profound impact on my practice. While I was sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean doing a loving-kindness meditation, a woman who appeared to be homeless came over to talk to me. But after a minute or so I told her I was busy meditating. Do you get it? I was too busy doing a meditation on kindness to extend actual kindness to a person who may have been in need.

As soon as she went away, I felt the shock of remorse. This was not guilt, which is usually based in anger against oneself, but rather the awareness that I'd disconnected from the heart. By allowing myself to truly feel this, to let it etch its way into my awareness without indulging in self-blame, I saw the gap between my ideals about living from kindness, and having kindness
be a lived reality. Because the experience of remorse was so intense, it had a residual impact that has stayed with me. Now when I find myself at that choice point between extending myself with kindness, or holding back from laziness or self-protection, I am more likely to live from the natural generosity of the heart.

An interesting and sometimes very fruitful exercise in consciously experiencing remorse is to image what might be written on your tombstone. Just like the wake-up that Alfred Nobel experienced when he realized he might be remembered as the inventor of dynamite, we can be equally sobered when we see what we might be remembered for. Would we want our tombstone to say, “He was angry and he died.” Or, “She held on to her resentments until her dying day.” Or, “He died never having given back.” These may be exaggerations, but we all have big lapses in which we forget what is most important. The point is that we don't have to wait until our death to remember. We can use our “little deaths”—those moments when we see that we're being petty, unkind, or unforgiving—to remind us that the most important thing is to live from the gratitude and kindness of the awakening heart. For example, if we're caught in holding on to resentment, we can bring to mind Black Elk's words: “It is in the darkness in our own eyes that men lose their way.” With the pain of remorse, this realization can help us to move out of our self-centeredness and into a more open and genuine way of living.