Comfortable With Uncertainty (11 page)

Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, which is another way of describing the path of the warrior-bodhisattva.

When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? The next time you get a chance, experiment with this.

79

Slogan: “Practice the three difficulties”

T
HE THREE DIFFICULTIES
are acknowledging neurosis as neurosis, doing something different, and aspiring to continue practicing this way.

Acknowledging that we are all churned up is the first and most difficult step. Without recognition that we’re stuck, it’s impossible to liberate ourselves from confusion. “Doing something different” is anything that interrupts our strong tendency to spin out. We can let the story line go and connect with the underlying energy, do on-the-spot tonglen, remember a slogan, or burst into song—anything that doesn’t reinforce our crippling habits. The third difficult practice is to then remember that we need to keep doing the first two. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.

In essence the practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines. Then we feel the bodily sensation completely. One way of doing this is to breathe it into our heart. By acknowledging the emotion, dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves about it, and feeling the energy of the moment, we cultivate maitri and compassion for ourselves. Then we could recognize that there are millions who are feeling the way we do and breathe in the emotion for all of us with the wish that we all be free of confusion and limiting habitual reactions. When we can recognize our own confusion with compassion, we can extend that compassion to others who are equally confused. In this step of widening the circle of compassion lies the magic of bodhichitta training.

80

Communicating from the Heart

W
E HAVE
a strong tendency to distance ourselves from our experience because it hurts, but the dharma provides encouragement to move closer to that experience. Although there are lots of words that could be used to explain compassionate action, I’d like to stress the word
communication
—in particular, communication from the heart.

All activities should be done with the intention of communicating. This is a practical suggestion: all activities should be done with the intention of speaking so that another person can hear you, rather than using words that cause the barriers to go up and the ears to close. In this process we also learn how to listen and how to look. You can practice making your actions, your speech, and your thoughts inseparable from this yearning to communicate from the heart. Everything you say can further polarize the situation and convince you of how separate you are. On the other hand, everything you say and do and think can support your desire to communicate, to move closer and step out of this myth of isolation and separateness that we’re all caught in.

Taking this kind of responsibility is another way of talking about awakening bodhichitta, because part of taking responsibility is the quality of being able to see things very clearly. Another part of taking responsibility is gentleness, which goes along with not judging but rather looking gently and honestly at yourself. There is also the ability to keep going forward. You can just keep on going; you don’t have to get frozen in an identity as a loser or a winner, the abuser or the abused, the good guy or the bad guy. You just see what you do as clearly and as compassionately as you can and then go on. The next moment is always fresh and open.

81

The Big Squeeze

I
F WE WANT
to communicate and we have a strong aspiration to help others—in terms of engaging in social action, helping our family or community, or just being there for people when they need us—then sooner or later we’re going to experience the big squeeze. Our ideals and the reality of what’s happening don’t match. We feel as if we’re between the fingers of a big giant who is squeezing us. We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

There is often a discrepancy between our ideals and what we actually encounter. For instance, in raising children, we have a lot of good ideas, but sometimes it’s challenging to put together the good ideas with how our children are, there at the breakfast table with food all over themselves. Or in meditation, have you noticed how difficult it is to feel emotions without getting totally swept away by them, or how difficult it is simply to cultivate friendliness toward yourself when you’re feeling miserable or panicked or all caught up?

There’s a discrepancy between our inspiration and the situation as it presents itself. It’s the rub between those two things—the squeeze between reality and vision—that causes us to grow up, to wake up to be 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate. The big squeeze is one of the most productive places on the spiritual path and in particular on this journey of awakening the heart.

82

Curiosity and the Circle of Compassion

T
HE TENDENCY
to centralize into ourselves, to try to protect ourselves, is strong and all-pervasive. A simple way of turning it around is to develop our curiosity and our inquisitiveness about everything. This is another way of talking about helping others, but of course the process also helps us. We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves. The whole path seems to be about developing curiosity, about looking out and taking an interest in all the details of our lives and in our immediate environment.

When we find ourselves in a situation in which our buttons are being pushed, we can choose to repress or act out, or we can choose to practice. If we can start to practice tonglen on the spot, breathing in with the intention of keeping our hearts open to the embarrassment or fear or anger that we feel, then to our surprise we find that we’re also open to what the other person is feeling. Open heart is open heart. Once it’s open, your eyes and your mind are also open, and you can see what’s happening in the faces and hearts of other people. If you’re walking down the street and far in the distance—so far that you can’t possibly do anything about it—you see a man beating his dog, then you can do tonglen for the dog and the man. At the same time, you’re doing it for your own heartbreak, for all the animals and people who are abusing and abused, and for all the people like you who are watching and don’t know what to do. Simply by doing this exchange you have made the world a larger, more loving place.

83

Take Tonglen Further

I
N THE PRACTICE
of awakening our hearts, the circle of compassion widens at its own speed and widens spontaneously. It’s not something you can make happen. It’s definitely not something you can fake. But you can encourage yourself to at least experiment with faking it occasionally by seeing what happens when you try to do tonglen for your enemy. Try this when your enemy is standing in front of you or when you’re intentionally bringing up the memory of your enemy in order to do tonglen. Think of this simple instruction: what would it take to be able to have my enemy hear what I’m trying to say, and what would it take for me to be able to hear what he or she is trying to say to me? How to communicate from the heart is the essence of tonglen.

Doing tonglen for all sentient beings doesn’t have to be separate from doing it for yourself and your immediate situation. That’s a point we need to hear again and again. When you connect with your own suffering, reflect that countless beings at this very moment are feeling exactly what you feel. Their story lines are different but the feeling of pain is the same. When you do the practice for all sentient beings and for yourself at the same time, you begin to realize that self and other are not actually different.

84

Slogan: “Be grateful to everyone”

B
E GRATEFUL
to everyone” is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves that we have rejected. Through doing that, we also make peace with the people we dislike. More to the point, being around people we dislike can be a catalyst for making friends with ourselves.

If we were to make a list of people we don’t like—people we find obnoxious, threatening, or worthy of contempt—we would discover much about those aspects of ourselves that we can’t face. If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities. We project these onto the outside world. The people who repel us unwittingly show us aspects of ourselves that we find unacceptable, which otherwise we can’t see. Traditional lojong teachings say it another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven’t worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders.

“Be grateful to everyone” is a way of saying that we can learn from any situation, especially if we practice this slogan with awareness. The people and situations in our lives can remind us to catch neurosis as neurosis—to see when we’ve pulled the shades, locked the door, and crawled under the covers.

85

Obstacles as Questions

O
BSTACLES OCCUR
at the outer and inner levels. At the outer level the sense is that something or somebody has harmed us, interfering with the harmony and peace we thought was ours. Some rascal has ruined it all. This particular sense of obstacle occurs in relationships and in many other situations; we feel disappointed, harmed, confused, and attacked in a variety of ways. People have felt this way from the beginning of time.

As for the inner level of obstacle, perhaps nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is
now
and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive. It keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us: Where are we separating ourselves from reality? How are we pulling back instead of opening up? How are we closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter?

86

Six Ways to Be Lonely

U
SUALLY WE REGARD
loneliness as an enemy. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we rest in the middle of it, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a cooling loneliness that turns our usual fearful patterns upside down. There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness:

1. Less desire
   is the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to change our mood.
   
2. Contentment
   means that we no longer believe that escaping our loneliness is going to bring happiness or courage or strength.
   
3. Avoiding unnecessary activities
   means that we stop looking for something to entertain us or to save us.
   
4. Complete discipline
   means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back to the present moment with compassionate attention.
   
5. Not wandering in the world of desire
   is about relating directly with how things are, without trying to make them okay.
   
6. Not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts
   means no longer seeking the companionship of constant conversation with ourselves.
   

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Thoroughly Processed

U
NDERSTANDING HOW
our emotions have the power to run us around in circles helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we increase our confusion, how we cause harm to ourselves. Because we have basic goodness, basic wisdom, basic intelligence, we can stop harming ourselves and harming others.

Because of mindfulness, we see things when they arise. Because of our understanding, we don’t buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive—we leave things minute. They don’t keep expanding into World War III or domestic violence. It all comes through learning to pause for just a moment and not doing the same thing again and again out of impulse. Simply to pause instead of immediately filling up the space transforms us. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.

The result is that we cease to cause harm. We begin to know ourselves thoroughly and to respect ourselves and others. Anything can come up, anything can walk into our house. We can find a dinosaur sitting on our living room couch, and we don’t freak out. We have been thoroughly processed by coming to know ourselves with honest, gentle mindfulness.

88

Commitment

R
ECENTLY
I
TAUGHT
a weekend program in a kind of New Age spiritual shopping mart. Mine was one of about seventy different workshops being presented. The people in the parking lot or at lunch would say to each other, “Oh, what are you taking this weekend?” I hadn’t encountered anything like that for a long time.