Comfortable With Uncertainty (7 page)

It’s easy to continue, even after years of practice, to harden into a position of anger and indignation. However, if we can contact the vulnerability and rawness of resentment or rage or whatever it is, a bigger perspective can emerge. In the moment that we choose to abide with the energy instead of acting it out or repressing it, we are training in equanimity, in thinking bigger than right and wrong. This is how all the four limitless qualities—love, compassion, joy, and equanimity—evolve from limited to limitless: we practice catching our mind hardening into fixed views and do our best to soften. Through softening, the barriers come down.

41

Be Where You Are

Y
OU CAN CULTIVATE
the four limitless qualities of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity by learning to relax where you are. There’s no problem with being where you are right now. Even if you feel loving-kindness and compassion for only one sentient being, that is a good place to start. Simply acknowledging, respecting, and appreciating the warmth is a way to encourage its growth. We can be where we are and at the same time leave wide open the possibility of being able to expand far beyond where we are now in the course of our lifetime.

Expansion never happens through greediness or pushing or striving. It happens through some combination of learning to relax where you already are and, at the same time, keeping the possibility open that your capacity, my capacity, the capacity of all beings, is limitless. As we continue to relax where we are, our opening expands. This is the potential of a human being. This is the gift of a human birth. When we say, “May I have happiness,” or, “May I be free of suffering,” or, “May any individual have happiness and be free of suffering,” we are saying that it is the potential of a human being to expand our capacity for opening and caring limitlessly. It starts out with feeling love or compassion for one being. It can expand to include more and more beings, until it reaches the full human capacity for connecting with love and compassion, which is limitless, free-flowing warmth—dynamic, alive, connected energy with no reference point. This is our human potential: to connect with the true state of affairs. It begins with being where we are.

42

Tonglen and Fearlessness

I
N THE BUDDHIST TEACHINGS
, in the Shambhala teachings, and in any tradition that teaches us how to live well, we are encouraged to cultivate fearlessness. How do we do that? Certainly the sitting practice of meditation is one way, because through it we come to know ourselves so completely and with such gentleness. Tonglen (sending-and-taking) practice also helps cultivate fearlessness. When you do this practice for some time, you begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.

After I did tonglen for the first time, I was amazed to see how I had been subtly using sitting meditation to try to avoid being hurt, to try to avoid depression, discouragement, or bad feelings of any kind. Unknown to myself, I had secretly hoped that if I did the practice I wouldn’t have to feel any pain anymore. When we do tonglen, we invite the pain in. Tonglen takes courage to do, and interestingly enough, it also gives us a lot of courage, because we let it penetrate our armor. It’s a practice that allows us to feel less burdened and less cramped, a practice that shows us how to love without conditions.

Negativity and resentment occur because we’re trying to cover over the soft spot of bodhichitta. In fact, it’s
because
we are tender and deeply touched that we do all this shielding. It’s because we have this genuine heart of sadness to begin with that we even start shielding. In tonglen practice we become willing to begin to expose this most tender part of ourselves.

43

Tonglen: The Key to Realizing Interconnectedness

P
EOPLE GENERALLY
eat up the teachings, but when it comes to doing tonglen, they say, “Oh, it sounded good, but I didn’t realize you actually meant it.” In its essence, this practice is: when anything is painful or undesirable, breathe it in. In other words, you don’t resist it. You surrender to yourself, you acknowledge who you are, you honor yourself. As unwanted feelings and emotions arise, you actually breathe them in and connect with what all humans feel. We all know what it is to feel pain in its many guises.

You breathe in for yourself, in the sense that pain is a personal and real experience, but simultaneously there’s no doubt that you’re developing your kinship with all beings. If you can know it in yourself, you can know it in everyone. If you’re in a jealous rage and you have the courage to breathe it in rather than blame it on someone else, the arrow you feel in your heart will tell you that there are people all over the world who are feeling exactly what you’re feeling. This practice cuts through culture, economic status, intelligence, race, religion. People everywhere feel pain—jealousy, anger, being left out, feeling lonely. Everybody feels it in the painful way you feel it. The story lines vary, but the underlying feeling is the same for us all.

By the same token, if you feel some sense of delight—if you connect with what for you is inspiring, opening, relieving, relaxing—you breathe it out, you give it away, you send it out to everyone else. Again, it’s very personal. It starts with
your
feeling of delight,
your
feeling of connecting with a bigger perspective,
your
feeling of relief or relaxation. If you’re willing to drop the story line, you feel exactly what all other human beings feel. It’s shared by all of us. In this way if we do the practice personally and genuinely, it awakens our sense of kinship with all beings.

44

The Four Stages of Tonglen

Y
OU CAN FORMALLY
practice tonglen within a session of sitting meditation. For example, if you are sitting for an hour, you could practice tonglen during the middle twenty minutes. Tonglen practice has four stages:

1. Rest your mind for a second or two in a state of openness or stillness. This is called flashing absolute bodhichitta, or suddenly opening to the basic spaciousness and clarity of the awakened heart.
   
2. Work with texture. Breathe in a feeling of hot, dark, and heavy—a sense of claustrophobia—and breathe out a feeling of cool, bright, and light—a sense of freshness. Breathe in through all the pores of your body and radiate out completely, through all the pores of your body. Do this until your visualization feels synchronized with your in and out-breaths.
   
3. Now contemplate any painful situation that’s real to you. For example, you can breathe in the hot, dark, constricted feeling of sadness that you feel, and breathe out a light, cool sense of joy or space or whatever might provide relief.
   
4. Widen the circle of compassion by connecting with all those who feel this kind of pain, and extending the wish to help everyone.
   

45

Start Where You Are

W
HAT WE’RE WORKING
with in basic meditation practice—and more explicitly in tonglen practice—is the middle ground between acting out and repressing. We learn to see our thoughts of hatred, lust, poverty, loathing, whatever they might be. We learn to identify the thoughts as “thinking,” let them go, and begin to contact the texture of energy that lies beneath them. We gradually begin to realize how profound it is just to let those thoughts go, not rejecting them, not repressing them. We discover how to hold our seat and feel completely what’s underneath the story line of craving or aversion or jealousy or feeling wretched about ourselves, underneath all that hopelessness and despair. We can begin to feel the energy of our heart, our body, our neck, our head, our stomach—what’s underneath the story lines. We find that there’s something extremely soft, which is called bodhichitta. If we can relate directly with that, then all the rest is our wealth.

In postmeditation, when the poisons of passion, aggression, or ignorance arise, the instruction is to drop the story line. Instead of acting out or repressing, we use the poison as an opportunity to feel our heart, to feel the wound, and to connect with others who suffer in the same way. We can use the poison as an opportunity to contact bodhichitta. In this way, the poison already is the medicine. When we don’t act out and we don’t repress, our passion, our aggression, and our ignorance become our wealth. We don’t have to transform anything. Simply letting go of the story line is what it takes, which is not all that easy. That light touch of acknowledging what we’re thinking and letting it go is the key to touching in with the wealth of bodhichitta. With all the messy stuff, no matter how messy it is, just start where you are—not tomorrow, not later, not yesterday when you were feeling better—but now. Start now, just as you are.

46

Getting to Know Fear

W
E CANNOT
be in the present moment and run our story lines at the same time. Experiment with this for yourself, and watch how it changes you. Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear. In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present, without a reference point, experiences groundlessness. That’s when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.

What we’re talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye—not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking. The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we’re going to be continually humbled. Fear is a natural reaction of moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.

47

Recognize Suffering

D
ISAPPOINTMENT
, embarrassment, and all the places where we cannot feel good are a sort of death. We’ve just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it together and feel that we’re on top of things. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.

Reaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It’s actually a sign of health that when we meet the place we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. But usually we don’t take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us. Things like disappointment and anxiety are messages telling us that we’re about to go into unknown territory.

When we get what we don’t want, when we don’t get what we do want, when we become ill, when we’re getting old, when we’re dying—when we see any of these things in our lives—we can recognize suffering as suffering. Then we can be curious, notice, and be mindful of our reactions. Our suffering is so grounded in our fear of impermanence. Our pain is so rooted in our lopsided view of reality. Who ever got the idea that we could have pleasure without pain? It’s promoted rather widely in this world, and we buy it. But pain and pleasure go together; they are inseparable. They can be celebrated. They are ordinary. Birth is painful and delightful. Death is painful and delightful. Everything that ends is also the beginning of something else. Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.

48

Slogan: “Change your attitude, but remain natural”

T
HE FUNDAMENTAL
change of attitude is to breathe the undesirable in and breathe the desirable out. In contrast, the attitude that is epidemic on the planet is to push it away if it’s painful and to hold on to it tightly if it’s pleasant.

The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of
working with
rather than
struggling
against
. What I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff. Then when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out
there
, you relate to it based on having worked with loving-kindness for yourself. This nondualistic approach is true to the heart because it’s based on our kinship with each other. We know what to say without condescension to someone else who is suffering, because we have experienced closing down, shutting off, being angry, hurt, or rebellious, and have made a relationship with those things in ourselves.

This change in attitude doesn’t happen overnight; it happens gradually, at our own speed. If we have the aspiration to stop resisting those parts of ourselves that we find unacceptable and instead begin to breathe them in, this gives us much more space. We come to know every part of ourselves, with no more monsters in the closet, no more demons in the cave. We have some sense of turning on the lights and looking at ourselves honestly and with great compassion. This is the fundamental change of attitude—this working with pain and pleasure in a revolutionary and courageous way.

49

Loving-Kindness and Tonglen

T
HE THINGS
that drive us nuts have enormous energy. That is why we fear them. For example, you are timid: you are afraid to look someone in the eye. It takes a lot of energy to maintain that. It’s the way that you hold yourself together. In tonglen practice, you have the chance to own that pattern completely, not blaming anybody, and to ventilate it with the out-breath. Then you might better understand that when other people look grim, perhaps it isn’t because they hate you but because they also feel timid. In this way, tonglen practice is a practice of making friends with yourself as well as a practice of compassion for others.