How to Meditate (9 page)

Take a few seconds to conjure up or get in touch with an unpleasant emotion. I would not recommend starting with something extremely traumatic! We all have totally incapacitating unpleasant memories or feelings. Get in touch with something along the lines of how miffed you were when someone took the last cookie. How upset you were when so-and-so interrupted you when you were talking. Begin with a mild irritation. By working with the “lightweight emotions,” we build up strength, just like working out at the gym. You start where you are, and then you work out and your strength grows. So by using lightweight emotions (irritation or mild anxiety), believe it or not, it’s building up your strength to work with really difficult emotions.

exercise

USING MEMORY AS A SUPPORT IN MEDITATION

Sit for a minute and find a painful memory that you can use for this exercise. Maybe it is a memory of being criticized. Sometimes people use a memory or sometimes people use a visual image of something that provokes them.

Next, find a pleasant emotion. Retrieve a memory or a visual image that evokes a pleasant emotion, such as being praised. Just for a moment, think of that. Have a memory or a visual image that feels positive.

With a painful emotion and a pleasurable emotion in mind, begin your meditation session. Place your mind on the breath, first allowing your breath to be the support. Let your breath be your friend for training in being present. If your mind wanders off, which it usually does, just come back to the breath. Do that for a short time, perhaps five minutes, and then rest in the open awareness.

Recall that anything can arise in space and be the object or support for your training. So now mentally fabricate or, using a memory or a visual, bring forward in your awareness the emotion that’s unpleasant and place your attention on the emotion. See if you can contact the texture of the feeling. If someone asked you to describe the feeling of the emotion, how would you describe it? Fully put your attention on the emotion itself, just as it is.

Some people find it helpful to feel for the emotion’s temperature or texture, or its location in the body. For some people this is very easy; for others it is quite difficult. Just do your best to be present with the unpleasant emotion. Do that for a short time, and then once again rest in open awareness. If at any point your mind wanders off, gently bring it back without the labels of “right” and “wrong.” Often our emotions take us into the story or the thoughts. When the thoughts arise, notice them, notice the thinking, then bring yourself to the feeling of the emotion. There, in the immediacy of the emotion, feeling into it, lies the possibility of moving into openness and acceptance. You’ll find that this is quite liberating and eventually quite settling.

I encourage you to get curious about your emotions and to allow yourself to go into them so you can experience this opening. This is how the heart opens. This is how compassion arises—compassion for oneself and compassion for others.

Next, repeat the same exercise above, this time recalling a pleasant emotion.

No amount of talking on the part of a teacher is going to stop you from following the trail of your emotions as it moves from emotion to thought to escalating emotion. You need to go into your emotions; you need to sit in meditation with them yourself so you can begin to realize how they are obstructing you. Emotions are like the fluid, dynamic, living quality of water, but we freeze our emotions into ice by pushing them away or letting them escalate. We turn our emotions into frozen objects and invest them with truth, and as a result they have so much power over us. So we train again and again in coming back to the object of meditation as a way of interrupting that fixated quality. The grasping and fixation—that’s really what we’re interrupting.

I hope that as the years go on you become more and more motivated to do this whenever you notice that your monkey mind has been trailing off in dozens of directions. I hope that you feel strongly motivated to come back and uncover the true nature of mind. You’re allowing yourself to connect with the natural, open state of your mind, and you’re beginning to dissolve this ancient habitual pattern of fixating and grasping. Meditation helps us to interrupt this fixation with our emotions in a very nonaggressive, gentle, friendly way, because we invite relaxation and spaciousness into this process. We learn to recognize the fluidity of our emotions by going into them and letting them pass through like clouds in the sky.

15

GETTING OUR HANDS DIRTY

I
was reading a transcript of a talk by Ponlop Rinpoche, and he said, “In the process of uncovering buddha nature, in the process of uncovering our open, unfixated quality of our mind, we have to be willing to get our hands dirty.” In other words, he was saying that we need to be willing to work with our disturbing emotions, the ones that feel entirely dark.

We all have emotional experiences that feel terrifying, and in order to experience our natural state, we have to be willing to experience these emotions—to actually experience our ego and our ego clinging. This may feel disturbing and negative, or even insane. Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, would like meditation to be a chill-out session where we don’t have to relate to unpleasantness. Actually, a lot of people have the misunderstanding that this is what meditation is about. They believe meditation includes everything except that which feels bad. And if something does feel bad, you’re supposed to label it “thinking” and shove it away or hit it on the head with a mallet. When you feel even the slightest hint of panic that you’re about to feel or experience something unpleasant, you use the label “thinking” as a way to repress it, and you rush back to the object of meditation, hoping that you never have to go into this uncomfortable place.

But Ponlop Rinpoche added something really important to this statement. He said that without having a direct experience of our emotions, we can never touch the heart of buddha nature. We can never actually hear the message of awakening. The only way out, so to speak, is through. But what does this word “experiencing” mean? And how can we experience emotions? How can we experience this negative, disturbing, unsettling stuff that we generally avoid? How do we get our hands dirty with them?

Ponlop Rinpoche says, “It’s only by really tasting your experience of emotions that you get a taste of enlightenment.” Buddha nature and the natural state are not just made up of happy, sweet emotions; buddha nature includes everything. It’s the calm, and the disturbed, and the roiled up, and the still; it’s the bitter and the sweet, the comfortable and the uncomfortable. Buddha nature includes opening to all of these things, and it’s found in the midst of all of them.

Because we perceive dualistically and have this black-or-white thinking where we label things either “good” or “bad,” we shut down when strong energy arises. We associate this strong energy with different thoughts—memories of the past or fantasies about the future—and then this somewhat indescribable thing happens, which we call “feeling an emotion.” Emotions, in essence, are just pure energy, but because of dualistic perception we identify the emotion as “me,” and it gets very locked in. The energy gets frozen. Trungpa Rinpoche once said, “Emotions are composed of energy, which can be likened to water, and a dualistic thought process, which could be likened to pigment or paint. When energy and thought are mixed together, they become vivid and colorful emotions. Concept gives the energy a particular location, a sense of relationship, which makes the emotions vivid and strong. Fundamentally, the reason why emotions are discomforting, painful, frustrating is because our relationship to the emotions is not quite clear.”

This is to say that energy itself is not a problem. We always associate our emotions with thoughts—we’re scared of something or we’re angry at somebody, or we’re feeling lonely or ashamed or lustful in relationship with either ourselves or somebody else. Our emotions have a lot of mental conversation—and, in my experience, it is often hard to discern between what is the thought and what is the emotion. In any given sitting period; in any given half hour of our lives, there are a lot of things that come and go. But we don’t need to try so hard to sort it all out. We don’t have to attach so much meaning to what arises, and we also don’t have to identify with our emotions so strongly. All we need to do is allow ourselves to experience the energy—and in time it will move through you. It will. But, we need to experience the emotion—not think about the emotion. It’s the same thing that I’ve been talking about with the breath: experiencing the breath going in and out, trying to find a way to breathe in and out without thinking about the breath or conceptualizing the breath or watching the breath.

I often describe this as having a “felt sense” of our emotions. This term “felt sense” may not really be the right term for you. For instance, you could have an experience of dread; you likely carry a story line about being afraid of something that’s about to happen. But if there is a way that you can interrupt the conversation through your meditation training, even for a few moments, then you can have an actual experience of dread—a nonverbal experience. You can allow yourself to become physically aware of dread. Feel it; feel the clenching and tightness. It can even go deeper than that: you might have a textural experience of dread as tingly or hot, a coldness or sharpness in your chest.

One of my first experiences of really feeling an emotion was very interesting. I was in a period of a lot of distress that I couldn’t get away from. This happens in our life, frequently. The person who was triggering me wasn’t going away. It was at the abbey, where I live. And we had to live with each other and in pretty close quarters, and what was being triggered were old memories and conditioning. This is often the case with strong emotions. There’s a lot locked in us. It can be quite irrational. It’s like we’re dogs who hear certain sounds and freak out. We see a certain facial expression, or someone treats us in a certain way, or there’s just the right tone of voice, or someone reminds us of something, and out of the blue there’s this whole felt sense of dread or anger or deep sadness. Usually we’re not even aware of it; we’re simply reacting the way we always have.

In this particular instance, what was being triggered for me was a feeling of helplessness, because this woman disliked me intensely and wouldn’t talk to me about it. The situation was bringing up feelings of powerlessness, of not being able to get things under control, of not being able to make everything all right. I couldn’t get her to like me, and I couldn’t even get her to talk about it. There was no way that my usual strategies were going to work, so I was just naked with this reoccurring dread. I met her in the halls constantly; she’d walk by coldly and, boy, it would bring up what felt like centuries of conditioning and perceived hurts.

I thought to myself, “This is my big chance. Maybe if I really go into this, I won’t ever have this issue come up again in this lifetime or any other lifetime.” So one night I went to the meditation hall. I sat all night long because I was in so much pain and I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t think much at all, because I was in so much pain. Sometimes pain completely knocks thoughts out; you’re sitting in the pain, and it’s like you’re speechless at all levels.

As I sat, I began to have this quality of experiencing what I was going through with this woman. I had a body memory of being a very little child, but it wasn’t like I was remembering a traumatic experience or anything. I just realized—at a cellular level—that my entire ego structure, my entire personality, was designed never to go to this particular feeling. I began to experience a deep feeling of inadequacy, like I wasn’t OK. I realized that what I was experiencing was a complete death to ego.

From that felt experience, I began to realize the power of getting sidetracked with words, of getting sidetracked with thoughts about our emotions. We get completely sidetracked with our strategies, which are always designed to move away from the felt experience. So whether it’s a humdinger of an emotion, a kind of core pain to our ego structure such as mine was, or whether it’s any strong emotion or even a more mild emotion, it’s so easy for us to get stuck and wrapped up in the story and thoughts around the emotion. From there, the emotions escalate and enslave us.