Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (16 page)

Dzigar Kongtrül’s instruction also tells us to relate to our feelings “selflessly.” What does it mean to experience feelings selflessly? It means to experience them without solidifying them, without concretizing them, without clinging to them as
my
feelings, without projecting our interpretations onto them. It means to experience them without our personal trip. “Directly” is something we can train in, but “selflessly” dawns on us slowly over time. We can’t force it. To me, feeling emotions selflessly happens organically,
naturally, as a result of giving them our full attention free of story line. Emotion then becomes the doorway to egolessness—the doorway to experiencing the impermanence of a fixed self, the elusiveness of a fixed self, the questionableness of an unchanging, reliable “me.”

We discover selflessness gradually, but always the prerequisite is being present. When we can be present with an emotion without any distractions, we find out very quickly how insubstantial, how fleeting it is. What seemed so threatening, so solid, so lasting, begins to dissolve, giving us an immediate experience of impermanence, as the feelings arise, dwell, and then pass away. We feel an emotion and it threatens to take us over, but if we stay open to it and look directly at it, it either disappears altogether or morphs into something else. Fear might become sadness. Anger might become hopelessness. Joy might become vulnerability. When emotions start to pass away, we never know what they will become.

From staying present with impermanence and change, we become more confident, more fearless, more accepting of the groundlessness of the human condition. Our experience of selflessness deepens. If we’re brave enough to experience our emotions directly and egolessly, they lose their seductiveness. The Buddhist teacher Dipa Ma gave this instruction on relating to emotions selflessly: “When you feel happy, don’t get involved with the happiness. When you feel sad, don’t get involved with the sadness.” She went on to say, “Just be aware of them.”

When you’re no longer so entangled in your emotions, then you can experience their power directly. Their intensity, their dynamic energy, rather than scaring you, wakes you up. You don’t discover this by trying to transcend the bitterness of life. You discover it by taking your place in the
charnel ground with the confidence that this is where you belong. This is your home ground. This is where you wake up. With charnel-ground practice, you don’t hold back. In the process, you develop an appetite for wakefulness.

The basic form of charnel-ground practice is familiar. It’s essentially the same as the three-step practice. The difference is that in charnel-ground practice, what you’re working with, what you’re opening to, is far more challenging, far more intense. When you find yourself desperately wanting not to feel what you’re feeling, it’s probably time to do this practice.

Begin by coming fully into the present. Then, standing or sitting, take your place joyfully, fearlessly, and confidently in the midst of the chaos and pain of your life.

Feel your heart and sense that this unpleasant place is workable, that sanity exists here. Allow yourself to soften and become tender, more approachable, and more inquisitive.

Then take a leap into the next moment, “suddenly free from fixed mind,” as Chögyam Trungpa put it. Go forward with compassion and an open mind.

When you do charnel-ground practice for even a few seconds, something within you starts to shift. Turning toward the intensity of life and welcoming it not only gives you a direct experience of impermanence and death and selflessness, it also gives you an appreciation for the groundlessness of life, for life as it really is.

I know prison inmates who train in charnel-ground
practice every day. In that environment, fear of death is very real. One inmate told me that for almost a year he was afraid to go out on the yard because there were inmates who wanted to kill him. But then he came face-to-face with his fear and sat with it over and over in his cell. As a result, he felt as if a load had been lifted, and now he could just be open to whatever was going on with the other men and with himself. He could go out on the yard and sit down next to someone and say, “What’s happening with your life?” And the men would tell him how bad it was for them. His life began to feel like a paradise compared with what it was like for so many of the inmates. “We all die anyway,” he told me, “so I’m more interested in appreciating my life and helping however I can than in staying in my cell out of fear of losing my life.”

Only by completely, directly touching the reality of what’s going on inside us can we embrace the bitterness, the ruggedness, the fundamental groundlessness of life as readily as we embrace the sweetness. But when the outer situation is as unstable as it is today—financial insecurity, political unrest, joblessness, homelessness, escalating wars and chaos—it’s very hard to do this. So how do we keep our compassion and kindness in the middle of all of this turmoil? We turn toward it with a different attitude. Every day is an opportunity to practice in the charnel ground.

Whether we’re irritated because someone took our parking place or we’re overwhelmed by illness, debt, or flashbacks, it’s all an opportunity to wake up. The intensity of life nowadays is triggering high levels of anxiety and inner unrest, creating the ideal environment for charnel-ground practice. We can do it in small bites throughout the day, with the attitude that we’re standing confidently in the center of
our life and taking it as our training ground. This is the time and this is the place where we can enter sacred world.

It’s crucial for all of us to find a practice that will help us have a direct relationship with groundlessness, with impermanence and death—a practice that will enable us to touch in with the transitoriness of our thoughts, our emotions, our car, our shoes, the paint job on our house. We can get used to the fleeting quality of life in a natural, gentle, even joyful way, by watching the seasons change, watching day turning to night, watching children grow up, watching sand castles dissolve back into the sea. But if we don’t find some way to make friends with groundlessness and the ever-changing energy of life, then we’ll always be struggling to find stability in a shifting world. And old age and death will come as a terrible shock. No question, most of us are afraid of death, and there are downsides to growing old. You don’t hear as well, your back hurts, you forget things. Younger people, if they notice you at all, see you as worn out, useless, over the hill, so your self-image is eroded.

As we train in the charnel ground, we discover that death is not an enemy and that aging doesn’t have to be so daunting. I’ve found that age has lots of advantages. For one thing, I let go much more easily: knowing that it’s all passing so quickly makes everything I encounter exceedingly precious. I know that every taste, every smell, every day, every meeting, every parting, could be my last. When I see people bent over, shuffling along on walkers, I know what could be ahead for me. I’ve begun to identify with the very elderly so intimately that instead of recoiling, I feel immense compassion.

As I move closer to death, I’m inspired to keep training in charnel-ground practice by this prayer from Dzigar Kongtrül:

When the appearances of this life dissolve

May I with ease and great happiness,

Let go of all attachments to this life,

As a son or daughter returning home.

The third commitment opens us to reality straight up. We’re able to stay present with impermanence and death and with even the most frightening and humiliating moments of life. We’re no longer looking for something other than right now, no longer looking for an ideal world. In the middle of the charnel ground, in the midst of the mandala of our life, we can finally contemplate groundlessness, impermanence, old age, sickness, and death, and be at ease with the thought: “This is just how it is. My old shirt won’t last forever, and neither will I.”

Concluding Words

11

We Are Needed

A
T THE VERY LOWEST POINT
in my life, when I was feeling utterly despondent, I started to see owls in the daytime. I would be in total despair, then look up, and there, sitting on the woodpile or in a tree or on top of the cliff, would be an owl—and it would wink at me. It always made me laugh at myself and go forward with a complete shift in perspective.

When life is hard, making a commitment to sanity can provide this same sort of wake-up call. When you’re working with any of the Three Commitments, it will give you a fresh outlook precisely when you need it most—when you’re on the verge of crashing.

So I leave you with a question: Are you ready to make a commitment? Is the time right for you to commit to not causing harm, to benefiting others, to embracing the world just as it is? Are you willing to make any—or all—of these commitments for a lifetime or a year or a month or even a day? If you feel that you’re up for it, then start wherever you are and voice the commitment to yourself or to a friend or to a mentor or spiritual teacher. You make the commitment knowing that if you break it, you simply acknowledge that you broke it and start again.

Underlying the question of whether you’re ready to make these commitments is a deeper question: Are you ready to
embark on the journey of embracing the groundlessness of life? Are you ready to consider falling in love with the ever-shifting, never-certain reality of our situation? The Three Commitments as I’ve presented them are a support for losing our fear of groundlessness, for becoming intimate with groundlessness, for making friends with the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

The other morning I woke up worrying about a dear friend’s well-being. I felt it as an ache in my heart. When I got up and looked out my window, I saw such beauty that it stopped my mind. I just stood there with the heartbreak of my friend’s condition and saw trees heavy with fresh snow, a sky that was purple-blue, and a soft mist that covered the valley, turning the world into a vision of the Pure Land. Just then, a flock of yellow birds landed on the fence and looked at me, increasing my wonder further still.

I realized then what it means to hold pain in my heart and simultaneously be deeply touched by the power and magic of the world. Life doesn’t have to be one way or the other. We don’t have to jump back and forth. We can live beautifully with whatever comes—heartache and joy, success and failure, instability and change.

Groundlessness, uncertainty, insecurity, vulnerability
—these are words that ordinarily carry a negative connotation. We’re generally wary of these feelings and try to elude them in any way possible. But groundlessness isn’t something we need to avoid. The same feeling we find so troubling when we open to it can be experienced as a huge relief, as freedom from all restraints. It can be experienced as a mind so unbiased and relaxed that we feel expansive and joyful.

Shantideva experienced it like this:

When real and unreal both

Are absent from before the mind,

Nothing else remains for mind to do

But rest in perfect peace,

From concept free.

But how does this shift happen? How can something we dislike so much become so soothing? The feeling itself doesn’t change. We just stop resisting it. We stop avoiding the unavoidable. We stop struggling against the dynamic, ever-changing quality of life and instead settle back and enjoy it.