Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (3 page)

Acknowledge the feeling, give it your full, compassionate, even welcoming attention, and even if it’s only for a few seconds, drop the story line about the feeling. This allows you to have a direct experience of it, free of interpretation. Don’t fuel it with concepts or opinions about whether it’s good or bad. Just be present with the sensation. Where is it located in your body? Does it remain the same for very long? Does it shift and change?

Ego
or
fixed identity
doesn’t just mean we have a fixed idea about ourselves. It also means that we have a fixed idea about everything we perceive. I have a fixed idea about you; you have a fixed idea about me. And once there is that feeling of separation, it gives rise to strong emotions. In Buddhism, strong emotions like anger, craving, pride, and jealousy are known as
kleshas
—conflicting emotions that cloud the mind. The
kleshas
are our vehicle for escaping groundlessness, and therefore every time we give in to them, our preexisting habits are reinforced. In Buddhism, going around and around, recycling the same patterns, is called samsara. And samsara equals pain.

We keep trying to get away from the fundamental ambiguity of being human, and we can’t. We can’t escape it any more than we can escape change, any more than we can escape death. The cause of our suffering is our reaction to the reality of no escape: ego clinging and all the trouble that stems from it, all the things that make it difficult for us to be comfortable in our own skin and get along with one another.

If the way to deal with those feelings is to stay present
with them without fueling the story line, then it begs the question:
How
do we get in touch with the fundamental ambiguity of being human in the first place? In fact, it’s not difficult, because underlying uneasiness is usually present in our lives. It’s pretty easy to recognize but not so easy to interrupt. We may experience this uneasiness as anything from slight edginess to sheer terror. Anxiety makes us feel vulnerable, which we generally don’t like. Vulnerability comes in many guises. We may feel off balance, as if we don’t know what’s going on, don’t have a handle on things. We may feel lonely or depressed or angry. Most of us want to avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, so we’ll do almost anything to get away from them.

But if, instead of thinking of these feelings as bad, we could think of them as road signs or barometers that tell us we’re in touch with groundlessness, then we would see the feelings for what they really are: the gateway to liberation, an open doorway to freedom from suffering, the path to our deepest well-being and joy. We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug of shenpa when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the story line. Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises? This is the challenge. This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

2

Life without the Story Line

M
Y GRANDDAUGHTER
’
S UNIVERSITY
professor asked her students to leave their cell phones behind when they came to class. My granddaughter was amazed at how much more present and alert she was as a result. She observed that her whole generation was getting in-depth, intensive training in being distracted. To me, this underscores how important it is for her generation, and the generations that follow, and the generations that came before, to counter this trend by getting intensive training in staying present.

When you practice staying present, one thing you’ll quickly discover is how persistent the story line is. Traditionally, in the Buddhist texts, our tendencies with their habitual story lines are described as seeds in the unconscious. When the right causes and conditions come together, these preexisting propensities pop up like flowers in the springtime. It’s helpful to contemplate that it’s these propensities and not what triggers them that are the real cause of our suffering.

I had a dream about my ex-husband: I was just settling down for a quiet evening at home when he arrived with six unknown guests and then disappeared, leaving me to take care of them. I was furious. When I woke up, I thought ruefully, “So much for being finished with anger: I guess the propensity is still there.” Then I started thinking about an
incident that had occurred the previous day, and I began to get furious all over again. This completely stopped me in my tracks, and I realized that waking or sleeping, it’s just the same. It isn’t the content of our movie that needs our attention, it’s the projector. It isn’t the current story line that’s the root of our pain; it’s our propensity to be bothered in the first place.

The propensity to feel sorry for ourselves, the propensity to be jealous, the propensity to get angry—our habitual, all-too-familiar emotional responses are like seeds that we just keep watering and nurturing. But every time we pause and stay present with the underlying energy, we stop reinforcing these propensities and begin to open ourselves to refreshingly new possibilities.

As you respond differently to an old habit, you may start to notice changes. In the past when you got angry, it might have taken you three days to cool down, but if you keep interrupting the angry thoughts, you may get to the point at which it takes only a day to drop the anger. Eventually, only hours or even one and a half minutes. You’re starting to be liberated from suffering.

It’s important to realize that interrupting thoughts isn’t the same as repressing them. Repression is denial of what’s happening, which only sends the thoughts underground where they can fester. At the same time, we don’t want to keep chasing after the thoughts and getting hooked by them. Interrupting thoughts is somewhere between clinging to them and pushing them away. It’s a way of allowing the thoughts to come and go, to arise and pass, to not be such a big deal.

The practice is to train in not following the thoughts, not in getting rid of thought altogether. That would be impossible.
You may have thought-free moments and, as your meditation practice deepens, longer expanses of time that are thought free, but thoughts always come back. That’s the nature of mind. You don’t have to make thoughts the villain, however. You can just train in interrupting their momentum. The basic instruction is to let the thoughts go—or to label them “thinking”—and stay with the immediacy of your experience.

Everything in you will want to do the habitual thing, will want to pursue the story line. The story line is associated with certainty and comfort. It bolsters your very limited, static sense of self and holds out the promise of safety and happiness. But the promise is a false one; any happiness it brings is only temporary. The more you practice not escaping into the fantasy world of your thoughts and instead contacting the felt sense of groundlessness, the more accustomed you’ll become to experiencing emotions as simply sensation—free of concept, free of story line, free of fixed ideas of bad and good.

Still, the tendency to scramble for security will try to reassert itself and gain some ground. We can’t underestimate the very real (and very fleeting) comfort it provides. The meditation teacher Tara Brach, in her book
Radical Acceptance,
describes a practice she uses at such times. It’s based on the Buddha’s encounters with his nemesis, Mara, a demon who kept appearing to tempt the Buddha to give up his spiritual resolve and go back to his old unaware ways. Psychologically, Mara represents the false promise of happiness and security offered by our habitual responses. So whenever Mara appeared, often with beautiful women or other temptations in tow, the Buddha would say, “I see you, Mara. I know you’re a trickster. I know what you’re trying
to do.” And then he’d invite his nemesis to sit down for tea. When we’re tempted to go back to our habitual ways of avoiding groundlessness, we can look temptation in the eye and say, “I see you, Mara,” then sit down with the fundamental ambiguity of being human without any judgment of right or wrong.

In a book I read recently, the author talked about humans as transitional beings—beings who are neither fully caught nor fully free but are in the process of awakening. I find it helpful to think of myself this way. I’m in the process of becoming, in the process of evolving. I’m neither doomed nor completely free, but I’m creating my future with every word, every action, every thought. I find myself in a very dynamic situation with unimaginable potential. I have all the support I need to simply relax and be with the transitional, in-process quality of my life. I have all I need to engage in the process of awakening.

Rather than living a life of resistance and trying to disprove our basic situation of impermanence and change, we could contact the fundamental ambiguity and welcome it. We don’t like to think of ourselves as fixed and unchanging, but emotionally we’re very invested in it. We simply don’t want the frightening, uneasy discomfort of feeling groundless. But we don’t have to close down when we feel groundlessness in any form. Instead, we can turn toward it and say, “This is what freedom from fixed mind feels like. This is what freedom from closed-heartedness feels like. This is what unbiased, unfettered goodness feels like. Maybe I’ll get curious and see if I can go beyond my resistance and experience the goodness.”

Buddhism holds that the true nature of the mind is as vast as the sky and that thoughts and emotions are like clouds
that, from our vantage point, obscure it. We’re taught that if we want to experience the boundlessness of the sky, we’ll need to get curious about those clouds. When we look deeply into the clouds, they fall apart, and there’s the expanse of sky. It never went anywhere. It has always been here, momentarily hidden from us by the fleeting, shifting clouds.

The journey of awakening takes discipline and courage. Letting go of our cloud-like thoughts and emotions is by no means habitual at first. The thoughts and emotions may make it difficult for us to contact the openness of our minds, but they’re like old friends who have accompanied us for as long as we can remember, and we’re very resistant to saying good-bye. But each time you begin to meditate, you can decide that you’re going to see if you can let the thoughts go and be right here with the immediacy of your experience. Perhaps you can be right here for only five seconds today, but any progress in the direction of nondistraction is positive.

Chögyam Trungpa had an image for our tendency to obscure the openness of our being; he called it “putting makeup on space.” We can aspire to experience the space without the makeup. Staying open and receptive for even a short time starts to interrupt our deep-seated resistance to feeling what we’re feeling, to staying present where we are.

Believing in the story line—identifying with the interpretations we put on our experience—is deeply ingrained in us. We assert our opinions as if they were indisputable: “Jane really is intrinsically horrible. I know this for a fact.” “Ralph is intrinsically charming. There is absolutely no doubt about it.” The way to weaken the habit of clinging to fixed ideas and contact the fluidity of thoughts and emotions is to shift your focus to a wider perspective. Instead of getting caught in the drama, see if you can feel the dynamic energy of the
thoughts and emotions. See if you can experience the space around the thoughts: experience how they arise in space, dwell for a while, and then return into space. If you don’t suppress the thoughts and emotions and don’t run with them, then you find yourself in an interesting place. The place of not rejecting or justifying is right in the middle of nowhere. It is here that you can finally embrace what you’re feeling. It is here that you can look out and see the sky.

As you’re meditating, memories of something distressing that happened in the past may bubble up. It can be quite freeing to see all of that. But if you revisit the memory of something distressing over and over, rehashing what happened and obsessing on the story line, it becomes part of your static identity. You’re just strengthening your propensity to experience yourself as the one who was wronged, as the victim. You’re strengthening a preexisting propensity to blame others—your parents and anyone else—as the ones who wronged you. Continuing to recycle the old story line is a way of avoiding fundamental ambiguity. Emotions stay on and on when we fuel them with words. It’s like pouring kerosene on an ember to make it blaze. Without the words, without the repetitive thoughts, the emotions don’t last longer than one and a half minutes.