Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (13 page)

There’s a later slogan that says, “Don’t make gods into demons.” What it means is that you can take something good—tonglen practice and the lojong teachings, for example (that’s the idea of “gods”)—and turn it into a demon. You can just use anything to close your windows and doors.

You could do tonglen as one of my students once described to me. He said, “I do it, but I am very careful about the control button; I breathe in just enough so that it doesn’t really hurt or penetrate, and I breathe out just enough to convince myself, you know, that I’m doing the practice. But basically, nothing ever changes.” He was using tonglen just to smooth everything out and feel good. You can also use tonglen to feel like a hero: you’re just breathing in and out all over the place but your motivation isn’t to befriend and begin to penetrate those areas of yourself that you fear or reject. In fact, you hope the practice will just bolster your sense of confidence, bolster your sense of being in the right place at the right time, having chosen the right religion, and “I’m on the side of the good and all’s right with the world.” That doesn’t help much. Maybe you’ve noticed that sometimes you feel like you’re in a battle with reality and reality is always winning.

All of the teachings, and particularly the lojong teachings, are encouraging us, if we find ourselves struggling, to let that be a moment where we pause and wonder and begin to breathe in, trying to feel what’s underneath the struggle. If we find ourselves complaining, it isn’t that we have to say, “Oh, I’m bad because I’m struggling.” It’s not that it’s a sin to complain. We’re simply saying that the way to change the pattern is to begin to breathe in and connect with the heart, the soft spot that’s under all that protecting.

Karma is a difficult subject, but one of the reasons you are encouraged to work with what happens to you rather than blame it on others is that what happens is somehow a karmic result of things that you have done before. This kind of teaching on karma can easily be misunderstood. People get into a heavyduty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means they did something bad and they’re being punished. That’s not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need in order to open your heart. To the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you’re given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to learn how to open further.

I saw a cartoon that describes this. A head of iceberg lettuce is sitting in a garden saying, “Oh, no, how did I get in this vegetable garden again? I wanted to be a wildflower!” The caption reads, “Oscar is born again as a head of iceberg lettuce in order to overcome his fear of being eaten.” One can think from a bigger perspective than this whole notion of reward and punishment. You could see your life as an adult education course. Some of the curriculum you like and some you don’t like; some of what comes up you find workable, some you don’t. That’s the curriculum for attaining enlightenment. The question is, how do you work with it?

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. Your world seems less solid, more roomy and spacious. The burden lightens. In the beginning it might feel like sadness or a shaky feeling, accompanied by a lot of fear, but your willingness to feel the fear, to make fear your companion, is growing. You’re willing to get to know yourself at this deep level. After awhile this same feeling begins to turn into a longing to raze all the walls, a longing to be fully human and to live in your world without always having to shut down and close off when certain things come along. It begins to turn into a longing to be there for your friends when they’re in trouble, to be of real help to this poor, aching planet. Curiously enough, along with this longing and this sadness and this tenderness, there’s an immense sense of well-being, unconditional well-being, which doesn’t have anything to do with pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, hope or fear, disgrace or fame. It’s something that simply comes to you when you feel that you can keep your heart open.

15

Lighten Up

T
HE NEXT TWO SLOGANS
—“Always maintain only a joyful mind” and “If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained”—go hand in hand. The first is saying that if you regard everything that arises as fuel to wake up, you can remain cheerful. The second is saying that you are well trained if you
can
do that—use everything in your life to wake yourself up rather than put yourself to sleep—no matter what.

If you feel completely caught up and are spinning off into a misery scenario, the slogan “If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained” can remind you to start to work with tonglen—to breathe in the mishap or the misery as a way of developing compassion for yourself and as a way of beginning to understand other people’s pain as well. You can use the distraction to bring yourself back to the present moment, just as a horse rights itself after losing balance or skiers catch themselves just as they are about to fall. Being well trained means you can catch yourself and come back to the present.

When things are going well, that can also be a reminder Instead of habitually clinging to what’s delightful, you could become accustomed to giving it away, sending it out to others on the outbreath. This enables you always to maintain a joyful mind. It begins to ease away the burden of maintaining your own private happiness as well as your usual load of unhappy situations and minor irritations—the burden of ego.

On the other hand, sending out the joyful stuff is also difficult to do. As someone said, “I like doing the outbreath with this idea of sharing. Sharing is really nice, but giving it away? That means I wouldn’t have it anymore.” The outbreath and sharing what’s pleasant can be threatening. You don’t often feel willing to share or give away that pleasure.

There’s a lot of joy as your burden begins to lessen, and it comes from doing anything that begins to change the pattern of fearing and wanting to resist what’s unpleasant. Resistance is really what causes the pain; more than the anger itself, or the jealousy itself, it’s resistance that causes the pain. Anything that begins to lighten up that resistance helps us to relax and open and celebrate.

Sooner or later you will find yourself in a situation where you can’t change the outer circumstances at all, and you realize it all comes down to how you relate to things—whether you continue to struggle against everything that’s coming at you or you begin to work with things. “Always maintain only a joyful mind” can be very helpful to remember in such a situation.

Anything that helps us not to be so desperate about pleasure and not to fear its transitory nature is also introducing us to being at home in our world and being able to help other people. In popular songs you hear lines like “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” or “I’ve got plenty of nothing and nothing’s plenty for me.” “Great bliss arising from the experience of emptiness” is how it’s described in traditional Tibetan texts, which sounds somewhat remote from personal experience. However, all these words are saying the same thing: we practice and we live in order to be able to relax and lighten up and not make such a big deal about everything that happens—the successes and the failures, the rewards and the punishments.

If your principal witness (in “Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one”) is a judgmental authority figure, it might be hard to lighten up. Let’s say you’re meditating, but there’s this other “you” standing behind with a stick, saying, “You’re thinking again, you’re always thinking! Whack! There goes the tonglen bell and you didn’t practice tonglen for even a second! Smack!” You say to yourself, “I can’t do this. I’m hopeless. Everybody else seems to be doing fine, but I don’t seem to have any basic goodness.” Then you beat yourself up and forget all about gentleness, or if you remember, you say, “You’re not gentle! Whack!”

You hear a slogan like “Always maintain only a joyful mind,” and for the whole next two weeks you’re just hitting yourself over the head for never being joyful. That kind of witness is a bit heavy. So lighten up. Don’t make such a big deal. The key to feeling at home with your body, mind, and emotions, to feeling worthy to live on this planet, comes from being able to lighten up. This earnestness, this seriousness about everything in our lives—including practice—this goal-oriented, we’re-going-to-do-it-or-else attitude, is the world’s greatest killjoy. There’s no sense of appreciation because we’re so solemn about everything. In contrast, a joyful mind is very ordinary and relaxed.

Once on retreat I was reading some traditional text that talked about bliss and special experiences, and I began to feel wretched. I felt poverty-stricken about never having had any experiences that felt like bliss, clarity, or luminosity. I began to feel depressed that I didn’t measure up to any of these glowing words. Fortunately, I put that book down and picked up something simple about just being alive with who you are right now—nothing special, no big deal, ordinary: just keep your eyes open, keep your ears open, stay awake. Those simple instructions began to cheer me up, because I felt that I could follow them.

When your aspiration is to lighten up, you begin to have a sense of humor. Things just keep popping your serious state of mind. In addition to a sense of humor, a basic support for a joyful mind is curiosity, paying attention, taking an interest in the world around you. You don’t actually have to be happy. But being curious without a heavy judgmental attitude helps. If you
are
judgmental, you can even be curious about that.

Notice everything. Appreciate everything, including the ordinary. That’s how to click in with joyfulness or cheerfulness. Curiosity encourages cheering up. So does simply remembering to do something different. We are so locked into this sense of burden—Big Deal Joy and Big Deal Unhappiness—that it’s sometimes helpful just to change the pattern. Anything out of the ordinary will help, and tonglen is definitely something different. This practice is about repatterning ourselves, changing the basic pattern and unpatterning ourselves together. You can also just go to the window and look at the sky. You can splash cold water on your face, you can sing in the shower, you can go jogging—anything that’s against your usual pattern. That’s how things start to lighten up.

I just read a story about a woman who had been gloomy all her life. As she grew older, she got more irritable and difficult. Then she got cancer and for some peculiar reason—after an initial period of resistance and anger—instead of getting more gloomy, she began to cheer up. The more she fell apart, the happier she got. She kept saying she was glad that she had this time to enjoy her life, which she had not enjoyed up to the moment that she got sick. Finally, the day before she died, she went into a coma. Everybody in her family, who were coming to feel more and more fond of her after all those years of finding her to be a pain in the neck, gathered around her bed crying and looking gloomy, just as she used to look. Just before she died, she opened her eyes to see them all standing there, and she said, “Gosh, you all look so unhappy. Is something wrong?” She died laughing.

So, “Always maintain only a joyful mind” and “If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained” are implying that the best gift you can give yourself is to lighten up. One way to do that is to let distraction bring you back to the present moment. Another way is to be curious. In addition, when things are really heavy and you feel stuck in either your joy or your misery, just do something different to change the pattern. Tonglen is a good suggestion of what you could do.

16

Abandon Any Hope of Fruition

O
UR NEXT SLOGAN
is “Abandon any hope of fruition.” You could also say, “Give up all hope” or “Give up” or just “Give.” The shorter the better.

One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are.

One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not good enough. We think back to the past a lot, which maybe was better than now, or perhaps worse. We also think ahead quite a bit to the future—which we may fear—always holding out hope that it might be a little bit better than now. Even if now is going really well—we have good health and we’ve met the person of our dreams, or we just had a child or got the job we wanted—nevertheless there’s a deep tendency always to think about how it’s going to be later. We don’t quite give ourselves full credit for who we are in the present.

For example, it’s easy to hope that things will improve as a result of meditation, that we won’t have such bad tempers anymore or we won’t have fear anymore or people will like us more than they do now. Or maybe none of those things are problems for us, but we feel we aren’t spiritual enough. Surely we will connect with that awake, brilliant, sacred world that we are going to find through meditation. In everything we read—whether it’s philosophy or dharma books or psychology—there’s the implication that we’re caught in some kind of very small perspective and that if we just did the right things, we’d begin to connect with a bigger world, a vaster world, different from the one we’re in now.

One reason I wanted to talk about giving up all hope of fruition is because I’ve been meditating and giving dharma talks for some time now, but I find that I still have a secret passion for what it’s going to be like when—as they say in some of the classical texts—”all the veils have been removed.” It’s that same feeling of wanting to jump over yourself and find something that’s more awake than the present situation, more alert than the present situation. Sometimes this occurs at a very mundane level: you want to be thinner, have less acne or more hair. But somehow there’s almost always a subtle or not so subtle sense of disappointment, a sense of things not completely measuring up.