Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (17 page)

The key to compassionate action is this: everybody needs someone to be there for them, simply to be there.

A friend was severely burned and disfigured. Later she was able to have plastic surgery to improve her looks, but there was a long time when it was difficult to look at her. This was a time of intense isolation. The nurses would just pop into the room and say cheery things and then get out of there as fast as they could. The doctors would march in and say efficient things and look at her charts, but not at her. All who encountered her kept their distance because the sight of her was too troubling, too disturbing. This was even true of her family and friends. People made their duty calls, but there was some sense of not wanting to relate with the horror of this disfigured person. Finally some hospice people started to come. They would sit there and hold her hand, just be there. They didn’t know what to say or what she really needed, but they weren’t afraid of her, and she realized that what people really need is for others not to be afraid of them and not to distance themselves from them.

That’s what tonglen provides—a support for us just to be there with another human being and try to communicate. Sometimes there’s nothing to be said and nothing to be done. Then the deepest communication of all is just to be there.

The practice goes further. We start with the self, extend out to situations where compassion naturally arises, move out further to this area of neutrals, and then we move to enemies. “Be grateful to every Juan.” To be truthful, probably no one in this room feels ready to do tonglen for an enemy. Just the word
enemy
is a problem, a label with a lot of emotion behind it, a lot of anger behind it, and a lot of soft spot behind it. Basically you have to start where you are with your loathing or whatever it is you feel, but with an aspiration to widen the circle of compassion.

I’ve found in my own history of working with this practice of awakening bodhichitta that the circle of compassion widens at its own speed and widens spontaneously; it’s not something you can make happen. It’s definitely not something you can fake. But I guess there’s a little bit of encouragement to at least experiment with faking it occasionally by seeing what happens when you try to do tonglen for your enemy. There’s a lot of encouragement just to try this and see what happens when your enemy is standing in front of you or you’re intentionally bringing up the memory of your enemy in order to do tonglen in the meditation hall. Think of this simple instruction: what would it take to be able to communicate with my enemy? What would it take to be able to have my enemy hear what I’m trying to say, and what would it take for me to be able to hear what he or she is trying to say to me? How to communicate from the heart is the essence of what tonglen is about.

You can extend even further to all sentient beings, which involves seeing that this practice is extraordinarily vast. Of course, we could use the notion of “all sentient beings” to distance ourselves from pain, to make the immediate, relative situation more abstract and far away. Someone said to me in all seriousness, “I have a very easy time doing tonglen for all sentient beings, but I have a little trouble doing it for my husband.” Doing tonglen for all sentient beings doesn’t have to be separate from doing it for yourself and your immediate situation. That’s the point that has been made again and again. When you connect with your own suffering, reflect that countless beings at this very moment are feeling exactly what you feel. Their story line is different, but the feeling of pain is the same. When you do the practice both for all sentient beings and for yourself, you begin to realize that self and other are not actually different.

20

The Big Squeeze

I
F WE WANT
to communicate and we have a strong aspiration to help others—on the level of social action, on the level of our family, at work in our community, or we just want to be there for people when they need us—then sooner or later we’re going to experience the big squeeze. Our ideals and the reality of what’s really happening don’t match. We feel as if we’re between the fingers of a big giant who is squeezing us. We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

There is often a discrepancy between our ideals and what we actually encounter. For instance, with raising children, we have a lot of good ideas, but sometimes it’s very challenging to put together all the good ideas with the way our children really are, there at the breakfast table with food all over themselves. Or with meditation, have you noticed how difficult it is to actually feel emotions without getting totally swept away by them, or how difficult it is simply to cultivate friendliness toward yourself when you’re feeling completely miserable or panicked or caught up?

There’s a discrepancy between your inspiration and the situation as it presents itself, the immediacy of the situation. It’s the rub between those two things—the squeeze between reality and vision—that causes you to grow up, to wake up to be 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate.

The big squeeze is one of the most productive places on the spiritual path and in particular in this journey of awakening the heart. It’s worth talking about because when we find ourselves in that place again and again, usually we want to run away; sometimes we want to give up the whole thing. It’s like “burn out”: it feels extremely uncomfortable and you can’t wiggle out of it. It’s like a dog that gets its teeth in your arm and you just can’t shake it off. Times of the big squeeze feel like crisis periods. We have the aspiration to wake up and to help and at the same time it doesn’t seem to work out on our terms. It feels impossible for us to buy our situation and also impossible to throw it out. Being caught in the big squeeze humbles you, and at the same time, it has great vision. This is the interesting part—it softens you and yet it has a big perspective.

Through meditation practice we learn not to reject, but also not to grasp. This is the same paradox that we are presented with in our lives. It’s not so much that you do or don’t reject, it’s more that sometimes you find that you can’t do either or that you do both at the same time.

I was invited to teach in a situation with the Sawang, Trungpa Rinpoche’s eldest son, in which it wasn’t exactly clear what my status was. Sometimes I was treated as a big deal who should come in through a special door and sit in a special seat. Then I’d think, “Okay, I’m a big deal.” I’d start running with that idea and come up with big-deal notions about how things should be, and then I’d get the messages back, “Oh, no, no, no. You should just sit on the floor and mix with everybody and be one of the crowd.” Okay. So now the message was that I should just be ordinary, not set myself up or be the teacher. But as soon as I was getting comfortable with being humble, I would be asked to do some special something or other that only big deals did. This was a painful experience because I was always being insulted and humiliated by my own expectations. As soon as I was sure how it should be, so I could feel secure, I would get a message that it should be the other way.

Finally I said to the Sawang, “This is really hurting. I just don’t know who I’m supposed to be,” and he said, “Well, you have to learn to be big and small at the same time.” I think that’s the point. We can always get comfortable being either big
or
small, either right
or
wrong.

Although we think that wrong is bad, if we get into the habit of thinking that we are wrong, that can be quite comfortable too.
Any
ground will do; we just want to be able to get our ground, either as a loser or as a winner, as a big deal or an ordinary deal. But if we wish to communicate, if we really wish to open our hearts, sooner or later we are going to find ourselves in the big squeeze, where we can’t buy it and we can’t throw it out, and we are caught in the juicy situation of being big and small at the same time.

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction.

On the other hand, wretchedness—life’s painful aspect—softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose—you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.

* * *

Today’s slogans are instructions on how to communicate from the heart. The emphasis is on how to keep one’s heart open for the juiciness and richness of the big squeeze. One of the slogans is “Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.” Whether it is glorious or wretched, delightful or hateful, be patient. Patience means allowing things to unfold at their own speed rather than jumping in with your habitual response to either pain or pleasure. The real happiness that underlies both gloriousness and wretchedness often gets short-circuited by our jumping too fast into the same habitual pattern.

Patience is not learned in safety. It is not learned when everything is harmonious and going well. When everything is smooth sailing, who needs patience? If you stay in your room with the door locked and the curtains drawn, everything may seem harmonious, but the minute anything doesn’t go your way, you blow up. There is no cultivation of patience when your pattern is to just try to seek harmony and smooth everything out. Patience implies willingness to be alive rather than trying to seek harmony.

A hermit well known for his austerity had been practicing in a cave for twenty years. An unconventional teacher named Patrul Rinpoche showed up at the cave, and the hermit humbly and sweetly welcomed him in. Patrul Rinpoche said, “Tell me, what have you been doing here?” “I’ve been practicing the perfection of patience,” the hermit answered. Putting his face very close to the hermit’s face, Patrul Rinpoche said, “But a pair of old scoundrels like us, we don’t care anything about patience really. We only do this to get everyone’s admiration, right? We just do this to get people to think we are big shots, don’t we?” And the hermit started getting irritated. But Patrul Rinpoche wouldn’t stop. He just kept laughing and patting him on the back and saying, “Yeah, we sure know how to dupe people, don’t we? We really know. I’ll bet they bring you a lot of gifts, don’t they?” At this point the hermit stood up and screamed, “Why did you come here? Why are you tormenting me? Go away and leave me in peace!” And then the Rinpoche said, “So now, where is your perfection of patience?” So that’s the point. We can create the ideal situation in which we have a very high opinion of ourselves, but how do we do when it comes to the big squeeze?

The next slogan is “Don’t be swayed by external circumstances.” If something is glorious or even just slightly pleasant, you say, “Wow! I want that.” If it’s wretched or even just slightly irritating, you say, “I want
out
of it!” The point is that challenges don’t cease, and if you wish to keep your heart open, the challenges will quickly increase rather than decrease. Harmony may seem a distant hope.

Lest you be hard on yourself about being swayed by external circumstances, keep in mind the story of Shakyamuni Buddha. Just before the moment of his enlightenment, all of the external circumstances came to try to sway him in the form of the daughters of Mara. (Mara symbolizes the ways we have of looking for alternatives to being where we are.)

Just before he was enlightened, every kind of idea occurred to the Buddha. It was as if every challenge in the book came up. On that evening what was different was that he simply held his seat, opened his heart to whatever might arise, didn’t shut down, and was fully there. Lest you feel bad about yourself, not being swayed by external circumstances as a total experience is called enlightenment.

The slogan “Don’t vacillate” very much goes along with not being swayed by external circumstances. Whatever arises, you can keep your heart open. Beyond that, you can see shutting down or closing off as an opportunity to wake up. Spinning off when things are painful or pleasant presents an opportunity to practice lojong. You have good instructions on what to do with pain, breathing it in, becoming more intimate and making friends with it; you have instructions on what to do with pleasure, sending it out, giving away what you are most unwilling to lose. In this way we can begin to know the pain of others and wish for others to have happiness, using the joy and pleasure of our lives not as problems but as tools for benefiting others.

* * *

The next slogan is “Don’t expect applause,” which means “Don’t expect thanks.” This is important. When you open the door and invite all sentient beings as your guests, and not only that, but you also open the windows, and the walls even start falling down, you find yourself in the universe with no protection at all. Now you’re in for it. If you think that just by doing that you are going to feel good about yourself, and you are going to be thanked right and left—no, that won’t happen. More than to expect thanks, it would be helpful just to expect the unexpected; then you might be curious and inquisitive about what comes in the door. We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake.

On the other hand, it’s good to express our gratitude to others. It’s helpful to express our appreciation of others. But if we do that with the motivation of wanting them to like us, we can remember this slogan. We can thank others, but we should give up all hope of getting thanked back. Simply keep the door open without expectations.