Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (18 page)

There is also a slogan that says “Don’t misinterpret.” Don’t impose the wrong notion of what harmony is, what compassion is, what patience is, what generosity is. Don’t misinterpret what these things really are. There is compassion and there is
idiot
compassion; there is patience and there is
idiot
patience; there is generosity and there is
idiot
generosity. For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, not to rock the boat, is not what’s meant by compassion or patience. It’s what is meant by control. Then you are not trying to step into unknown territory, to find yourself more naked with less protection and therefore more in contact with reality. Instead, you use the idiot forms of compassion and so forth just to get ground. When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda. Many different people come in. Just when you think you have a little scheme that is going to work, it doesn’t work. It was very beneficial to Juan, but when you tried it on Mortimer, he looked at you as if you were crazy, and when you try it on Juanita, she gets insulted.

Coming up with a formula won’t work. If you invite all sentient beings as your guests while just wanting harmony, sooner or later you’ll find that one of your guests is behaving badly and that just sitting there cheerfully doing your tonglen and trying to cultivate harmony doesn’t work.

So you sit there and you say, “Okay, now I’m going to make friends with the fact that I am hurting and afraid, and this is really awful.” But you are just trying to avoid conflict here; you just don’t want to make things worse. Then all the guests are misbehaving; you work hard all day and they just sit around, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, eating your food, and then beating you up. You think you’re being a warrior and a bodhisattva by doing nothing and saying nothing, but what you’re being is a coward. You’re just afraid of making the situation worse. Finally they kick you out of your house and you’re sitting on the sidewalk. Somebody walks by and says, “What are you doing sitting out here?” You answer, “I am practicing patience and compassion.” That’s missing the point.

Even though you’ve dropped your agenda, even though you are trying to work
with
situations instead of struggling
against
them, nevertheless you may have to say, “You can stay here tonight, but tomorrow you’re going, and if you don’t get out of here, I am calling the police.” You don’t really know what’s going to benefit somebody, but it doesn’t benefit anybody to allow someone to beat you up, eat all your food, and put you out on the street.

So “Don’t misinterpret” really gets at the notion of the big squeeze. It’s saying that you don’t know what’s going to help, but you need to speak and act with clarity and decisiveness. Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and look at what’s happening. They come from opening your heart and not running away. Then the action and the speech are in accord with what needs to be done, for you and for the other person.

We make a lot of mistakes. If you ask people whom you consider to be wise and courageous about their lives, you may find that they have hurt a lot of people and made a lot of mistakes, but that they used those occasions as opportunities to humble themselves and open their hearts. We don’t get wise by staying in a room with all the doors and windows closed.

“Train in the three difficulties” is my favorite slogan because it acknowledges that this path is difficult, all right, but it’s a good way to spend our time. There are three difficulties. The first is
seeing neurosis as neurosis,
and the second is
being willing to do something different.
The third difficulty is
the aspiration to make this a way of life.

Seeing neurosis as neurosis.
The first difficulty is to see what you do. There is a slogan that goes along with that that says, “Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing.” This is an interesting point, to be able to see what we do without hating ourselves. This can also be a description of
maitri
—loving-kindness. We could see what we do with honesty but with gentleness. We could see what we do and realize that that’s our first experience of the big squeeze. It’s the path of a warrior, seeing what we do without turning it against ourselves.

This slogan about liberating yourself by examining and analyzing simply means, as with the slogans “Don’t be jealous,” “Don’t be frivolous,” and “Don’t wallow in self-pity,” that the first step is to
see
yourself jealous,
see
yourself frivolous,
see
yourself wallowing in self-pity. You think to yourself, “Well, what would Dr. Seuss do in this situation?” Instead of using it as ammunition against yourself, you can lighten up and realize it’s the information that you need in order to keep your heart open. If everybody on the planet could experience seeing what they do with gentleness, everything would start to turn around very fast, even if we didn’t get to the second difficulty.

Doing something different.
The second difficulty is to do something different. Even if you see what you do, can you then do something different? If you’re jealous, can you snap your fingers and no longer be jealous? We all know it’s more difficult than that. You’re sitting there and your boyfriend is sitting across the room with somebody else having a really good time, and you’re getting more jealous and furious by the minute. There’s a little bird on your shoulder who says, “OK, here’s your big chance. You could use this to wake up.” And you say, “Forget it! He’s really a creep. I want to be mad at him. He deserves my anger.” Now the little bird is jumping up and down, saying, “Hey, hey, hey, hey! Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember?” You’re saying, “I don’t believe this stuff! I am right to be jealous, and he is horrible!” There you are. The little bird jumps up to the other shoulder and pulls on your earlobe and says, “Come on, come on! Give yourself a break. Get to know this stuff. Drop the story line.” “Forget it!” you say. Boy are you stubborn.

That’s what I find about myself. Even when we’re given the methods for how to give ourselves a break, we are so stubborn. If you think smoking is hard to give up, try giving up your habitual patterns. It leaves you with the same kind of queasy feeling that you have when giving up any other addiction.

So instead of “liberating yourself by examining and analyzing,” the habitual response to seeing yourself clearly is to take the wrong medicine: you inflame the jealousy, you wallow more in self-pity, you speed up the frivolity. Usually we do this by talking to ourselves. It’s like a bellows fanning a fire. We just sit there, and we have fantasies about our boyfriend leaving the party with our friend, or we talk to ourselves about how it’s hopeless and how we always feel like this and how it’s never going to get better.

Do something different, such as tonglen.
Anything
different would help, anything that’s not habitual. For example, you could go up and take a cold shower and sing at the top of your lungs, or drink a glass of water from the wrong side, like you do when you are trying to get rid of hiccups.

Continuing that way.
But even if you see what you do and even if you do something different, the third difficulty is that it’s difficult to continue that way, to cut the habitual pattern as a way of life. So whenever you see yourself spinning off in some kind of habitual way, you could aspire to catch yourself and to do something different as a way of cultivating compassion for yourself and compassion for others. But don’t be surprised or give up when it’s difficult.

A slogan that encourages practicing the three difficulties is “Two activities: one at the beginning, one at the end.” At the beginning of your day when you wake up, express your aspiration: “May I practice the three difficulties. May I see what I do. When it happens, may I do something different, and may that be a way of life for me.” At the beginning of your day, using your own language, you could encourage yourself to keep your heart open, to remain curious, no matter how difficult things get. Then at the end of the day when you’re just about to go to sleep, review the day. Rather than using what happened as ammunition for feeling bad about yourself, about how the whole day went by and you never once remembered what you had aspired to do in the morning, you can simply use it as an opportunity to get to know yourself better and to see all the funny ways in which you trick yourself, all the ways in which you’re so good at zoning out and shutting down. If you feel like you don’t want to practice the three difficulties anymore because it’s like setting yourself up for failure, generate a kind heart toward yourself. Reflecting over just one day’s activities can be painful, but you may end up respecting yourself more, because you see that a lot happened; you weren’t just one way. As Carl Jung said at the end of his life, “I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.”

So that’s the big squeeze. Although you listen to all these teachings, and you have all these practices as a support, somehow it has to become real for you. It has to be digested by you. The teachings and practices are like orange juice concentrate—that thick orange stuff in the can—and life is like the water. You have to mix it all together. Then you have good orange juice that you can bring out in a big pitcher for everyone to drink. And even though it came out of a can, you know that it’s truly freshly squeezed.

21

High-Stakes Practice

P
OGO SAID,
“We have met the enemy and they are us.” This particular slogan now appears a lot in the environmental movement. It isn’t somebody else who’s polluting the rivers—it’s us. The cause of confusion and bewilderment and pollution and violence isn’t really someone else’s problem: it’s something we can come to know in ourselves. But in order to do that we have to understand that
we have met the friend and that is me.
The more we make friends with ourselves, the more we can see that our ways of shutting down and closing off are rooted in the mistaken thinking that the way to get happy is to blame somebody else.

It’s a little uncertain who is “us” and who is “them.” Bernard Glassman Sensei, who does a lot of work with the homeless in New York, said that he doesn’t work with the homeless because he’s such a great guy but because going into the areas of society that he has rejected is the only way to make friends with the parts of himself that he’s rejected. It’s all interrelated.

We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.
That’s a very important point. We could say that working with others is a high-stakes maitri practice, because when we start to work with others, somehow they all seem to end up looking like Juan or Juanita. If we are wholehearted about wanting to be there for other people without shutting anybody or anything out of our hearts, our pretty little self-image of how kind or compassionate we are gets completely blown. We’re always being tested and we’re always meeting our match. The more you’re willing to open your heart, the more challenges come along that make you want to shut it.

You can’t do this work in a safety zone. You have to go out into the marketplace and live your life like everybody else, but with the added ingredient of not wanting to shut anything out of your heart. Maitri—loving-kindness—has to go very deep, because when you practice it, you’re going to see everything about yourself. Every time your buttons get pushed is like a big mirror showing you your own face, and like the evil stepmother in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” you want the mirror to tell you what you want to hear—even if it’s that you haven’t been kind or that you’re selfish. Somehow you can even use your insight into your limitations to keep yourself feeling all right.

What we don’t want is any
unforeseen
feedback from the mirror. What we don’t want is to be naked, exposed. We have blind spots, and we put a lot of energy into staying blind. One day the wicked step mother went to the mirror and said, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” and instead of, “You are, sweetheart,” the mirror said, “Snow White.” And just like us, she didn’t want to hear it. Nevertheless, I think we all know that there’s no point in blaming the mirror when it shows you your own face, and there’s certainly no point in breaking the mirror.

I once knew a very powerful woman who always managed to have everything go her way. The epitome of her approach to life was that she had a scale in her bathroom that was always turned down so that when she stood on it she weighed exactly what she wanted to weigh. When you look in the mirror and see that you have a big pimple on the end of your nose, and you decide to actually see it and let yourself wince and feel the embarrassment and nevertheless just go about your business, then when a five-year-old comes rushing up to you and says, “Hey lady, you have a big pimple on the end of your nose!” you just say, “I know.” But if you try to cover that pimple over with cosmetics or a nosebag, you are shocked and offended when it turns out that everyone can see it anyway.

This tendency to refer back to ourselves, to try to protect ourselves, is so strong and all-pervasive. A simple way of turning it around is to develop our curiosity and our inquisitiveness about everything. This is another way of talking about helping others, but of course the process also helps us. The whole path seems to be about developing curiosity, about looking out and taking an interest in all the details of our lives and in our immediate environment.

When we find ourselves in a situation in which our buttons are being pushed, we can choose to repress or act out, or we can choose to practice. If we can start to do the exchange, breathing in with the intention of keeping our hearts open to the embarrassment or fear or anger that we feel, then to our surprise we find that we’re also open to what the other person is feeling. Open heart is open heart. Once it’s open, your eyes and your mind are also open, and you can see what’s happening in the faces and hearts of other people. If you’re walking down the street and way off in the distance—so far away that you can’t possibly do anything about it—you see a man beating his dog, and you feel helpless, you can start to do the exchange. You start out doing it for the dog, then you find you’re doing it for the man. Then you’re also doing it for your own heartbreak and for all the animals and people who are abusing and abused, and for all the people like you who are watching and don’t know what to do. Simply by doing this exchange you have made the world a larger, more loving place.