There is an image I often come back to, where I am sitting at home, minding my own business, quite content, [when suddenly] I hear a knock at the door, only to get up and discover that it’s greed, fear, jealousy, or hatred at the threshold. How do I act? What do I do in that moment? In the past, I have flung open the door and said, “Welcome home, it’s all yours,” only to forget that I live here. My consciousness, my awareness lives here. My capacity to love lives here. This is just a visitor. 

When I think back on the Buddha’s reminder that the mind is naturally radiant and pure—the mind is shining—I can chill for a moment because the visitors are just dropping by. They’re not permanent. They aren’t indicative of my deepest, innermost self. The Buddha said that it is because of visiting forces that we suffer. So it’s in that spirit that I work to reconfigure my relationship to all of these difficult and challenging states that may come, that will come. 

Naming the Experience

To establish the beginnings of a more authentic relationship [with this unexpected guest], see if you can recognize what’s going on by naming it. Every time my mind says, “this is a bad thing to feel, it shouldn’t be here,” I try to retranslate that identification from “bad” to “painful,” “difficult,” “full of suffering,” or “devastating,” and watch to see what happens.

Watching the Mind

I talk about sitting and looking at my own fear. One of the things we say in mindfulness practice is that we pivot. Usually, with a strong emotion, our interest is going toward the object. If you really want a new car, for example, you likely spend your time thinking, “Should I get that kind of upholstery or that kind of upholstery?” It’s not that common to turn our attention around to the desire itself and say, “What does it feel like to want something so much?” 

What is this feeling? What’s it like in my body? What’s the mood of it? 

And that’s how we come to understand feelings as compounds. It’s not just anger. Within the anger, you might also see fear, sadness, and helplessness. When observing my own fear, I notice that despite the world’s pronouncement that we’re afraid of the unknown—which, of course, is true—I’m actually most afraid of all the stories that I tell myself. 

When I first went back to New York after many months away, ahead of that trip, in my mind, I was just watching [my mind create narratives/stories], “I haven’t been back to my apartment in New York for four or five months. I heard people can get Legionnaires’ disease when they turn on the faucet after it’s been off for a long time. My faucet hasn’t been turned on for a long time. I wonder what the water’s going to look like. Will I be able to tell? Does it smell a certain way? What are the symptoms? What am I going to do if the first night in New York I come down with Legionnaires’ disease? There it is!”

Whereas, even in the midst of that, if I remind myself, “You know what? You don’t know. This is just a story. You’re not even in New York yet.” Then I relax. I feel space. I feel openness. So the goal in some way is that space. It’s not an icy distance, it’s space. It’s important that you’re not all caught up in it, [that] you’re not defined by the emotion and driven into action. That’s a state of freedom.

Mindfulness is the place in the middle, which is not sucked in and overcome by something; nor is it pushing it away or recoiling from it in fear.

Not Compounding Suffering

Some things in life just hurt. Losing somebody hurts. People can be so unjust toward themselves in the light of that, insisting “This should not hurt. If I were a better person, if I’d been meditating longer each day, it would not hurt.” Which is quite unfair. There’s a layer of extra suffering [in our making] assumptions and interpretations that we do not [actually] have to endure. [When this takes place], we pile [it] on and we’re not holding that original hurt in a compassionate light or with any spaciousness. 

One of the extra layers of suffering we add on to our feelings or stories is what I call our inner critic. I’ll suggest to people that they give it a name, give it a wardrobe, give it a persona, because the transformation is going to be in how you relate to your inner critic, so we establish a relationship that way. I say [this] with apologies to any Lucys who may be [reading, but] I named my own inner critic Lucy, after the character in the Peanuts comic strip. I named my inner critic Lucy, because a friend had rented a house for many of us to do a retreat, and [when] I went into the bedroom set aside for me, there was a cartoon on the desk. And in the first frame of the cartoon, Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown and says, “You know, Charlie Brown, what your problem is? The problem with you is that you’re you.” Poor Charlie Brown replies, “Well, what in the world can I do about that?” And then Lucy responds, “I don’t pretend to be able to give advice. I merely point out the problem.” 

Somehow, whenever I was walking by the desk, my eye would fall right on that line. “The problem with you is that you’re you.” Because that Lucy-dominant voice had been so strong in my childhood, in my earlier life. Soon after seeing that cartoon, my very first thought was, “It’s never going to happen again.” And I greeted that thought with, “Hi Lucy.” Over time, my favorite response to Lucy became, “Chill out Lucy. Just chill.” That’s different from, “You’re right, Lucy. You’re always right. I’m completely worthless.” It’s also different from, “Oh my God, I’ve been meditating for forty years. Why is Lucy still here? I spent all that money on therapy. Why is Lucy still here? She shouldn’t be. I’m a failure.”

Mindfulness is the place in the middle, which is not sucked in and overcome by something; nor is it pushing it away or recoiling from it in fear. In a vast oversimplification of a certain Tibetan Buddhist practice, they would say:

Invite Lucy in for a meal. Keep an eye on her. Don’t let her have the run of the house, because you might end up with no silverware, but you don’t have to be so afraid. You don’t have to be so ashamed. You don’t have to be so freaked out. Your awareness, your capacity for kindness, for compassion, is actually much stronger than Lucy. Lucy may come. Lucy may come a lot. But you’re OK because of the environment that’s being created.

I used this as an example for the group I was teaching, and some of them didn’t like it. So I said how about inviting Lucy in for a cup of tea? They didn’t like that either. So I said, “OK, what’s acceptable?” And one said, “How about a cup of tea to go?” 

If We Can Be with Something, We Can Learn From It

Interestingly enough, something we often mistakenly do is insist that Lucy never show up again, but that is not going to work. Instead, we can consider what’s skillful and unskillful, realize that we’re not going to prevent things from arising, and refocus our attention toward how they are met. 

The states that lead us toward contraction and suffering are translated as defilements. Whatever we call them, they only function as actual hindrances when we relate to them in a certain way. Otherwise, they’re more like clouds moving in the sky. 

If a certain emotion comes, for example, and you try to dismantle it or evade it immediately, there’s not going to be a lot of learning. But if you can hang in there with it, take some interest in it, pay attention in this different way, there can be a lot of learning, just as I learned in that very personal insight about my own fear. It could be a personal insight, or it could be a more universal insight like, everything that arises—everything—is impermanent. If you look at anger and you see moments of rage and moments of fear, moments of sadness, moments of helplessness … that’s an alive system. That emotion that arose seems so solid, maybe so unchanging, but really look at it: it’s constantly changing. Physical pain arises in a superficial glance, it feels like some entity has just taken over our knee, our back, or our head. But if we really pay careful attention, we see, “Oh, it’s moments of burning, moments of twisting, moments of piercing, moments of iciness. None of that sounds good. None of that feels good. But that’s an alive system. And within that, there’s movement and flow.”

I have a friend, for example, with a very severe chronic pain condition, who said to me, after working in this way, “I found the space within the pain.” We like to think when we look at pain, that it’ll just go away. But it may not be that way. And yet something can happen that brings a whole other kind of relief, if we can find the space within it. We’re investigating when we’re not running away, when we’re not drowning in something that is arising and yet temporary. 

♦

If you would like to learn more about this offering, visit this link here. 

The post A Guide to Changing How We Relate to Difficult Emotions appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The reason that we suffer is simple: to paraphrase the Rolling Stones song, “we can’t always get what we want.” And in not getting what we want, we create conflict for ourselves and others. It may seem simplistic to reduce all our suffering to our unmet wants, but if we take the time to look closely at our situation, it becomes evident that the Buddha’s teaching on the source of our distress is exactly right. We suffer because we have something we don’t want, we want something we don’t have, or we have something we can’t keep. If we think of the concept of craving (Pali, tanha) as a triune, then its three faces are avoidance, desire, and clinging.

The first face of craving is avoidance. It turns away from the pain that comes by craving for what we have that we don’t want to go away. No one wants to grow old, yet most of us do—or we hope to, once we realize that aging is a privilege, given the alternative. None of us want to get sick, and especially not for long periods of time. We certainly don’t want to die, although we most decidedly will. These three “signs” of existence, as the Buddha calls them, may be different in context from one life to another, but not in fact. And although we understand that resistance is pointless, to accept the conditions of life feels so much like defeat, that we’d rather fight than surrender to the inevitable. It feels like a betrayal, the way things are set up—like there’s a bug in the system or a few lines of fine print no one bothered to point out when we signed the contract to live our lives.

“I was a good husband, a good father,” a patient once said to a therapist friend who worked in a nursing home. “I did my job, I paid my taxes, I even climbed a few mountains. Why the hell is this happening to me?” By “this,” he meant getting old; he meant losing control; he meant letting go of everything he’d worked so hard to get. It’s not easy to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that if we check the right boxes, we’ll somehow be spared the indignity of our decline. But the fact is that from the moment we’re born, we’re already dying. No matter how rich, how famous, or how powerful any of us become, none of us are exempt from these three signs. Yet few of us are willing to carry the truth of our fragility or the certainty of our deaths. We’d rather look for security wherever we can find it.

There’s a story of a fisherman who’d been struggling to feed his family. Every morning, he’d go out on the ocean, cast his net, and, invariably, he’d haul it in almost empty. This pattern continued until one day, when he left early with his brother and, after only an hour, pulled in a catch so big that it threatened to capsize his skiff. Carefully, the fisherman tied up the bulging net and stowed the catch in his boat. He then grabbed a piece of coal from a bucket and drew a big X on the side of the boat under the gunwale, or the upper edge of the side of his boat.

“What are you doing?” asked his brother.

“This is a great fishing spot!” the fisherman said. “I’m marking it so that we can come back tomorrow.”

If we can’t fight old age, maybe we can fix youth in place. If we can’t avoid death and the anxiety that comes with it, maybe we can keep them at bay with the pleasure that comes from having money, or good looks, or a nice house, or a prestigious award. If the first kind of craving is avoidant, the second is grasping. It’s the face that looks toward its goal, which is very simple: to get what we want because it makes us feel good, not bad. This approach to living seems so obvious, so reasonable, that it’s almost absurd to question it. Who wants to feel pain? Who doesn’t want to feel pleasure? Isn’t pleasure natural and desirable? Indeed, pleasure by itself isn’t a problem, nor is our wanting it. We’ve all felt the rush of joy that accompanies all kinds of pleasant moments: digging our toes into sand, smelling the fragrant steam coming from a pot of stew, receiving an unexpected windfall of money, finding an elegant solution to a persistent problem.

The difficulty comes from grasping itself, which is relentless and impervious to the truth of impermanence. Yet we all know that vacations end, scents fade, money is spent, another problem replaces the first.

There’s nothing in Buddhism that says we can’t or shouldn’t enjoy life’s modest or magnificent wonders. The problem isn’t enjoyment either. The difficulty comes from grasping itself, which is relentless and impervious to the truth of impermanence. Yet we all know that vacations end, scents fade, money is spent, another problem replaces the first. Things shift, they break, they get lost, they decay. People leave or die. Everything that is, wanes, and no amount of effort can stop this passing. But as with old age, sickness, and death, our general response to this constant change is distaste. We don’t like change, and we don’t like it when it happens to us. When it does, our first response is to go looking for more things. More wine, more sex, more clothes, more likes, more titles, more trips—which makes desire a perfect, self-sustaining system. Without interference, it’ll spin endlessly from seeking to grabbing to losing to seeking again. And although we could accept impermanence and focus on figuring out where else we might find lasting satisfaction, it seems much easier to just hold on to what we have. This is the third face of craving.

The orientation of the first face is avoidant, the second is grasping, and the third is fixated. Its sole preoccupation is to keep things as they are. Of the three types of thirst, this is perhaps the most painful and unnatural—like sticking your tongue to a frozen mailbox. Holding on always comes at a cost: primarily, disappointment, and, peripherally, exhaustion, because things are neither lasting nor dependable. Getting what we want is hard enough, but to keep what we have is impossible. It’s simply not the way things work.

In one of those strange confluences that happen every so often, the day I started writing this article my bicycle was stolen. It was a distinctive bike—a purple beach cruiser with a basket and a rear-mounted, custom-made crate that fit my dog, a good load of groceries, or a five-gallon water jug, as needed. It was graceful in a midlife sort of way, and I loved it. So I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt when I walked out of my doctor’s office and saw only absence. It felt like a boundary had been breached, as if someone had entered my personal space without my consent. But then I thought, who created those boundaries? What is stealing when the something that was taken was never really yours? What is the meaning of “mine” and “yours” when the boundary that separates us fades, like everything else that’s conditioned? I’m not condoning stealing or any other invasion of privacy. Boundaries exist for a reason. But in working with craving, it’s useful to take a close look at those limits and see what happens when we enlarge them. Or when we question the nature of want, of having or owning, and of the owner.

The late Bhikkhu Nanananda once said that “conceit” (belief in an independent self that is somehow superior to other selves) is misappropriation of public property—that is, of the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air. The Buddha said that conceit is the last defilement to fall away before full awakening.

A bhikkhu thinks thus: ‘This is peaceful, this is sublime, that is, the stilling of all activities, the relinquishing of all acquisitions, the destruction of craving, dispassion, cessation, nibbana.’ In this way, Ananda, a bhikkhu could obtain such a state of concentration that he would have no I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit in regard to this conscious body; he would have no I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit in regard to all external objects; and he would enter and dwell in that liberation of mind, liberation by wisdom, through which there is no more I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit for one who enters and dwells in it. (Ananda Sutta AN 3.32, trans. by Bhikkhu Bodhi)

Releasing ourselves from I-making and mine-making doesn’t prevent us from enjoying life’s pleasures. On the contrary, it helps us delight in them even more, since we’re able to acknowledge their transiency and value. Whether what we hold is a bicycle, a cherished memory, or our own precious body, letting go of craving allows us to carry these things more lightly.

My teacher always says, “Practice when it’s easy,” so here it is, a tiny loss to prepare me for the true relinquishment of my conscious body. Like my bike, my body—which has also done an excellent job of taking me from one place to another—is on loan temporarily. Like my bike, one day, it too will disappear. It’s my sincerest wish that I am able to let go in that moment with some modicum of grace and acceptance. In the meantime, I hope that the one who has my bicycle enjoys it as much as I did. I hope they find happiness and fulfillment.

It’s definitely true that we can’t always get what we want—and it’s precisely because of this that we can thoroughly enjoy what we have, for the time being.

The post We Can’t Always Get What We Want (And That’s All Right) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

¡Bienvenidos a nuestra nueva sección de Dharma en Español! Aquí en Tricycle reconocemos la importancia de seguir ofreciendo el dharma a los practicantes de una amplia gama de comunidades, y dado el creciente interés en el dharma en español, hemos puesto en marcha una nueva iniciativa para ofrecer enseñanzas originales y traducidas. Profesores de habla hispana de Latinoamérica y Europa han contribuido generosamente con charlas de dharma y prácticas que publicaremos en nuestra página web y en la revista, así como con artículos seleccionados de nuestra Sección de Enseñanzas. Esperamos que estos artículos cuidadosamente seleccionados les inspiren, desafíen y apoyen, y que también animen a todos aquellos que buscan la liberación a recorrer el camino de la práctica.  

No dudes en hacernos llegar tus comentarios o sugerencias. Nos encantaría saber de ustedes.

Welcome to our new Dharma in Spanish section! Here at Tricycle we recognize the importance of continuing to make the dharma available to practitioners across a wide range of communities, and given the increased interest in Spanish dharma, we’ve started a new initiative to offer ongoing original and translated teachings. Spanish speaking teachers from both Latin America and Europe have generously contributed dharma talks and practice pieces that we’ll be publishing in our website and print magazine, as well as selected pieces from our Teachings section. It’s our hope that these carefully curated offerings will inspire, challenge, and support you and encourage all those seeking liberation to walk the path of practice.  

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with your comments or suggestions. We’d love to hear from you.

***

El apego es un factor mental que hace que exageremos las buenas cualidades de un objeto, persona, idea, etc., o que proyectemos buenas cualidades que no existen. Esto nos lleva a desearlo y aferrarnos a él, considerándolo permanente, placentero y existente por sí mismo. Esta práctica nos ayuda a reflexionar sobre el apego y a trabajar con él.

Para empezar, pregúntate ¿A qué cosas, personas o emociones estoy apegado? ¿Cómo los veo cuando estoy apegado? Si esa persona o cosa existe tal y como se presenta a mi mente apegada, ¿por qué no todo el mundo la ve así? ¿Por qué a veces me siento diferente al respecto? ¿Cuál es una actitud más realista hacia el objeto de mi apego?

Ten en cuenta estas preguntas mientras continuamos nuestra exploración. Para eliminar el dolor del apego, es útil considerar primero sus desventajas. Por ejemplo, genera insatisfacción y frustración porque continuamente queremos más y mejores cosas, lo que nos impide disfrutar de lo que ya tenemos. Nos hace subir y bajar emocionalmente según tengamos o no el objeto de nuestro apego. Puede motivarnos a confabular, manipular y conspirar para conseguir lo que queremos. Bajo el hechizo del apego, podríamos actuar hipócritamente o con otras intenciones, lo que acaba dañando nuestras relaciones con los demás.

El apego puede llevarnos a actuar de forma poco ética para conseguir lo que queremos, a perjudicar a los demás y a aumentar nuestro propio sentimiento de odio y de culpa hacia nosotros mismos. En última instancia, hace que nos pasemos la vida persiguiendo placeres, ninguno de los cuales podremos llevarnos cuando muramos. Mientras tanto, nuestro potencial para desarrollar cualidades internas como el amor, la compasión, la generosidad, la paciencia y la sabiduría queda desaprovechado. De este modo, el apego bloquea eficazmente nuestra claridad e incluso nuestro potencial para despertar.

Otro subproducto del apego es la ira. Cuando estamos fuertemente apegados a algo, nos decepcionamos y nos enfadamos si no lo conseguimos o si nos lo quitan una vez que lo tenemos. Piensa en un ejemplo de tu vida en el que haya ocurrido esto. Luego examína: ¿Por qué me enfado? ¿Qué relación hay entre mis expectativas y mi enfado? ¿Qué esperaba de la persona, cosa o situación que no tenía o no hacía? ¿Eran realistas mis expectativas? ¿El problema estaba en esa persona o cosa, o en que yo pensaba que la persona u objeto tenía cualidades que no tenía? ¿Cuál es una visión más realista de esa persona, cosa o situación? ¿Cómo afecta esta nueva visión a cómo me siento y me relaciono con ellos?

El apego nos hace temer no conseguir lo que queremos o necesitamos, y perder lo que tenemos. Piensa en ejemplos de tu vida en los que esto haya ocurrido.

Entonces pregúntate: ¿Realmente necesito esas cosas? ¿Cuál es el peor escenario si no las consigo o las pierdo? Incluso si las tuviera, ¿me quedaría completamente sin herramientas para manejar la situación, o hay cosas que puedo hacer para afrontarla con eficacia? ¿Qué pasaría si renunciara a sentir apego por esa persona o cosa? ¿Cómo sería mi vida?

Cuando se trata de relaciones, el apego puede llevarnos a la codependencia, provocando que permanezcamos en situaciones perjudiciales por miedo al cambio. Reflexiona: ¿A qué estoy apegado que me hace permanecer en esa situación? ¿Merece la pena aferrarse a eso? ¿Es en realidad tan maravilloso como mi apego cree que es? ¿Qué pasaría si dejara de estar apegado a ello? ¿De qué herramientas internas y externas dispongo para afrontar la situación?

Que no es realista esperar que los objetos externos sean una fuente duradera de felicidad.

Contempla las desventajas de estar apegado a esas personas, cosas, experiencias de tu vida a las que te aferras con fuerza. Piensa en la naturaleza transitoria del objeto de tu apego y comprueba si puedes aceptar que el cambio es la naturaleza misma de la existencia. Recuerda que no es realista esperar que los objetos externos sean una fuente duradera de felicidad. Reflexiona sobre el hecho de que, al soltar nuestro apego, podremos disfrutar de nuestra salud, de nuestras relaciones, de la riqueza que podamos tener cuando el objeto o persona esté ahí, y estar tranquilos cuando no esté.

A continuación, consideraremos algunos antídotos contra el apego. La principal actitud que hay que cultivar es la del equilibrio: eliminando nuestras exageraciones y proyecciones, podemos ser más equilibrados en nuestras relaciones con las cosas que queremos o necesitamos. Libres de aferramiento y compulsividad, podemos implicarnos y preocuparnos de forma saludable. Los puntos que figuran a continuación están pensados para una reflexión repetida. La comprensión intelectual por sí sola no produce la fuerza necesaria para detener los patrones destructivos.

Reflexionar sobre nuestra mortalidad nos ayuda a ver con claridad lo que es importante en nuestra vida. Tómate un momento para imaginar que estás muriendo. Visualiza realmente dónde estás, cómo estás muriendo, las reacciones de tus amigos y familiares. ¿Cómo te sientes? ¿Qué pasa por tu cabeza? Luego pregúntate: Dado que algún día moriré, ¿qué es importante en mi vida? ¿Qué me hace sentir bien haber hecho? ¿De qué me arrepiento? ¿Qué quiero hacer y evitar hacer mientras viva? ¿Qué puedo hacer para prepararme para la muerte?

Contempla la naturaleza cambiante del cuerpo, desde el feto hasta el bebé, el niño, el adulto y el anciano. Algunas preguntas que puedes utilizar son ¿Está mi cuerpo compuesto de sustancias puras? ¿Es intrínsecamente bello? Después de la muerte, ¿en qué se convertirá mi cuerpo? ¿Merece la pena apegarse a él? ¿Existe alguna esencia inherente que sea mi cuerpo? ¿Soy yo mi cuerpo? 

No hay duda de que debemos cuidar nuestro cuerpo, mantenerlo limpio y sano, porque es la base de nuestra preciosa vida humana. Protegiéndolos con sabiduría pero sin apego, podremos practicar el dharma y beneficiar a los seres vivientes.

A menudo nos aferramos a nuestras ideas sobre cómo deben hacerse las cosas, a nuestras opiniones sobre quiénes son los demás y qué deben hacer, a nuestras creencias sobre la naturaleza de la vida. Luego nos enfadamos cuando los demás no están de acuerdo con nuestras ideas. Pregúntate a sí mismo: Cuando alguien critica mis ideas, ¿me está criticando a mí? ¿Es correcto algo sólo porque yo lo creo? ¿Qué pasaría si yo viera las cosas como las ve la otra persona? ¿Cómo puedo liberarme del miedo a perder poder o a que se aprovechen de mí?

Si vemos defectos en las ideas del otro, podemos expresarlos de forma amable, sin ponernos a la defensiva de nuestras propias opiniones. Imagínate hablando con firmeza y claridad para exponer tus opiniones, pero sin ponerte a la defensiva. Recuerda que debes seguir abriéndote a una visión más amplia.

Imagina que recibes toda la aprobación y elogios que siempre has deseado. Imagina que la gente te dice o reconoce todas las cosas que siempre has deseado que te digan. Disfruta de las buenas sensaciones que esto te puede producir. Luego pregúntate: ¿me hará realmente feliz de forma duradera? ¿En qué me benefician los elogios, la aprobación o la buena reputación? ¿Previenen enfermedades o alargan mi vida? ¿Resuelven realmente el problema del odio a uno mismo y la culpa? ¿Purifican mi karma negativo o me acercan a la liberación o la iluminación? Si no es así, ¿merece la pena estar apegado a ellos?

Para desarrollar nuestro sentido de estar interconectados con todos los demás y ser receptores de mucha bondad por su parte, contempla la ayuda, el apoyo y el ánimo que has recibido de amigos o seres queridos. Reconócelos como actos de bondad humana. Reflexiona sobre los beneficios que has recibido de tus padres, parientes y profesores: los cuidados que te dieron cuando eras joven, la protección, la educación. Todos los talentos, habilidades y destrezas que tenemos ahora se los debemos a las personas que nos enseñaron y formaron.

Piensa en toda la ayuda que has recibido de extraños: la casa que habitas, la ropa que vistes, los alimentos que comes, todo lo hicieron personas que no conoces. Sin sus esfuerzos, no podrías sobrevivir. Luego reflexiona sobre los beneficios que has recibido de personas con las que no te llevas bien y de personas que te han hecho daño. A través de sus acciones, nos dan la oportunidad de desarrollar la paciencia, la tolerancia y la compasión, cualidades esenciales para progresar en el camino.

El amor es el deseo de que los demás tengan felicidad y las causas de la felicidad. Empieza por desearte a ti mismo que estés bien y seas feliz, no de forma egoísta, sino porque te respetas y cuidas de ti mismo como uno de tantos seres vivientes. Extiende gradualmente este amor a amigos, extraños, personas difíciles y a todos los seres. Para cada grupo de personas, piensa en individuos concretos y genera amor hacia ellos. Luego, deja que ese sentimiento se extienda a todo el grupo.

Piensa, siente, imagina: “Que mis amigos y todos los que han sido amables conmigo tengan felicidad y sus causas. Que estén libres de sufrimiento, confusión y miedo. Que tengan corazones tranquilos, pacíficos y plenos.”

Genera los mismos sentimientos hacia gente desconocida. Extiende el sentimiento a quienes te han hecho daño o son difíciles. Reconoce que hacen lo que te parece censurable porque están experimentando dolor o confusión. Qué maravilloso sería que fueran libres.

Como conclusión, reconoce que el apego es tu enemigo. Solemos pensar que el apego es nuestro amigo, pero cuando observamos detenidamente nuestra experiencia, empezamos a ver cómo el aferrarnos a las cosas destruye en realidad nuestra paz mental y destruye nuestra felicidad. Y cuando vemos esto, entonces eso nos da algo de energía para querer contrarrestar nuestro apego y no sólo seguirlo ciegamente.

Este artículo se basa en una meditación guiada que la Venerable Thubten Chodron suele dirigir en sus retiros.

♦

This article previously appeared in Tricycle’s Fall 2023 issue as Taking the Ache Out of Attachment.

The post Práctica: Quitar el dolor del apego appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Apart from a cry of “Fire!” the shortest human prayer torn from the throat of emergency on a rapidly heating Earth is “Help!” Meanwhile, the everyday common prayer—the only one we ever really need, despite its relative absence from our lips and hearts—is simply “Thank you.” 

For it is amazing to be, to be here at all. 

But moving beyond just the human, the singular, silent cry of life on Earth right now is “Precarious!” This too is closer to a prayer than it may seem; it’s an honest, vulnerable, lucid confession of alarm. This admission of vulnerability is itself a search for the strong nerve of resilience.  

Over the Hill and into the Dark

The times are always uncertain until we cease longing for certainty, and only then do they become truly interesting. The planetary crisis we’re in together is now simply the given—the strange, inarguable gift of what is. The fervent half-prayer of “Precarious!” overhears the realization that any escape is futile. Who now in good faith can dispute planetary heating and its appalling consequences and our drift toward civilizational suicide, ruined lands, biodiversity collapse, record-breaking megafires and megafloods, and new pandemics. And then there’s our shadow pandemic, too: panic, confusion, and conspiratorial rage, shadowed by dread, anxiety, and depression. 

The Industrialized West has metastasized into almost every corner of this living planet with a turbo-charged drive to extract wealth at all cost to life, the hell-bent intent that has now been normalized by democracies and tyrannies alike. The momentum of living by damage has slipped beyond our reckoning and control. Our fractious geopolitical world is now mirrored by massive geophysical changes, as the weather and Earth herself turns angry. 

Meanwhile, social media has as much fractured as formed the basis for a consensual, factually based understanding from which to engage the huge questions. Conspiracy, paranoia, misinformation, organized disinformation, and contempt for evidence undermine a coherent response. First the pandemic and now war stalks the world again. Where’s the center that will hold, the sure place in which to invest trust? 

It’s impossible to avert your eyes, difficult to see how to respond, and impossible not to long to do so. Even listing the ways in which “so much is wrong” begins to feel like a verbal totentanz, as in the old medieval woodcuts depicting the dance of death: heavy-laden words joining hands with the skeletal grim reaper, dancing us over a hill of doom into the dark. 

The planetary dangers that haunt us make our time an exquisite moment, piercing and inescapable. Also baffling to the point of provoking fresh realizations, hence the description of this time as a “gift” brimming with untested possibilities right along with potentially dire consequences. Dare we celebrate the way it stretches us, this strange privilege of being alive right now? Can we embrace the sheer lunacy of our moment, in which the biggest human “ask” in history up to now has chosen us? 

A koan scandalizes all suppositions (literal, rational, empirical, neurotic) that hold up the shaky sky of human knowing and fearing, until the leaves blowing in the street, the wave welling over a rock, the eyelashes of the cow all share the same realm as this mind. The shock of this can stoke new depths of fiery, fiercely protective love for the Earth. With luck, this love is fierce enough to protect our home from the worst impulses in ourselves and turn them to good. 

Darkening This Mind

Luckily there’s another, very different kind of darkness—that of the mind relaxing in a state of active not-knowing. In this fertile darkness, the search for how to respond can grow more surefooted, agile, and in sync with events rather than pitted against them. Not-knowing is like leaning back against the tree that is always there, older than any forest; or as Dogen puts it, taking “the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate yourself.” Not-knowing introspection and self-inquiry—as in “What is this self?”—moves us into intimacy with who this is and what is happening. 

The ecocrisis of our time raises the question of the true nature of our human presence on the Earth as a koan that rightly exerts an almost overwhelming pressure on our hearts. It cannot be resolved, and the suffering it causes cannot be relieved without breaking through the paradigm that is so relentlessly causing it. Zen koans help us grow skilled in tolerating a precarious state of mind, and not turning away but growing curious instead. That we can’t go forward in the usual way becomes the strangely valuable offer of the moment. Not-knowing, in the spirit of improvisation, accepts all offers! And the Zen koan turns every obstacle into the way. 

Take a despairing reaction like “There is nothing I can do to stop this disaster!” Looking beyond the ideas of “I,” and “stop,” and even the activity of “doing,” can we even dare to look deeply into the crisis and not-know what it is, or that it is so? Perhaps even disaster loses its power of impasse when scrutinized by a trusting form of productive doubt. Can something be done with less doing, using the calm, inside moments that can be created within an emergency when what is happening is met with not-knowing? 

The Zen koan turns every obstacle into the way. 

Or consider the desperate sense of “This is beyond me!” Aha! Yes, it is! Reality is definitely beyond the claim of “me.” Might it be possible to live tragically aware of the immensity of what we face and yet rely on the ground of fundamental joy that dares to meet fear? Not-knowing meets and disables fear and can discern more clearly how a situation is moving and what is needed right in the midst of the unfolding moment. 

The way we have framed reality is plainly out of kilter and out of date. Koan mind breaks the rigid frame and makes an ally out of uncertainty, asking it to be our guide in the darkness. 

Crises Secrete Their Own Healing

Every koan has a bit of the apocalyptic about it, lifting the veil that this dream of a separate self throws over the wholeness of reality. Apocalypse implies destruction of a world, but hiding in that word is the older meaning, that of a necessary revelation, a veil torn away, leaving no choice but to see what is hidden from us in plain sight. 

Similarly, people speak of a healing crisis in the course of an illness, a looked-for climax poised to either tip us toward death or toward the dawn of healing. “Medicine and sickness heal each other”: Yunmen is pointing to the suffering healing into nondual awakening, the dream of separation waking into the reality of no “other.” Precarious emotional states likewise can intensify into a healing crisis in which seemingly indigestible anger, fear, or grief can suddenly tip over and metabolize a general amnesty. That beautiful word forgiveness suggests the germination of ease within precariousness. 

Crises shape and transform us all our lives. The limitations that grow apparent to a crawling infant become the seeming unlikelihood of learning to walk. Impasse is the unavoidable opportunity to see beyond expectations, suppositions, and impossibilities as they crumble before our eyes. Crisis, whether at the vast or intimately personal level, is what reveals that there is no “normal,” despite all strenuous efforts to coax one into being. Not-knowing is relaxing into trusting this. 

⧫

From A Fire Runs through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis by Susan Murphy © 2023 by Susan Murphy. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

The post A Koan for These Times
 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Muchos de nosotros luchamos para sacar la práctica de nuestra cabeza y encarnarla. Estamos condicionados a dirigir nuestras vidas con la mente, a usar nuestra capacidad de pensar y juzgar en todo lo que hacemos, y eso afecta nuestro zazen. Puede tomar la forma de tensión o rigidez. Puede manifestarse como dolor en las articulaciones o en la espalda. Y puede que estemos tan acostumbrados a llevar nuestra vida de esta manera que ni siquiera seamos conscientes de nuestro malestar, hasta que empezamos a sentarnos y, con una nueva conciencia de lo que ocurre en nuestro cuerpo, lo notamos por primera vez.

Cuando realizamos actividades como conducir, caminar o cepillarnos los dientes mientras estamos sumidos en nuestros pensamientos—por ejemplo, pensando en una conversación que aún no ha tenido lugar—no somos conscientes de lo que ocurre en nuestro cuerpo. En ese momento, estamos tan metidos en la cabeza que somos incorpóreos.

La filosofía y la religión presentan a menudo un dualismo entre mente y cuerpo, o espíritu y materia. En algunos sistemas de creencias, el cuerpo se considera impuro, como si el reino mental fuera más valioso, más noble o virtuoso que el reino físico. Lo mismo ocurre con las emociones, que implican respuestas y sensaciones corporales. A menudo se tratan como algo que debemos mantener bajo control, para que no nos juzguen como débiles o inestables. Pero cuando reprimimos u ocultamos nuestras emociones, nos encontramos con todo tipo de problemas, no sólo en términos de nuestra propia sensación de bienestar, sino también en nuestras relaciones con los demás.

En el zen, hablamos de cuerpo-mente, lo que ayuda a entender que ambos están integrados, pero no deja de ser nada más una palabra que no llega a la experiencia pura, directa y vivida de encarnarnos en un cuerpo. Del mismo modo, podemos hablar, leer y escuchar las enseñanzas e inspirarnos, pero, al final, el zen no es una creencia, sino una práctica: una experiencia que abarca todo nuestro ser. Esta experiencia comienza con aprender a sentarse: con la posición ideal de las caderas, la cabeza, los hombros y los diversos elementos que crean una base estable y relajada para zazen y conforman una postura eficaz para la concentración. La palabra latina para concentración (concentratio) significa “juntar, reunir en el centro”, como cuando reunimos nuestra atención y la colocamos en el hara, un punto situado unos dos centímetros por debajo del ombligo.

Sin embargo, nuestra mente aferrada y calculadora puede malinterpretar fácilmente la concentración como actividad mental. Pero la concentración es un estado de conciencia que implica tanto a nuestro cuerpo como a nuestra mente. Observar la postura con la mente de un principiante puede ser muy útil, y esto ocurre de forma natural para las personas que se inician en la práctica. Pero para los que llevamos tiempo meditando, es necesario que observemos con honestidad nuestra postura y consideremos hasta qué punto puede estar ayudando o impidiendo nuestra práctica. Nuestros cuerpos cambian con el tiempo—debido al envejecimiento, a una lesión o a cualquier otra condición—así que siempre hay margen para adaptarse y mejorar, teniendo en cuenta que nuestra postura afecta a nuestra capacidad de concentrar la mente.

R

ecientemente, estaba leyendo el libro Abrir la mano del pensamiento: Fundamentos de la práctica del budismo zen, de Roshi Kosho Uchiyama, que contiene una vívida descripción de la diferencia entre el Pensador de Rodin y la figura de un buda sentado. 

Uchiyama afirma que el Pensador “está sentado encorvado, con los hombros echados hacia delante y el pecho comprimido, en una postura mental e ilusoria. Los brazos y las piernas están flexionados, el cuello y los dedos doblados, e incluso los dedos de los pies curvados. Cuando nuestro cuerpo está doblado y contorsionado de esta manera, el flujo sanguíneo y la respiración se congestionan; quedamos atrapados en nuestra imaginación y somos incapaces de liberarnos. En cambio, cuando nos sentamos en zazen, todo está erguido: tronco, espalda, cuello y cabeza. Como nuestro abdomen descansa cómodamente sobre las piernas sólidamente dobladas, la sangre circula libremente hacia el abdomen y la respiración se mueve libremente hacia el tanden o hara. Se alivia la congestión, disminuye la excitabilidad y no necesitamos perseguir fantasías y delirios”.

Dicho esto, si tenemos una limitación física que nos impide sentarnos con las piernas cruzadas, simplemente nos adaptamos según sea necesario. Siempre hay una forma de practicar, incluso recostados.

Cada uno de nosotros tiene que practicar en el cuerpo en el que se encuentra. Yo tengo una curvatura en la parte inferior de la columna debido a una escoliosis infantil, y mi pelvis se desalinea con bastante facilidad. Si no soy consciente de mi postura, me inclino hacia un lado al sentarme y siento dolor en la cadera. Tardé años en descubrir cómo trabajar con ello, y sigo trabajando en ello. Así es mi cuerpo. Para utilizar las palabras de Uchiyama, “zazen correcto” no es cuestión de tener una postura perfecta. Se trata de trabajar con los distintos elementos de zazen como una forma de implicar todo nuestro cuerpo en la práctica, no sólo la cabeza. “Es fácil decirte que apuntes a la postura correcta y lo dejes todo en manos de eso, pero no es tan sencillo hacerlo. Incluso mientras estamos en posición de zazen, si continuamos con nuestros pensamientos, estamos pensando y ya no estamos haciendo zazen”.

En el Zendo de Chapin Mill, de vez en cuando oímos pasar trenes a lo lejos. En un momento, oímos un tren que se acerca cada vez más, cada vez más fuerte, y en el momento siguiente, ha desaparecido. No tenemos que hacer nada al respecto. Simplemente pasa. Del mismo modo, hay una diferencia entre perseguir los pensamientos y simplemente dejar que ocurran. En zazen, no los alejamos ni nos aferramos a ellos. Simplemente los dejamos pasar mientras mantenemos la concentración en nuestra práctica.

Como dice Uchiyama: “Zazen no es pensar, ni tampoco dormir. Hacer zazen es estar lleno de vida, con el objetivo de mantener una postura de zazen correcta. Si nos adormecemos mientras hacemos zazen, nuestra energía se disipa y nuestro cuerpo se vuelve flácido. Si perseguimos nuestros pensamientos, nuestra postura se volverá rígida. Zazen no es ni estar flácido y sin vida ni estar rígido; nuestra postura debe estar llena de vida y energía. . . . Cuando hacemos zazen, no debemos estar dormidos ni atrapados en nuestros pensamientos. Debemos estar bien despiertos, buscando la postura correcta con nuestra carne y nuestros huesos. ¿Podremos conseguirlo alguna vez? ¿Existe el éxito o el acierto? Aquí es donde zazen se vuelve insondable.

“En zazen, tenemos que aspirar vivamente a mantener la postura correcta, ¡y sin embargo no hay ninguna marca que alcanzar! O en todo caso, la persona que hace zazen nunca percibe si ha dado en el blanco o no. Si la persona que hace zazen piensa que su zazen se está volviendo realmente bueno, o que ha ‘dado en el blanco’, está simplemente pensando que su zazen es bueno, mientras que en realidad se ha separado de la realidad de su zazen. Por lo tanto, siempre debemos aspirar a hacer un zazen correcto, sin preocuparnos por percibir que se ha dado en el blanco. . . . Zazen es simplemente todo nuestro ser haciéndose a sí mismo por sí mismo. Zazen hace zazen”.

O, más sencillamente, es nuestro cuerpo simplemente estando en un cuerpo. Ya tenemos todo lo que necesitamos para sacar nuestra práctica de nuestra cabeza y meterla en nuestro cuerpo, simplemente por estar en el cuerpo en el que estamos, tal cual, en este momento. No sólo mientras estamos sentados, sino también en la actividad. En el zen, a menudo hablamos de sacar nuestra práctica del zendo, del cojín de meditación, y llevarla al mundo. Pero también funciona en la otra dirección. Llevar el mundo a nuestra práctica consiste en no separarnos de la vida tal y como es, tal y como la experimentamos a través de nuestros ojos, oídos, nariz, lengua, cuerpo y mente.

En el Canto de alabanza a zazen del maestro Hakuin, la línea final es “y este mismo cuerpo [es] el cuerpo de Buda”. ¿Qué es ese cuerpo? No es simplemente mi particular bolsa de piel y huesos o mi particular ecosistema de microorganismos. Cada vez que nos liberamos de nuestros pensamientos, nos estamos liberando en aquello que está más allá de nuestro ser material, físico; más allá de este cuerpo que llamamos nuestro yo y que se vuelve nuestro Verdadero Yo, que es no-yo.

Adaptado de Practicando con todo nuestro ser, un episodio del podcast del Centro Zen de Rochester.

♦

This article previously appeared on Tricycle as This Very Body.

The post Plática Dhármica: Este Mismo Cuerpo appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Sankhāra es una de las palabras más versátiles y desafiantes que se encuentran en las enseñanzas budistas. Se basa en una raíz etimológica que significa “hacer” o “hacer” (√kr), y por tanto está relacionada con la palabra karma. Karma tiene tanto un sentido activo, que se refiere a las acciones que realizamos en el momento, como un sentido más pasivo, que apunta a las consecuencias pasadas y futuras de esas acciones.

La palabra sankhāra refina esto aún más al utilizarse en tres sentidos: 1) las intenciones o cualidades de la mente que dan forma a una acción; 2) las actividades de cuerpo, habla y mente que ejecutan dichas acciones; y 3) el residuo kármico que resulta de esas acciones, que luego sirve como campo subyacente del que surgen nuevas intenciones y acciones. Por ejemplo, la emoción de la ira da lugar a una palabra, un acto o un pensamiento de ira, lo que hace que la persona se sienta más inclinada a la ira en el futuro. Debido a esta inclinación, una persona que ha practicado el enfado durante mucho tiempo ha moldeado su personalidad de tal forma que podríamos decir que está predispuesta al enfado.

Por supuesto, todo esto aplica también a los estados mentales y emocionales positivos. Cuando una persona siente compasión, la pone en práctica con hechos, palabras o pensamientos, y genera tendencias habituales subyacentes hacia la compasión, convirtiéndose en una persona predispuesta a la compasión. O sea que los estados mentales inducen comportamientos que dan lugar a los rasgos de personalidad correspondientes.

Así pues, el concepto de sankhāra se sitúa en el centro de un proceso de fabricación mediante el cual nos formamos a nosotros mismos a través de nuestras continuas respuestas al mundo. En un modelo psicológico que carece de un yo fijo, el yo se forma y se vuelve a formar a cada momento por la naturaleza de nuestras intenciones, acciones y disposiciones resultantes. Estamos continuamente “formando formaciones”, como dice un texto (sankhāram abhisankharoti, que utiliza la palabra como sustantivo y como verbo), con lo que nos moldeamos y remodelamos constantemente tanto a nosotros mismos como al mundo por la calidad de nuestras respuestas.

Sankhāra es también el nombre de uno de los cinco agregados, las cinco funciones de la mente y el cuerpo que interactúan regularmente entre sí para dar forma a nuestra experiencia. Mientras que la forma material, el tono de los sentimientos, la interpretación perceptiva y la conciencia nos ayudan a comprender lo que ocurre en cada momento, el agregado de formaciones (sankhāra) guía como actuamos al respecto.

El reto consiste en responder con habilidad en lugar de con torpeza, y el sankhāra es una herramienta que puede manejarse con ilusión o con sabiduría.

♦

This article previously appeared on Tricycle as What’s in a Word: Sankhāra. 

The post ¿Qué hay en una palabra? Sankhara appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Times of great uncertainty and disruption call for an appropriate response. An Ecosattva is a being committed to protecting and serving all, including our precious Earth. We can all walk the path of the Ecosattva, responding to the cry of the earth with clarity and dedication to the interdependent well-being of ourselves, our communities, and all beings.

There are two things that any Ecosattva needs to cultivate to be able to meet the challenges of this moment: fierce compassion and equanimity. Fierce compassion means seeing the suffering of our times clearly, and being willing to take a stand, to act to relieve that suffering however we can. Equanimity is the spaciousness, the perspective to have our action come from a place of deep wisdom rather than reactivity. 

Compassion and Appropriate Action

In many temples in Asia, you see statues of a great being, the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara Kuan Yin. A bodhisattva is an awakened being. In this particular statue, you’ll often see many arms and many hands. In each palm, there’s drawn an eye. Sometimes the bodhisattva is male, sometimes female, transgender; it is very gender fluid. This eye on the palm of each hand, is the eye of wisdom. 

That if we look deeply into the situation, then our action will be appropriate action. But if we are caught up in our own story, and in our strong emotions, our anger, our reactivity, then we won’t be able to see the situation and its depth, and its complexity and its impermanence. Then our action may actually cause more harm than good because it doesn’t have this deep grounding in wisdom. 

It’s challenging to see a situation clearly. The Buddha said that most of our perceptions are wrong. So we need to act, but we need to try to see clearly. For this we need the skill of equanimity, which is non reactivity. It’s seeing things from all sides. 

The word in Sanskrit is upeksa. It means to be able to look and see from all around, like you’re standing on the top of a mountain. You’re not caught in any one side, in any perspective. 

During the war between the US and Vietnam, there was the School of Youth for Social Service. Thousands of youth were going into the countryside to rebuild villages, schools, roads and improve the lives of people. This School of Youth for Social Service was set up by Thich Nhat Hanh.

This was important work. It was often the difference between life and death for people. Yet every week, these young social workers would take a day of mindfulness for themselves to refresh themselves, to come together and practice and to heal, to listen to each other, to share from their hearts. 

They didn’t say the work of the war is too urgent, we have to work seven days a week. They understood that in order to sustain themselves, they had to take regular pauses to take good care of themselves. 

The peace activist A.J. Muste has said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” The young social workers in Vietnam were practicing peace, not working towards peace in a frenetic or frantic way. That’s not how we create peace. We need to manifest it in every step. Not running for something in the future, but being peace in this moment, because the future is made of this moment. 

The young people in Vietnam would rebuild bombed villages. In one village in particular, they rebuilt it, and it was bombed again. They rebuilt it a second time and it was bombed again. They rebuilt it a third time. I believe it happened four times that they rebuilt that village and they didn’t say, “Hey, this isn’t worth it. Let’s just call it a day.” 

They weren’t rebuilding the village because they wanted a particular outcome. Of course they would have preferred I’m sure that the village remained unharmed, but they weren’t dependent on that as their outcome. They rebuilt the village time and again because that’s what they needed to do, not because there was any guarantee that their action was going to work, and succeed in the end. That is a deep example of “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  

We’re not doing something with the expectation of a particular outcome. If we do that, if we say, “I’ll only do this, if this happens,” we will burn out very soon. Because either we won’t do it at all, or we do it and if it doesn’t work, then we lose all of our energy, and we fall into despair. So it’s like the difference between conditional and unconditional love. 

It’s hard to practice unconditional love, and it’s very hard to work for change without wanting things to go the way we expect. If we want to survive with our energy, and our hope, our love, our enthusiasm intact, we have to look with this eye in the palm of our hand, which sees that no action goes unrecorded in the larger scheme and the larger flow of life. That an action done out of pure intent to bring joy or relieve suffering is never lost, even if in the immediate outcome it’s not what we want, and maybe it’s even the opposite. That eye in the hand of our action is the eye that sees that all we can do is what we deeply feel and know needs to be done. 

The only way we can be truly free and deeply powerful in that action is if we do it because we know it needs to be done. That is the power of equanimity, that we need to balance out the fierce compassion that drives us to action. 

In The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a senior nun from Vietnam, who came to visit Plum Village, his monastery in France. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given three or four months to live. She accepted this and decided to put all of her energy into practicing to be fully present in each moment for the [remaining] days she had left to live. She was aware of her breathing, of her steps. She was mindful of each of her bodily movements throughout the day. Before returning to Hanoi, where she expected to die, a sister persuaded her to go get a checkup in France. The doctors found that all of the metastasized cancer had receded to just one area. She lived for more than 14 years after she was told she had just three months. 

He tells this story as a collective metaphor. We are facing a possible extinction as a species. If we can accept that things are going to change, maybe end, and we are on the brink of real collapse, we put our whole hearts knowing this is it. We live deeply, fully as a human species, with other species, and with the earth, understanding, “Okay, we’ve messed this up. Now we just have a little time. How can we live deeply with all beings on this planet?”

This is what the nun was doing when she was determined to practice. Because she said, “Well, my life is going to end in a few months. Let me give all of my attention to this step, this breath, this moment.” She wasn’t trying to live for 14 more years, that just happened. Her desire was simply to do what needed to be done, to practice with all of her energy for the few months that she was told she had left. So she was truly free. She wasn’t thinking, “I’ll do this so that I can get this in return.” 

That is really working with the mystery, the unknown, and letting life just unfold, and hold us and teach us. So that is what this practice of the Ecosattva path is, to give our best wholeheartedly, not with any outcome that we are attached to. We never know what may come of that action. 

♦

This article is adapted from a dharma talk given in November 2023 titled “Taking the Ecosattva Path: Equanimity and Fierce Compassion.”

The post Embodying the Equanimity and Fierce Compassion of Avalokiteshvara appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The words devotion and vote both come from the Latin vovere, to vow, promise, or dedicate. To be devoted means that we commit fully. When we are devoted, we give tremendously of our time, energy, and attention—to a spouse, an instrument, a practice, a garden, a quality, or the sacred. This kind of wholehearted offering can include our rational intelligence, but it needn’t depend on it. Yes, devotion without reason can be dangerous, as history tragically demonstrates. But when our devotion leads to good and benefits others, we can feel confident that the object of our devotion is worthy, whether or not it makes sense rationally.

It took a long time for me to appreciate the value and beauty of Buddhist devotional practices like bowing, chanting, and offering incense. Learning more about their historical context gave me a new perspective on these practices. The Buddha radically challenged traditional views that holiness was about one’s birth (caste) and that spiritual purity or attainment could be found through rituals like bathing in the Ganges. He asserted that true righteousness lies in the heart, and that the primary value of ritual is symbolic. In ritual, intention matters more than action. Thus to offer incense to a Buddha statue is to offer gratitude for the Buddha’s teachings and respect for our own capacity for awakening.

Devotion expresses humility, gratitude, and appreciation; we may literally lower ourselves to honor another. In this way, bowing is a whole-body mudra (symbolic gesture) signifying deep respect. Devotion to the sacred, one’s ancestors, or a teacher uplifts the heart and calls forth our potential. Their goodness elicits the best in us.

We see the potency of devotion in a curious passage from the Buddhist Pali canon where the Buddha, just days after being enlightened, reflects, “It is painful to dwell without reverence. . . . Now what ascetic or brahmin can I honor, respect, and dwell in dependence on?” Realizing that his insight had surpassed that of everyone he knew, the Buddha decides to honor and respect the truth that set him free. This floored me when I first read it. One of the few records of the Buddha’s thoughts after his awakening is essentially, “How can I still show devotion?” This sentiment embodies a fundamental human longing to be in relationship with something sacred or worthy of our respect.

Without devotion we suffer from spiritual hunger; we sense something missing, perhaps without even knowing what it is. Without the opportunity to give ourselves to something worthwhile, our need for devotion may become displaced onto addictions to accumulation, substances, or appearances; onto entertainments and pleasures; or onto feelings of self-judgment, inadequacy, and self-loathing. In effect, we become what Buddhists call “hungry ghosts,” endlessly consuming, never fulfilled.

When we feel an absence of the sacred, we experience a void in our hearts, a pervasive emptiness. Materialism, hedonism, and hyperindividualism dislocate our need for devotion to something larger than ourselves, whether through religious observance, spiritual practice, or a transcendent experience of love. We may be devoted to art, to love or family, to the sacred, to social justice, or to all of these and more. Our devotion is not defined by its object but by the quality of attention and love we bring to it. When we act with full sincerity, connecting our heart with our purpose, even washing the dishes can be an act of devotion.

We don’t practice devotion to get something in return. We practice it for its own sake, as a complete offering of our heart.

Neglecting the heart and failing to integrate devotion into our lives inevitably erode our capacity for fulfillment in some way. If we don’t engage our hearts, life becomes dry and automatic. Relying exclusively on the logical and analytical part of our minds, we approach life mechanistically and lose touch with creativity and freshness. Caring for children, spearheading a new project or campaign, even meditating become obligations rather than empowering vocations, and we lose the deep joy of acting with sincerity.

Devotion expresses itself in a diverse mosaic beyond traditional ways of relating to the sacred. As the poet Rumi wrote, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” In 1965, when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched for voting rights with Dr. King, he famously said, “I felt like my legs were praying.” Activism, caregiving, service, singing, growing vegetables, planting a tree—all can be meaningful acts of devotion that connect us to something larger than ourselves.

We don’t practice devotion to get something in return. We practice it for its own sake, as a complete offering of our heart. Singing my son to sleep in my arms, lowering him gently into a warm bath, even wiping his bottom—done wholeheartedly these acts express full devotion. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi recounts how Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, made a devotional act of fetching water from the river, taking only half a dipper and returning the rest “without throwing it away. . . . When we feel the beauty of the river, we intuitively do it in Dogen’s way.”

In deep devotion the quality of our presence transcends our actions. What we do with wholehearted devotion becomes a holistic expression of our being, an act of beauty and selflessness beyond the everyday realm of time, roles, and duties. Released from such daily pressures, we open to the transpersonal realm of the mythopoetic, the archetypal, and the sacred. A single moment of generosity, offered with complete devotion, connects us with all acts of generosity. Planting one tree with devotion connects us with the limitless capacity of life. Devotion thus reaches beyond discrete acts. Vows of love, aspiration, and justice require devotion. Long-term commitments like marriage, child-rearing, and ordination all call forth enduring devotion, as we show up again and again each day. Such devotional commitments, combined with resolve and awareness, power social change in the face of obstacles and repression.

When we give our whole being to anything skillful—be it for one moment of complete presence or a lifetime of tireless work—our being itself becomes a blessing.

In northwestern India a hundred years ago, Badshah Khan’s devotion to nonviolence and education as forms of rebellion sparked a peaceful revolution that challenged at once British colonialism, the authority of local mullahs, and an ancient culture of violence. Advocating for a united, independent, secular India, Khan founded the world’s first nonviolent “army of peace,” which grew to one hundred thousand members in spite of brutal British repression. His visionary devotion drew global attention to the power of nonviolence and was vital to India’s liberation.

Devotion can transform protests into pilgrimage and demonstrations into ceremony. In 1978, advocating for tribal sovereignty and protesting threats to treaties and water rights, several hundred American Indian activists and supporters marched for five months across the United States, from San Francisco to Washington, DC. Known as the Longest Walk, this pilgrimage secured several legislative victories, including the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. More recently, in 2016, opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (an oil conduit that passes through ancestral burial grounds and under tribal water sources), Lakota elders at Standing Rock frequently reminded demonstrators that their actions were a form of ceremony.

In such efforts, we can glimpse devotion’s capacity to extend even beyond our lifetimes. Held strongly enough, and by enough people, devotion bridges generations in liberating visions—from emancipation, women’s suffrage, and marriage equality to ongoing movements for nuclear disarmament and for racial and climate justice. When we give our whole being to anything skillful—be it for one moment of complete presence or a lifetime of tireless work—our being itself becomes a blessing, and we drink from a source of strength and goodness beyond our personal history or identity.

Reflection: Getting Started

Take time to examine what you habitually devote yourself to. To what activities, persons, values, or habits do you unthinkingly give yourself ? Is part of you devoted to time, money, efficiency, or control? Consider how this serves and how it limits you. Now reflect on who or what is worthy of your devotion. Is there a person, activity, or value to which you would like to be more devoted? Perhaps your family, a craft or project, a social movement, or even a quality like generosity or gratitude? What would that look like for you?

Meditation: Going Deeper

Sit, stand, or recline and settle your mind and body in any way that feels supportive. Let yourself be completely natural, without trying to control your thoughts or focus in any special way. In your own time, when you’re ready, pose one of these questions to your heart:

• What is sacred to me?
• What do I hold dear in life?
• What upholds and supports me?
• What is the deepest truth I know?
• What is too important to forget?

Simply ask the question and listen to whatever arises. Make space for anything and everything—memories, images, sensations, and emotions, as well as discursive thought. Give more attention to the depth and quality of your question and your sincere listening than to finding an answer. Whenever your mind wanders, return to something simple and grounding in the present moment, such as your breath. Continue your inquiry by asking the question again or posing one of the others. Keep listening, honoring whatever arises, not needing to figure things out. If something clear emerges, shift your focus to appreciating your connection with whatever feels sacred, worthy, or true to you. When you feel ready, let go of the question and return to being present. Make a mental note of anything significant you want to remember.

Action: Engaging Devotion

Choose an activity to take on as a devotional practice for the next two weeks. This could be praying, bowing, chanting, or any other spiritual observance. It could equally be walking in the garden for ten minutes every morning, mindfully drinking a cup of tea, reading your child a bedtime story, or even cleaning your teeth! The quality of presence and intention you bring to the activity is what matters. If the activity you choose seems to lack meaning, create that meaning. For example, if you choose drinking water as your devotional act, when you drink you might focus on the wish that all creatures have access to clean water. If it’s cleaning your teeth, you might connect with the heartfelt wish that all creatures have the means necessary to care for their bodies.

Each day, before doing the activity, pause, gathering all of your attention. Set a clear and firm intention to give this activity your full attention. When you do it, do it wholeheartedly, connecting with the meaning this activity, person, or task has (or that you’ve created). As you act, stay attuned: Are you aware? Is your heart engaged? Are you rushing ahead or settling into the moment? Return to the aim of offering your entire being. As the days unfold, notice whether any resistance, impatience, or control comes up. If so, recall that meeting these habitual challenges is also a practice. What happens if you let go of having things the way you want and surrender to the process?

Alternatively, choose an ongoing commitment in your life that you’d like to reinvigorate with devotion. Can you notice ways devotion imbues not only this commitment but all great actions, such as parenting, intimate partnership, lifelong friendship, and following one’s vocation?

If You Have Difficulties

If terms like the sacred don’t speak to you, find ones that do. What connects you with something larger than yourself or your lifetime? What lights you up inside? If the word devotion turns you off, try using a synonym like commitment or wholeheartedness. Practice doing something with complete and total sincerity; put your whole heart into it. If you struggle to do this, use that as an opportunity to practice patience, forgiveness, and mindfulness and try again. If you find yourself growing tight, straining to do it “correctly,” pause in that very moment. Try relaxing your face and jaw. Exhale. Come back to the spirit of devotion: offering your heart to that which is worthy. Consider your time, energy, and presence a gift you can offer. To whom or what shall you offer it? Return to the practice of devotion with this new orientation.

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From Your Heart Was Made For This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love © 2023 by Oren Jay Sofer. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. 

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Hay una oración budista que habla de la vida humana como “el océano de la existencia con sus olas de nacimiento, envejecimiento, enfermedad y muerte”. Las tres últimas son también las “señales” que Siddhartha Gautama vio antes de abandonar su cómoda vida de palacio y, espoleado por una cuarta señal—la visión de un mendicante errante—partió en busca de la liberación. Para la Venerable Jissai Prince-Cherry, sacerdote budista zen, fueron tres de estas “olas”—el nacimiento de su hijo, una dolorosa enfermedad y una muerte desgarradora—las que la pusieron firmemente en el camino a la libertad.

“Cuando nació mi hijo, me di cuenta de que ya no veía mi carrera en la Fuerza Aérea como antes. Llegaría el día en que tendría que dejarlo al ser desplegada, y pensé: no puedo hacerlo. No lo haré”.

En 1994, un año después de terminar el servicio militar, Jissai requirió una pequeña operación. Mientras se recuperaba en casa, se dio cuenta de lo infeliz que era. A pesar de tener un buen trabajo, una familia maravillosa y todo el dinero que necesitaban, había en ella algo que no podía identificar. Así que cuando tres programas de entrevistas que estaba viendo en la televisión presentaban segmentos sobre meditación, lo tomó como una señal—una versión moderna de la cuarta señal con la que se encontró Buda. Fue a la biblioteca pública, escogió un libro y, convencida de que era lo que buscaba, empezó a practicar meditación.

“Me identificaba como cristiana, pero no era practicante”, dijo. “No tenía motivos para rechazar los libros budistas de la biblioteca. Más bien, buscaba una razón para descartarlos, así que decidí leer el libro de aspecto más budista que encontré”.

Ese libro era Lo que enseñó Buda, de Walpola Rahula. Y, para su asombro, Jissai encontró reflejadas en esas páginas sus propias verdades. Consultó otro libro, y este también confirmó lo que sentía, así que empezó a practicar con un grupo zen local. Al año siguiente, al marido de Jissai le ofrecieron un ascenso en Rochester, Nueva York, y ella aprovechó la oportunidad para practicar con el Centro Zen de Rochester (CZR). Un taller introductorio la llevó a un retiro, luego a otro, y en poco tiempo se encontró practicando en el centro lo más que podía. Incluso cuando su familia se trasladó a Kentucky dos años más tarde, continuó con el CZR y, con el apoyo de su maestro, Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, estableció un grupo de meditación en Louisville.

Una vez más, las olas surgieron, esta vez la repentina muerte de su marido en 2011 mientras Jissai estaba de retiro en Nueva York. Atrapada entre el dolor y el impulso de la práctica que había establecido, Jissai intensificó su entrenamiento zen. Sus hijos habían crecido y ella contaba con apoyo financiero, lo que le permitió viajar regularmente entre Rochester y Louisville.

Las historias hablan de una manera que las explicaciones de la teoría y la doctrina budistas no lo pueden hacer.

En 2018, Jissai se convirtió en sacerdote novicio en la Orden de las Tres Joyas de la Sangha Nube-Agua (la asociación de centros y grupos zen dirigidos por estudiantes de Roshi Kjolhede). La mitad de su formación para la ordenación monástica tuvo lugar durante el aislamiento de COVID, pero el CZR, al igual que otras comunidades espirituales que restringieron sus actividades en persona, realizó sus actividades en línea. “Fue una verdadera bendición”, afirma Jissai. “Había sesiones de meditación dos veces al día, charlas zen y sesshins mensuales. Mi formación continuó sin saltos”. En 2022, Jissai fue ordenada como sacerdote budista zen de la Orden de las Tres Joyas.

Al describir su estilo de enseñanza, Ven. Jissai Prince-Cherry dice: “Soy más bien una narradora. Al igual que Buda utilizaba los cuentos Jataka, yo cuento historias para ilustrar un punto. No importa si los ‘hechos’ de la historia son ciertos o no. Lo esencial es el punto de la historia. Las historias hablan de una manera que las explicaciones de la teoría y la doctrina budistas no lo pueden hacer. Las historias dan vida a las enseñanzas”.

Para escuchar las charlas de Ven. Jissai Prince-Cherry, visite el podcast del Centro Zen de Rochester en rzc.org/library/archives-podcast.

P: ¿Qué es la “mente de principiante” y por qué es importante cultivarla?

R: La “mente de principiante” es un término popularizado por Roshi Shunryu Suzuki, del Centro Zen de San Francisco, en su libro Mente zen, mente de principiante. Su famoso dicho es: “En la mente del principiante hay muchas posibilidades, pero en la del experto, hay pocas”. La mente del principiante es muy abierta. Es una mente infantil; no nos aferramos a lo que sabemos o creemos saber, por ende, libera posibilidades. Es espaciosa y vacía.

En la tradición Zen que yo practico, utilizamos el término “no saber” indistintamente del término “mente de principiante”. Para conocer algo, necesitamos un sujeto y un objeto. Hay un conocedor que conoce algo, alguna “cosa”, alrededor de esta cosa, hay barreras, hay una caja y una etiqueta (para nombrarla). Pero este tipo de conocimiento crea distancia. Crea una brecha entre el conocedor y lo conocido. Sin embargo, la vida no es así. Las líneas entre conocedor y conocido, entre sujeto y objeto, son mucho más ténues de lo que imaginamos. La mente del principiante funciona antes de que el sujeto y el objeto se hayan dividido en dos. El no saber es un conocimiento íntimo.

A pesar de lo que pueda parecer, la mente del principiante no es ni anti-intelectual ni ignorante. Deja a un lado el conocimiento para permanecer con las manos vacías, con la cabeza vacía. No es malo tener la cabeza vacía. Durante sesshin, por ejemplo, nuestros retiros en silencio, hacemos unas diez horas de meditación cada día por dos a siete días. Para sesshin, es muy útil tener la cabeza vacía.

Hace poco dirigí un sesshin en el Centro de Retiros Chapin Mill del Centro Zen de Rochester. Asistieron personas que habían hecho muchos, muchos retiros, y había gente que era nueva.

Algunos de los veteranos tenían la cabeza llena de sus experiencias en sesshines anteriores, mientras que los principiantes no tenían ni idea de lo que les esperaba. Aportaron frescura al retiro porque carecían de conocimiento. Ciertamente habían oído hablar de lo que ocurre durante sesshin, habían leído sobre ello, tenían el programa, así que no eran ignorantes, pero como nunca lo habían hecho antes, no llevaban el peso de experiencias pasadas. Eran libres.

La mente llena de conocimientos de un experto no es libre. Es como un punto al final de una frase. Ya está. Fin. En cambio, una mente que no sabe es un signo de interrogación. Está abierta y dispuesta a todo.

Lo bueno es que no tenemos que emprender un proyecto especial para cultivar la mente de principiante; accedemos a ella simplemente practicando. Mediante la absorción en la respiración, un koan o shikantaza (“solo sentarse”), recuperamos la mente despejada de conocimiento. Al volver una y otra vez al no-saber, experimentamos de primera mano las palabras de Sócrates: “La sabiduría comienza en el asombro”. Nos damos cuenta directamente de que la intimidad, la ilimitación y la libertad son nuestra verdadera naturaleza. La mente del principiante es nuestra herencia.

—JP-C

♦

This article previously appeared on Tricycle as Meet a Teacher: Venerable Jissai Prince Cherry.

The post Conoce a una maestra: Venerable Jissai Prince-Cherry appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the springtime, thousands of different kinds of flowers bloom. Your heart can also bloom. You can let your heart open up to the world. Love is possible—do not be afraid of it. Love is indispensable to life, and if in the past you have suffered because of love, you can learn how to love again.

The practice of mindfulness will help you to love properly, in such a way that harmony, freedom, and joy are possible. The true declaration of love is, “Dear one, I am here for you,” because the most precious gift you can give to your loved one is your true presence, with body and mind united in solidity and freedom.

You also have to learn how to speak all over again. When you speak with 100 percent of your being, your speech becomes a mantra. In Buddhism, a mantra is a sacred formula that has the power to transform reality. You don’t need to practice mantras in some foreign language like Sanskrit or Tibetan. You can practice in your own beautiful language: for if your body and mind are unified in mindfulness, then whatever you say becomes a mantra.

After you have practiced walking meditation or mindfulness of the breath for two or three minutes, you are here, really alive, truly present. You look at the person you love with a smile, and you say the first mantra: “Dear one, I am here for you.” You know that if you are here, then your beloved is here also. Life, with all its miracles, is here, and among those miracles is the person before you, the one you love.

You can say this mantra a few times a day: “Dear one, I am here for you.” And now that you have the ability to recognize the presence of this other person, you can practice a second mantra: “Dear one, I know that you are here, alive, and that makes me very happy.” This mantra enables you to recognize the presence of the other person as something very precious, a miracle. It is the mantra of deep appreciation for his or her presence.

When people feel appreciated in this way—when they feel embraced by the mindful attention of another—then they will open and blossom like a flower. There is no doubt that you can make this happen through the energy of mindfulness. You can do it right away, even today, and you will see that the transformation it brings about is instantaneous. In order to love, we must be here, and then our presence will embrace the presence of the other person. Only then will they have the feeling of being loved. So you must recognize the presence of the other person with the energy of mindfulness, with the genuine presence of your body and mind in oneness.

If the person you love is suffering, you can say a third mantra: “Dear one, I know that you are suffering. That’s why I am here for you.” You are here, and you recognize the fact that your loved one is suffering. You don’t need to make a big deal about it; you just generate your own presence and say this mantra. That’s all. “Dear one, I know that you are suffering. That’s why I am here for you.” This is the essence of love—to be there for the one you love when she is suffering.

A mantra can be expressed not only through speech but by the mind and body as a whole. The fact that you are there with the energy of your presence and understanding, and the fact that you recognize the presence of the other person and their suffering, will give them a great deal of relief. Some people suffer deeply but are completely ignored by others. They are alone and isolated, so cut off from the rest of the world that their suffering becomes overwhelming. You must go to them and open the door to their heart so they can see the love that is there.

Our bodies and minds are sustained by the cosmos. The clouds in the sky nourish us; the light of the sun nourishes us. The cosmos offers us vitality and love in every moment. Despite this fact, some people feel isolated and alienated from the world. As a bodhisattva, you can approach such a person, and with the miracle of the mantra you can open the door of his or her heart to the world and to the love that is always happening. “Dear one, I know that you are suffering a lot. I know this, and I am here for you, just as the trees are here for you and the flowers are here for you.” The suffering is there, but something else is also there: the miracle of life. With this mantra, you will help them to realize this and open the door of their closed heart.

The fourth mantra is a bit more difficult to practice, but I will transmit it to you because one day you will need it. It is: “Dear one, I am suffering. I need your help.” This fourth mantra is more difficult to practice because of the negative habit energy we call pride. When your suffering has been caused by the person you love the most in the world, the pain is very great. If someone else had said or done the same thing to you, you would suffer much less. But if the person who did it is the one who is dearest to you in the world, the suffering is really dreadful. You want to lock yourself away in a room and cry alone.

Now, when this person notices that something is wrong and tries to approach you about it, you might rebuff him or her. “Leave me alone,” you say. “I don’t need you.” The other might say, “Dear one, it seems to me that you are suffering,” but you do everything possible to prove you don’t need them.

This is exactly the opposite of what you should do. You should practice mindfulness of the breath with your body and mind in union, and with this total presence, go to the other person and say the mantra: “Dear one, I am suffering. I need your help. I need you to explain to me why you did this thing to me.”

If you are a real practitioner, please use this fourth mantra when you are in such a situation. You must not let pride come between you and your loved one. Many people suffer because of this obstacle called pride. You love someone, you need them, and so in these difficult moments, you should go and ask them for help.

In true love, there is no place for pride. I beg you to remember this. You share happiness and adversity with this person, so you must go to him or her and share the truth about your suffering. “Dear one, I am suffering too much. I want you to help me. Explain to me why you said that to me.”

When you do that, the Buddha does it at the same time with you, because the Buddha is in you. All of us practice this mantra along with you—you have the support of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha in uttering these words. These words will quickly transform the situation, so do not let things drag on for months or years. You should act decisively; the magic formulas have been transmitted to you for this purpose. Inscribe these four mantras in your heart, and use them. This is the practice of love, and its foundation is the energy of mindfulness.

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From You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment by Thich Nhat Hanh. English translation © 2009 by Shambhala Publications, Inc. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

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