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.

On a recent Saturday morning, shortly after I began teaching meditation, I was on my way to teach a daylong retreat outside of Nashville. While driving on Granny White Pike, a busy two-lane street, I signaled and merged into the turn lane. Just as I did, someone in a white car sped up and honked at me multiple times.

The blasts startled me. I was driving at least the speed limit, I signaled and moved into the turn lane correctly, and, to my knowledge, I did everything completely normal. But the sudden blasts penetrated my body to the core and shook up my nervous system. I felt upset as I waited for the turn light. “What’s up with that guy, I did nothing wrong. What a jerk!”

We’ve all seen the headlines of road rage incidents that then escalate into dangerous, even fatal, encounters. This episode was harmless overall; the driver was gone, yet the lingering anger I felt remained. Then the voice of wisdom piped in, “you’re on your way to teach a retreat, you don’t want to carry this frustration in your nervous system a minute more.”

I then remembered a practice I can do while driving or at other times when an encounter throws me off. I center in on the place where I still feel the response—starting with my awareness of the angry thoughts, then bringing my attention to my body, feeling the agitation and contraction in my gut area. I take a few breaths and gradually let go of the narrative of “that driver was a jerk.” I often find, when bringing my attention to the physical sensation of agitation in the body and the breath, that the sense of self that often solidifies amid feeling wronged or hurt just melts away, especially when there is no recourse or further action needed. This act of going back to bodily awareness often supports a return to equanimity when the mind and heart are feeling agitated.

I didn’t want the driver to leave me with a second arrow; the first arrow being the horn, the second arrow being the anger and sense of being wronged one carries with them. As I remained present without proliferating thoughts, the anger and frustration began to dissipate. Nothing was left but the breath and my body, sitting at a traffic light. All was well, my nervous system had reset to ease. The light changed, and I drove the rest of the way to the retreat feeling at peace.

While teaching that morning, I used this encounter as an example of how to let go of feeling wronged in a situation where there is no external control or recourse. I explained how I unwound the tension and anger, all the way to a sense of self, and then let it go.

Compassion naturally arises when we get a glimpse into another person’s suffering.

During a break, a young man asked if we could meet privately. We went into a room at the back of the house, and he confided, “that story you told of the man who aggressively honked at you—I’m that guy.” I was stunned. How likely was that? He continued, “I’m not literally that guy, but that’s just like me, I can’t control my anger. My wife and child are leaving me. I’m losing everything that matters to me. I don’t want to live like this any longer, can meditation help me?”

My heart softened. The proverbial jerk on the road sat right in front of me, exposing his suffering and the real consequences that arose from his hostility. How often do we see behind the hardened surface to the actual human who we think is a jerk? Compassion naturally arises when we get a glimpse into another person’s suffering.

This angry man was willing to reveal his vulnerability. That’s rare. Because I had already unwound my own reaction from the encounter with an aggressive driver, I could more fully listen to and receive this man’s tenderness and feel connected to his suffering. While a different flavor from my own, I knew that in the deepest place, this man was another reflection of the ways I too was not fully awake.

An Exercise

Ahead of everyone’s busy holiday season of bustling and commuting, here is a step-by-step guide for how to unwind a reactive response:

• Begin by recognizing and bringing awareness to the reaction at the thought level, just noting without judgment the narrative itself. Don’t try to stop it, let it run for a minute through the spotlight of your awareness.
• Now find the place in your body where you find a corresponding felt sense of the reaction. Perhaps a tightness in your gut or chest, or a constriction at your throat.
• Begin to explore the way these sensations feel in your body. Notice if your mind returns quickly to the thought. Gently bring it back to the bodily sensations.
• Start to let go of the narrative as you stay with the physical sensations.
• Don’t demand anything, trust the wisdom of the body, and let go of trying to figure it out or change it.
• Now investigate if you can find a “me” or “mine” in these sensations. Chances are, you can’t.
• Just continue to rest your attention at the sensations for a few more minutes. As you disidentify from these thoughts and the sense of self that felt wronged, you’ll likely begin to relax and return to equilibrium.

The post Awakening with a Rude Driver appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In an often-told Zen tale, the parents of a village girl storm the hut of the aging monk Hakuin and thrust on him their daughter’s newborn child. They blame him for fathering the baby, mock his esteemed reputation, and name him a dirty old man. Awkwardly cradling the squalling baby, Hakuin makes a deep bow and responds with equanimity, “Is that so?”

That night, as a chill wind penetrates the hut, he encircles the baby with his own warmth, offering her protection. He nurtures this child as a father would his daughter: stitching her clothes from his monk’s robes, sharing his own meager broth and rice, as well as schooling her in poetry, brush painting, and the wisdom of the dharma.

When the true father is revealed, the village girl’s parents appear once again at Hakuin’s hut, this time to claim the child as their own and to take her away. They praise Hakuin for his generosity, ask forgiveness for tarnishing his image as a monk, and name him a great benefactor. As he releases the beloved child, he makes a deep bow and again with equanimity responds, “Is that so?”

I’ve found myself returning to the Hakuin tale as I’ve reflected on a recent school reunion. A reunion—what better occasion to confront the tight grip of the self image; the exquisite pull, and sometimes pain, of seeing through the lens of reputation, name, and identity?

The first class reunion for my progressive New York City private school was our twenty-fifth. Some of us, including me, had started at the school at age 6, and so we went back a long way together. At the reunion, my fifth-grade teacher told me a story. “At morning circle,” Joan said, “I asked for a volunteer. Before I’d mentioned the errand, you raised your hand and jumped from your seat. You raced out of the room en route to do that errand. Who knows where you went? It was ten minutes before you raced back, empty-handed, confused.” I’ve savored the tale of this small, intense enthusiast, and wondered, “Who was she?”

At our second reunion, our thirty-fifth, my childhood friend Suzy told my 10-year-old daughter about the young me: “Every single day at school your mom would cry.” And who was this? I’ve pondered both of these stories for hints of who I was and, in some ways, who I am now.

Over these many years, I’ve committed much time and effort to meditation practice, to therapy, to qigong or yoga, to countless modalities to train in awareness and equanimity. That’s meant I’ve often taken myself gently by the scruff of the neck—to listen with more care, to contain soaring emotions (not always so benign as enthusiasm or tears), and to pause and consider before I jump. At times I’ve taken pride in my progress; indeed, I’ve relished praise from friends for how I have “changed.”

Of course, in Buddhism we’re taught that pride is based in illusion and, ultimately, causes pain, as does attachment to either blame or praise. Yet how I’ve yearned for you to certify me, to stamp me, to applaud me, to mirror me back to myself as a new and improved self. And who is this “you?” I’ve been in awe of you since I was 6—the Big Shot, the primo-identity!

This past year, I’ve been one of the planners of a third reunion, our forty-seventh. In my kitchen in Berkeley I met with a classmate, Carly. She had been the queen Big Shot. When we were little, I dreaded the Fifth Avenue bus ride home with Carly, who teased me daily about my little-shot ways—a dreamer, a klutz, a teacher’s pet. Often, as we rode downtown, she would knock me down and sit on top of me, crushing my cheek against the seat. With me struggling underneath her weight, my face stinging with tears, we’d ride past my stop at 81st by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all the way to hers at 53rd, almost as far as MoMA. It was a long walk back uptown to my stop.

I still don’t know why she did it or why I stood for it. I do know that at some point I paid a high price to win Carly’s friendship. I also know that we continued a long love-hate history throughout school and beyond; listening to Mozart together, staying up all night talking about our boyfriends, our mothers. We went through her breakdown during college and mine ten years later. Since then, our on-and-off visits have felt strained for reasons that have remained mostly opaque.

At our recent visit, after reunion planning, we exchanged news of family and work. I picked up a booklet of photos from the past month’s meeting of the Berkeley City Council, where in their tradition of naming days in honor of local artists, my birthday for that year was named “Barbara Gates Day.” The cover photo featured a group shot of my crew, arrayed in jeans and shawls, running shoes and silver boots—family, the staff of Inquiring Mind, neighborhood kids—precious strands of my life that had come together to celebrate. But as soon as I opened the booklet, something felt off. I hurried through to the final shot of me at a podium, eyebrows raised, nostrils flared, gesturing with dramatic flourish. “Whoa!” Carly shook her head with a snort. “Same old Barbara!” She scowled, narrowed her eyes, and, as if to someone across the room, added, “Nope, hasn’t changed a bit!” I felt it like a wallop. A whole lot of words followed that I couldn’t take in, that I could barely hear, but three that I thought I did were: “Full of yourself.”

Where did that come from? I had the urge to grab her by the shoulders, to escort her out the front door, and, with an imperceptible shove at the landing, to knock her down the steep sixteen steps. Tongue-tied, I sat there raging. Once again I was pinned under Carly on the Fifth Avenue bus headed past my home stop. Again, I felt crushed into some diminished picture of my “self.”

But what if instead, like the Zen monk Hakuin, I had responded with a gracious nod, “Is that so?” What if I had let her comment breeze through our exchange?

Not so easy. I try to imagine our monk by the doorway to his hut clasping the dazed baby to his fast-beating heart, blamed, called dirty old man. Or years later, releasing this child, whose tender life felt inseparable from his own, now praised with the lofty great benefactor. When his world as he knew it was overturned and he was presented with opposing identities, what a feat to hold steady in himself, to be unshakable. For me, pulled as I am by enthusiasm, by hurt, or by thirst for validation, such freedom from the addiction to identity doesn’t come easily.

This visit with Carly touched off memories. So many memories from childhood were of the powerlessness of us little shots and the clout of the Big Shots—whom I feared, hated, and secretly craved to impress.

What if I had let her comment breeze through our exchange?

Who were the little shots? They were dreamers, artists, tellers of tales: Ariana, with her tender cheeks and spun-sugar halo of hair, a painter, even at 9 capturing the nuance of seasons; Plum, with her silky braids and embroidered tops, a book lover who wrote endless tales of mystery and imagination; and me, a fervent story-maker, rapt in the child’s worlds of dress-up and dolls.

And the Big Shots? They were the tough girls. Each and every one could throw a mean pitch in baseball or Soak ’Em—the scourge of little shots like me. In a Soak ’Em game, sometimes dubbed Dodge Ball or Murder Ball, the Big Shots seemed all powerful. When two teams faced off in the gym, the team with more Big Shots always inevitably won. When one of them got the ball, we knew they would slam it at one of us little shots and knock us out of the game. A sidearm throw aimed at the face could blacken an eye or bloody a nose, or aimed at the feet could send us flying–smack–against the gym floor. And for me, the choosing of teams was the most excruciating part. Big Shot captains took turns picking, and my friends and I were always chosen last. Talk about a diminished identity.

After two years of planning, when the forty-seventh reunion finally happened, our gatherings included a visit to a building overlooking Central Park that for many years housed our school. In a bizarre juxtaposition with our freedom-loving progressive institution, this building now housed a minimum-security prison. A bright-eyed, gray-haired, and balding group of us was graciously ushered around the site. As we toured the lobby (now complete with metal detectors and a gun arsenal) and the former classrooms (now dorm units with tight tiers of bunks), I had an eerie vision of the sacred chambers of our childhood illuminated in the background. Glowing behind a large, dimly lit room rose our school gym. A Soak ’Em game was in full swing, Carly in a blue mesh pinnie spinning a mean ball, sending me sprawling.

As I descended the stairs from the cafeteria and peered down the corridors of locked doors, a memory blossomed into consciousness:

With a passel of children, I skitter down the steps, laughing and shoving, dash left through the fifth-floor hallway, almost to the end, and throw open the door. It’s Fred Shultz’s fifth-grade math class. Fred is late, so someone seizes the boxes of fresh chalk and starts throwing. It’s like a multi-ball Soak ’Em assault, two Big Shot girls in alliance with the boys against the little shots—Ariana, Plum, and me. We recoil at the far end of the table and duck a barrage of flying chalk while flinging handfuls of broken pieces back at our tormentors. Suddenly, the Big Shot girls, armed with new packs of ammunition, jump up on their chairs and, towering above the rest of us, focus their full attack on Ariana.

Through the cloud of chalk dust, I stagger up onto a chair. In a sudden reversal, I turn on Ariana, pummeling her with chalk. Ariana, with her spun-sugar hair; Ariana, who has been my dearest friend. When I’ve used up the last of the chalk shards, I search wildly for more. That’s when I grab the eraser from the tray along the blackboard. With all of the force I hadn’t been able to muster in hundreds of failed Soak ’Em games, I hurl that eraser. When the speeding missile hits Ariana’s eye, she shrieks in pain.

Did Fred finally arrive and make us stop? Did Ariana leave in an ambulance? I can’t remember. I do remember that Ariana was out for the rest of the week while rumors spread that she might lose her eye. It was June already, almost time for summer vacation, and as the year drew to a close, she stayed home, and, in fact, the following year she never came back.

As we alumni headed out of what once was our school and into Central Park, I grappled with the karmic consequences of this chalk fight. By hitting Ariana with that eraser I ended our friendship and was catapulted into the ranks of the Big Shots. Heady with the pheromones of betrayal and victory, I was now allied with Carly and her pals. Secretly, I harbored the anguish of loss mixed with a stinking dirty sense of shame. And now, more than five decades later, despite the fact that Ariana’s eye healed quickly and that she and I reconciled during college, I have continued to feel the pain of that betrayal. Now, sitting on a park bench, I came back into contact with its burn. I lost Ariana. I lost my way.

Our school had espoused freedom; mostly, it was the opposite of a prison with metal grids and an arsenal. But indeed, we were human beings suffering from the same imprisoning habits as the rest of our species. How locked in we were by our fixed images of each other—Big Shot, little shot, crybaby, enthusiast, athlete, artist—and our images of ourselves—in my case, so rigid that I sacrificed what I loved most just to end up in a different cell.

Sitting on the bench, my thoughts steeped in the chalk fight, I returned to the grown-up event with Carly. In my Berkeley kitchen when I had felt accused, I jumped to anger so fast. Yet I hadn’t known my raw heartache underneath—of feeling somehow unseen and unappreciated. Now, I let that heartache seep through me. It then came to me, Carly may well feel that way too. Why would the pain that drove me to switch sides and assault a friend somehow be different from what drives Carly or anyone else to bully?

And I returned to “Is that so?” Is anything ever really “so?” I questioned the pictures I hold of myself or Carly, of little shots or Big Shots. Without those, what is left? Not me. Not her. Not us. Not them. Right there a glimpse of emptiness. And out of that, a taste of equanimity.

⧫

This piece has been adapted from the Fall 2010 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 27, No. 1). Text © 2010 Barbara Gates.

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

• “Happiness Beyond Worldly Measures”
• “Gabe and the Medicine Buddha”
• “The Buddha as a Parent”
• “Reunion on the Path of No Speech”

The post Who Was She? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Today is Halloween, and here’s the chilling secret: Buddhism loves ghosts. And not just the hungry kind. Demons, spirits, and other supramundane creatures abound in the Buddhist canon, and they continue to play a role in the lives of many Buddhist practitioners today. 

To some skeptics, all those ghoulish beings are just psychological tropes, mere projections of an unenlightened mind. But like any good teacher, the things that go bump in the night have a way of upending our notions about what we hold to be real and unreal.

So, fill your oryoki bowls with mini Milky Ways, and descend into the hellish and haunted realms, with these seven articles from our archives that highlight the mysterious roles that monsters, specters, ghosts, and zombies played in Buddhist traditions throughout history. For the easily frightened, we also include a selection of articles about overcoming fear through meditation and Buddhist teachings. Happy Halloween! 

Buddhist Halloween Horrors

• The Monsters of Buddhism—Inside and Out by Julia Hirsch
  An abridged guide to Buddhist monsters and the lessons they hold about the possibility of transformation—such as the child-eating Kishimojin, who eventually purifies her karma and becomes the Buddha-endorsed guardian deity of mothers and children. Alternatively, a horror movie with a happy ending. 
• How to Watch a Thai Ghost Movie by May Cat
  A Thai cinephile writes about the karma-fueled haunting of the 2009 Thai horror flick Novice. A young man ordains as a novice monk, but is tormented by the misdeeds of his past. In the end, the monk gets his due, and the hungry ghosts doom him to life as one of their own. 
• Ghosts, Gods, and the Denizens of Hell by Donald Lopez, Jr.
  Buddhist studies scholar Donald Lopez Jr. provides an introduction to the six realms—including the less than desirable sectors of existence. “There are eight hot hells and eight cold hells, four neighboring hells, and a number of trifling hells,” he writes, reminding us that even though human existence is tough, it’s still the best (and only) shot we have at freedom from samsara. 
• Treasury of Lives: Halloween Edition by Harry Einhorn
  Tibetan cosmology is populated with interesting paranormal creatures, like deloks—people who died, visited the lower realms, and returned to warn those in the human realm about the punishments that awaited them unless they started walking an ethical path. Also in Tibetan Buddhism is a model of fear-facing Buddhist practice in the female master Machik Labron (1055–1149), who encouraged her students to do chöd, tantric practice in burial grounds and other spooky places. 
• The Old Human Demoness by Chokey Dolma
  This haunting tale by Chokey Dolma showcases the richness of Tibetan ghost stories. Once upon a time, a young monk disobeys his teacher’s order to buy meat only as given without asking for more, and he becomes marked by evil spirits. To avoid becoming demon food, the young monk travels to Lhasa and requests the aid of a mysterious old woman. Although she agrees to help hide him from the demons, the young monk eventually discovers there is more to this woman than meets the eye. 
• Bringing Hungry Ghosts Out of Hiding, Andy Rotman in conversation with Julia Hirsch
  Andy Rotman, a scholar of South Asian religions at Smith College and one of the few academics researching the history of hungry ghosts, explains what the most wretched beings of the Buddhist cosmos can teach us about greed, suffering, and the dharma. 
• Into the Demon’s Mouth, by Aura Glaser
  Through a modern retelling of the Buddhist story of the great Tibetan saint Milarepa and the demons who inhabited his cave, Glaser invokes Carl Gustav Jung, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and others to illustrate how remaining present among difficult life situations can help us to work with problems and to even learn from them. A parable with elements of horror, Glaser’s writing opens up the story so that we can learn to face our fears with clarity and kindness. 

Fear

• Harnessing Horror Through Meditation by Biju Sukumaran
  After getting stuck on Disneyland’s Space Mountain ride as a child, Biju Sukumaran has had a phobia of heights and small spaces. Recently, he started drawing from the Buddhist practices of vipassana (insight) and Tibetan chöd meditation to face his fears of flying, horror movies, and, yes, even roller coasters. 
• A Safe Container for Fear by Josh Korda
  What does fear feel like in the body? Approaching feelings of unease, anxiety, and social discomfort with questions like these, Josh Korda suggests, can help untangle the web of fear we weave for ourselves. 
• Facing Fear by Lama Tsony
  Coming back to the focal point of meditation (the breath, posture, or a visualization) can help us practice and move through our fears, Lama Tsony writes. Taking refuge or seeking guidance from a spiritual teacher or friend offers the support we need as we explore the uncomfortable zones of our minds. 
• The Terror Within by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
  In a meditation on the different ways fear has come up in her own life and practice, Zen priest, author, and artist Zenju Earthlyn Manuel uses lessons from the Heart Sutra and the Buddha’s teachings on the five hindrances to provide steps for breaking out of cycles of anxiety and to acknowledge the roots of our fear as a conditioned state that is accumulated over a lifetime. By providing steps for breathing into these feelings and releasing them, Manuel invites readers not to hide from their fear but to embrace it as an act of liberation.

 ⧫ 

This article was originally published on October 31, 2019.

The post Scare Yourself Awake appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At the first cross-cultural meetings of Eastern masters and Western therapists, the Dalai Lama was incredulous at the pervasiveness of “low self-esteem” that he kept hearing about. He went around the room asking, “Do you have this feeling? Do you have this?” When all of the Westerners nodded yes, he just shook his head in disbelief. In the Tibetan cosmology, such feelings are representative of the hungry ghost realm, not of the human realm.

The sense of self that most Westerners experience when they begin meditation is not necessarily the same as that of their Eastern counterparts. The Western emphasis on individuality and autonomy, the breakdown of the extended and even the nuclear family, the scarcity of “good-enough” parenting, and the relentless drive for achievement in our society leave a person all too often feeling cut off, isolated, alienated, hollow, and longing for an intimacy that seems both out of reach and vaguely threatening.

In our culture, this sense of separateness is often experienced very early in life. Meditation practice tends to stir up these early feelings, just as, according to Freud, hypnosis, free association, and the careful attention to what is present “on the surface of the patient’s mind” will. Western meditators often begin practice only to find that they rather quickly uncover remnants of these feelings of separateness, and that these feelings do not necessarily go away with further meditation. Suffusing the meditative experience can be a longing that stems from the conviction that there is something deficient in the person who longs. This feeling of unworthiness often requires special attention of a psychotherapeutic kind, which traditional meditation teachers are not trained to provide. If these early feelings are not exposed and accepted, the longing to fix them will corrupt the meditative experience.

It is here that I have found the greatest need for a combined approach drawing on both meditation and psychotherapy—tailored to the needs of the hungry ghost as well as to the human realm of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. The pretas, or hungry ghosts, are probably the most vividly drawn metaphors in the Wheel of Life. Phantomlike creatures with withered limbs, grossly bloated bellies and long, narrow necks, the hungry ghosts demand impossible satisfactions; they are searching for gratification for old unfulfilled needs whose time has passed. Their ghostlike state is representative of their attachment to the past.

In addition, these beings, while impossibly hungry and thirsty, cannot drink or eat without causing themselves terrible pain or indigestion. Their throats are so thin and raw that swallowing produces unbearable burning and irritation. Their bellies are in turn unable to digest nourishment; these are beings who cannot take in a present-day, albeit transitory, satisfaction. They remain obsessed with the fantasy of achieving complete release from the pain of their past, stubbornly unaware that this desire is fantasy. But it is crucial that their fantasy be owned as fantasy. The hungry ghosts must come in contact with the ghostlike nature of their own longings in order to be free.

Western feelings of unworthiness are rooted in just this kind of “hungry ghost” scenario. Prematurely estranged in our childhoods, many of us are unable to find or sustain intimacy in our adult lives, becoming preoccupied instead with the unresolved frustrations of our past. Just as the hollowness of the hungry ghosts must be experienced in such a way that reparation is no longer sought from impossible sources, so the Western student afflicted with such feelings must make the hollowness itself the object of his or her meditation. Only then can self-loathing be transformed into wisdom, a task in which both psychotherapy and meditation may well collaborate.

When a person recognizes that needs from the past were never and can never be met, that obstacles from the past were never and can never be overcome, there is often a sense of profound outrage. It is this kind of realization that tends to characterize the estranged Western experience in psychotherapy and that also tends to disrupt the meditative experience. It is this very outrage that is the hallmark of what has come to be called narcissism: the vain expectation, and selfish insistence, that one’s sense of hollowness should somehow be erased. Too often in our therapies we assume that by merely tuning in to these feelings of outrage we will be released from them, but this is rarely the case. Reclaiming one’s outrage does not readily bring the situation to a resolution, since the only resolution that can be imagined is an impossible one: the retrieval of a connection that has already been broken.

Meditation practice actually offers a means, not often accessed by contemporary Western therapies, of temporarily assuaging this hollowness. This is done through developing states of sustained concentration in which ego boundaries dissolve and feelings of delight predominate. Such states, which in the Buddhist cosmology represent the highest and most pleasurable desire realms, represent developed gratifications which, in themselves, reinforce a sense of optimism, hope, and possibility.

Buddhism also offers a skillful means for relieving feelings of outrage, by shifting the perspective from how outraged one feels to the question of who feels outraged. This shift can do more than merely counter one’s hollowness with delight, but can also reveal what the Buddhist psychologies consider the relativity of the narcissistic emotions.

In the Tibetan tradition, according to the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, the best time to clearly observe the self is in a state of what is called injured innocence, when we have been insulted and think, “How could she do this to me? I don’t deserve to be treated that way.” It is in this state, Thurman says, that the “hard nut” of the self is best found; and the self cannot be truly understood, from a Buddhist perspective, until it is seen clearly as it appears.

This state of injured innocence is the Buddhist equivalent of unworthiness and outrage, but in Buddhism it becomes a tremendous opportunity rather than a place of resignation. From the Buddhist perspective, to reach this state of injured innocence, to hold the feeling of outrage in the balance of meditative awareness rather than compulsively reacting, is the entrance to the path of insight. It is just this moment that all of the preliminary practices of meditation have been leading up to. For the path of investigation is, above all else, about investigation into the nature of this “I” that feels injured. Until it is felt, it cannot become the object of meditative scrutiny. This is the crucial boundary between self and no-self. In my practice of psychotherapy, I have to somehow celebrate the appearance of this elusive “I,” to convey to my patients at the moment of their most poignant indignation the possibilities that are now open to them. In Zen this might be called the “gateless gate,” the doorway to the path of insight.

There is no way to overestimate the power of this approach in dealing with the reactive emotions that color the experience of unworthiness. The crucial step, from the Buddhist view, is to shift the perspective from the reactive emotions to the feeling of “I” itself. In so doing, one’s investment in outrage is gradually withdrawn and replaced by interest in exploring the nature of “I.” It is not that the emotions or the feeling of individuality necessarily disappear (although some Buddhist schools go so far as to assert that they eventually do), but that the life goes out of them as the feeling of “I” is found to be so much less substantial than was first assumed.

The Buddha taught a method of holding thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the balance of meditative equipoise so that they can be seen in a clear light. Through this method, the customary identifications and reactions that usually adhere to the emotions like moss to a stone are stripped away, allowing the understanding of emptiness to emerge. This understanding has vast implications for the field of psychotherapy, promising relief from even ordinary suffering. As the self is thoroughly investigated, it seems, its presence becomes more and more ambiguous. Even the duality of self and no-self can start to feel artificial. As the Third Zen Patriarch articulated with great clarity:

When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,

nothing in the world can offend,

and when a thing can no longer offend,

it ceases to exist in the old way…

If you wish to move in the One Way

do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.

Indeed, to accept them fully

is identical with true Enlightenment.

 ⧫ 

This piece has been adapted from the Spring 1995 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 11, No. 2) Text © 1995-2020 by Mark Epstein and Inquiring Mind. 

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

• “Interview with John Tarrant — Spilling Down Through All the Realms: The Light Inside the Dark“
  
• “The Process of Dissolution“
  
• “The Deep Hunger”
  

The post Are We All Hungry Ghosts? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What is the one thing in life we can rely on? We might say, “I rely on my mate.” We may love our husbands and wives; but we can’t ever completely rely on them, because another person (like ourselves) is always to some extent unreliable. There is no person on earth whom we can completely rely on, though we can certainly love others and enjoy them. What then can we rely on? If it’s not a person, what is it? What can we rely on in life? I asked somebody once and she said, “Myself.” Can you rely on yourself? Self-reliance is nice, but is inevitably limited.

There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is. Let’s talk more concretely. Suppose there is something I want very much: perhaps I want to marry a certain person, or get an advanced degree, or have my child be healthy and happy. But life as it is might be exactly the opposite of what I want. We don’t know that we’ll marry that certain person. If we do, he might die tomorrow. We may or may not get our advanced degree. Probably we will, but we can’t count on that. We can’t count on anything. Life is always going to be the way it is. So why can’t we rely on that fact? What is so hard about that? Why are we always uneasy? Suppose your living space has just been demolished by an earthquake, and you are about to lose an arm and all your life’s savings. Can you then rely on life just as it is? Can you be that?

Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don’t want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is. If tomorrow I have a heart attack, I can rely on that, because if I have it, I have it. I can rest in life as it is.

Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life.

When we make a personal investment in our thoughts we create the “I” (as Krishnamurti would say), and then our life begins not to work. That’s why we label thoughts, to take the investment out again. When we’ve been sitting long enough we can see our thoughts as just pure sensory input. And we can see ourselves moving through the stages preliminary to that: at first we feel our thoughts are real, and out of that we create the self-centered emotions, and out of that we create the barrier to seeing life as it is; because if we are caught in self-centered emotions we can’t see people or situations clearly. A thought in itself is just pure sensory input, an energy fragment. But we fear to see thoughts as they are.

When we label a thought we step back from it, we remove our identification. There’s a world of difference between saying, “She’s impossible” and “Having a thought that she’s impossible.” If we persistently label any thought the emotional overlay begins to drop out and we are left with an impersonal energy fragment to which we need not attach. But if we think our thoughts are real we act out of them. And if we act from such thoughts our life is muddled. Again, practice is to work with this until we know it in our bones. Practice is not about achieving a realization in our heads. It has to be our flesh, our bones, ourself. Of course, we have to have life-centered thoughts: how to follow a recipe, how to put on a roof, how to plan our vacation. But we don’t need the emotionally self-centered activity that we call thinking. It really isn’t thinking, it’s an aberration of thinking.

Zen is about an active life, an involved life. When we know our minds well and the emotions that our thinking creates, we tend to see better what our lives are about and what needs to be done, which is generally just the next task under our nose. Zen is about a life of action, not a life of passively doing nothing. But our actions must be based on reality. When our actions are based on our false thought systems (which are based on our conditioning), they are poorly based. When we have seen through the thought systems we can see what needs to be done.

What we are doing is not reprogramming ourselves, but freeing ourselves from all programs, by seeing that they are empty of reality. Reprogramming is just jumping from one pot into another. We may have what we think of as a better programming; but the point of sitting is not to be run by any program. Suppose we have a program called “I lack self-confidence.” Suppose we decide to reprogram that to “I have self-confidence.” Neither of them will stand up very well under the pressures of life, because they involve an “I.” And this “I” is a very fragile creation—unreal, actually—and is easily befuddled. In fact there never was an “I.” The point is to see that it is empty, an illusion, which is different from dissolving it. When I say that it’s empty, I mean that it has no basic reality; it’s just a creation of the self-centered thoughts.

Doing Zen practice is never as simple as talking about it. Even students who have a fair understanding of what they’re doing at times tend to desert basic practice. Still, when we sit well, everything else takes care of itself. So whether we have been sitting five years or twenty years or are just beginning, it is important to sit with great, meticulous care.

⧫

Excerpted from Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2007 (trade paperback edition)

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Somehow, in our day-to-day lives, we tend to identify ourselves with many different thoughts. But when we are able to understand ultimate awareness, we can rise above these concepts. There is a beautiful example that is given in the Buddhist teachings: namkha tabu, which means the mind is like a sky, and all the thoughts are like clouds. There’s also another metaphor: the mind is like the ocean, and the thoughts are like the waves.

When we get to that level of understanding, then we will not identify ourselves with all the different thoughts. When we are not aware of our awareness, what happens is we identify with all the different conceptions that we go through, like emotions. When we are feeling sad, we identify our whole being with sadness. And because we allow ourselves to take on that identity—I am sad—then we have few feelings of joy. When we put our whole being into joy, then we say “I am happy.” When we are feeling angry, how do we actually identify ourselves? We identify ourselves as “I am angry,” right? When this happens we are not letting our mind be like the sky. We immediately let ourselves get carried away into these different conceptions, emotions, and things that we are feeling and thinking. So that is what happens when we don’t understand or when we don’t reach that level of being aware of awareness.

When we actually understand how we are aware of our awareness, then we will understand how our mind is like the sky. And if we start to understand how spacious and open our awareness is, then somehow we will rise above the conception. So that is why understanding awareness is very important. Many times when we practice meditation, many people try to practice meditation by shaping or training their focus.

People think that meditation is just about training their focus, focusing on one object and then remaining focused on that object for a longer time—they think that that is meditation. Yes, that is one part of meditation, but it has to go beyond that. In order to be able to go above that, this method of being aware of awareness is very necessary.

When you rise above the awareness, when you don’t identify even with your awareness, you rise above your mind and your thoughts. When you are in that state of being aware of awareness—being like the sky—that will help you feel more spacious and open. That is freedom. There is great freedom in that: you will not feel caught up in many different parts that are arising in your daily life.

This method of letting yourself be aware of awareness is a very profound teaching that was given by Buddha Shakyamuni and then carried into Tibet. To put this teaching in simple language that everybody can understand: just let your mind be open like the sky. Just practice that. Let your mind be open like the sky, and then let all the thoughts float freely like clouds. Let yourself remain in that state, and then you will actually experience being aware of awareness in your day-to-day life.

You don’t need any specific philosophical or religious background. Personally, I’ve found that being aware of awareness in my day-to-day life is very helpful because when situations arise, instead of letting myself get carried away or dragged into the situation, I just pull myself out of the situation. You can just pull your mind out of the situation and let your mind be like a sky, looking at the situation above, not from underneath.

If you let yourself be underneath the situation, then what happens is we bring the situation so close, and we are underneath it. It’s like you have a small rock in your hand, and you’re bringing it so close to your eyes that it feels like you are under a big, huge rock when actually, it is just a small rock. It’s just perspective. We tend to look at the situation from underneath and so close that we exaggerate the situation, and then we make that situation so big. Then we think, “This is what my life is; I am just crushed by this.” In reality, if you look at it from above, it’s not a big, big thing. It’s just a small rock. That is open awareness. 

⧫

Excerpted from Za Choeje Rinpoche’s Dharma Talk video “Being Aware of Awareness.” Watch the full video here.

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The ring of a bell signaled it was my turn for dokusan, an interview to discuss my practice with the Soto Zen Master at this five-hundred-year-old training monastery in Japan.

I picked up a small mallet and struck the cast iron bell in front of me: one time, letting it ring, then a second time. I rose and hurried down a long hall of tatami mats, the woven straw flooring in traditional Japanese living spaces, passing through the Ihai-do, a narrow room lined on both sides with rows of individual altars for deceased sangha community members. They silently witnessed the swish of cloth as my long black priest robe rubbed back and forth around my ankles with each quick step.

At the end of the hall, three steps rose up. I stopped at the bottom and performed a short gassho, bowing with palms touching and elbows out. Then in one swift motion, I grabbed the end of my zagu, or priest bowing cloth, laid it down on the tatami, and folded it into a square. I dropped down and started my full prostrations as quickly as possible—body crouched in child’s pose, both hands outstretched and palms placed up on the floor, then, with symmetrical precision, hands raised past the ears and down again before rising to stand. I did this three times quickly, as is the custom, after which I refolded and slid the zagu back over my left wrist. One more quick gassho and then I headed up those three stairs to my dokusan with Sekkei Harada Roshi, the Abbot of Hosshinji monastery in Obama, Japan. I entered the room ready to ask the central question of my life.

I had come to Japan after leaving the predominantly white convert Soto Zen Buddhist monastery in central California where I had thought I would spend the rest of my life. When I had asked to be ordained after more than eight years of meditative Buddhist practice, I had felt a deep calling to live as a Buddhist monastic. But this did not come to be. I left the California monastery after three and a half years there, heartbroken and confused about the racism I had experienced on both a personal and structural level. The persistent white supremacy culture of the monastery made it unsafe and did not support me as a Vietnamese American practitioner. This was true for many other people of color staying there as well. The experience was a huge shock to my understanding of Buddhism, Buddhist practice, and my sense of place in the world.

As I made plans to leave that California monastery and figure out how to practice as a newly ordained priest, I was contacted by someone who studied under Sekkei Harada Roshi in Japan. They urged me to study with him as he was acknowledged as an enlightened Zen Master. I had only practiced Soto Zen in predominantly white convert settings in the United States, and I felt drawn to practice in Japan, the birthplace of this sect of Buddhism.

I had been at Hosshinji for three weeks, trying to process my despair from having to leave California due to the racism at my home monastery. Entering the room for dokusan with Sekkei Harada Roshi, I barely sat down before blurting out the quintessential question of my existence up to that moment. “Why does hatred seem to follow me wherever I go?” I asked.

Sekkei Harada didn’t hesitate. “Know hatred completely,” he answered. Then he grabbed the handbell to his right and rang it vigorously, signaling the end to my interview.

I scrambled out of the room, doing the prostrations and bows in reverse order.

My mind raced to make meaning of what had just happened.

Nothing came.

My mind had stopped.

A  koan in Zen practice is a story assigned by a teacher for you to work with. Various traditions have different ways of practicing with koans, but giving an answer to the teacher as part of the process is a commonality across sects. How the teacher accepts or rejects the answer is part of the mythology of this practice. A well-known koan is, “At this very moment, what is your original face before your parents were born?”

Many people think koans are paradoxes, but really they’re stories to stop your mind, to bump it off its loop of incessant and well-worn patterns of thinking, planning, and processing. Koans open us to an understanding that’s beyond habitual thinking.

Life also gives us koans.

For me, racism has been a koan I’ve turned over and over. Studying race theory was one of my answers to this koan. Other answers from my life have included activism and various jobs as a social worker focused on addressing the harmful results of racism.

All of these were good answers.

In Zen, we like to say, “The question is more important than the answer.” Why? Because questions often come up at uncomfortable moments. Deep questions arise when we’re faced with circumstances in which our coping mechanisms aren’t working anymore. At such moments, transformational change is possible if we stay open to all answers, especially unexpected ones.

The system of white supremacy centers whiteness while juxtaposing people of color as “other,” fragmenting us all into the delusion of separateness. Aware of this dynamic and its harm to people of color, I had to be careful to not simply search outside myself for answers. Like many Asian Americans and other people of color, at some point I had to learn to value myself, reclaiming the validity of my own experience in any moment and in any condition. Buddhist practice over many years has supported me to return to knowing and trusting my wholeness.

“Know hatred completely.” That moment with Roshi stopped my mind from its habitual looping to try to “understand” racism. All my intellectual theories and years of antiracist work didn’t address my suffering in a useful way at this crucial point of my life. That moment stopped my frantic search to find some reason why hatred kept following me. What I needed was to attend to the hurt and harm from being the target of racism.

In Buddhism, we practice to be able to find settledness and clarity that’s not dependent on the conditions of the world. To find such settledness and clarity, we have to attend to our suffering in body, heart, and mind. The koan of racism was not just something that I wanted to understand. What I really want, even now, is to heal from the hurt and pain I’ve carried.

In both activist and Buddhist practice realms, I felt that I had to choose between a rock and a hard place. For example, in feminist spaces, white women were most often touted as leaders, negating the many ways women of color brought groundbreaking exploration and transformation to gender oppression. Or in racial justice groups, male-identified BIPOCs often take up the most space, including leadership ones. Or, in many of the convert-based meditation groups I’ve taught at, I am thought to be “too religious,” especially as Buddhism-based practices have been appropriated into secularized popular “mindfulness” apps and health and self-care industries.

Similarly, I noticed that in predominantly white convert Buddhist centers, people of color were often told that race was not part of practice because “there’s no self.” When I tried to address racist incidents, I was told that this was to reify “a false sense of self.” If antiracism work was acknowledged by white leaders, then it was “just a relative stepping stone” on the way to an “absolute.” By default, given the predominantly white and mostly male teachers within convert Buddhism in North America, this “absolute” felt patriarchal, white-defined, and white-centered.

I needed a way to practice that started from the premise that there is racism in the world and that there are intense manifestations of it in the United States of America. Racism impacts us on the cushion, in meditation halls, in practice communities, in our places of work, in conversations with friends, at the doctor’s office, and everywhere we go. This is true whether we are people of color or white-identified. I needed a way to practice Buddhism that moved from only an individual focus to one that recognized the power and privilege embedded in our structures and systems and how we are impacted by them in different ways. In doing so, I hoped to discover how to heal from systemic hurts and harms.

The day after that mind-stopping meeting in Japan, Sekkei Harada Roshi offered me another chance for a dokusan interview. I rang the bell, did my bows, and went into the practice discussion room, ready to share my insights about how his answer had affected me. Before I could open my mouth, Roshi launched into a lengthy story of Shakyamuni Buddha’s life and enlightenment along with the histories of other early Buddhist ancestors. Then, once again, he rang me out of the room.

We never spoke about my question again.

This event impacted me deeply, and I continued to turn it over for many years afterward. When I remember my dokusans with Sekkei Harada Roshi, this last part has always puzzled me. I often wondered, What was his point about it all? In writing this now, I have an understanding of what he was teaching me. The Buddha and ancestors were searching for the same things as you and me: an end to suffering.

I think Roshi was saying that there can’t be spiritual bypass. He realized—and after that initial exchange I, too, realized—that I was looking for a way to explain away the hurt and pain by wanting to discuss it. Discussion isn’t wrong. Theory isn’t wrong. Activism isn’t wrong. But we can’t use these things for spiritual bypass. We can’t use Buddhist practice, or any methods such as race theory or activism, as a way to skip over the human condition inherent in the first noble truth—experiencing the hurts and pains of our lives. Trying to get away from them via any method is to try and skip over, or bypass, fully experiencing our life as it is. Our practice is to get closer and closer to “know it completely” because, in doing so, we can actually then have more clarity on how we can heal. In Pali, the first recorded language of Buddhism, the term yoniso manasikara is usually translated as “wise attention.” It can also be translated as “attention that takes the whole into account.” This is what Sekkei Harada Roshi was pointing me toward: the practice of investigating dukkha (suffering), which sees it in context, in totality, and not just the hurt and pain of the moment.

Then, the rest of the four noble truths offer us descriptions and practices for how to connect or reconnect to the wholeness of life—that our existence is seen, relevant, healable, and valued—when we remember and access the contexts that validate us and support us to thrive. Additionally, we need to remember that all beings want the same thing: to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. This is what connects us all.

Denying that systems of oppression exist is to deny reality as it is. Learning to negotiate these systems with self- and collective-determined agency is the practice of engaged liberation. In practicing collective liberation, this is what I wish for us: that we may come home to a sense of wholeness grounded in what is safe and of value to all. May we then aspire to spread that out, to work together to strengthen safety and care for each other. This is the work, and the liberation, of understanding, practicing, and developing the four noble truths.

⧫

From Home Is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path by Rev. Liên Shutt, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2023 by Rev. Liên Shutt. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.

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Since I could think, I have struggled with an intense fear of rejection. This fear can play out in a whole range of ways—and at times it takes on rather comic forms. For example, attending a party where I don’t know anyone fills me with dread. Professional networking events, Super Bowl parties, holiday parties, birthday invites, you name it. I still go most of the time, maybe out of a sense of obligation or the belief that this time it will be easier.

Either way, when I do go, it often looks something like this: I arrive and immediately make a beeline for the bar. Everyone else standing around in small groups seems to know one another, and the last thing I want to do is “intrude.” After all, my fear of rejection leads me to think that none of these people will want to talk to me. The bar seems like a legitimate place to stand, but only until I receive my drink. I squeeze my glass of sparkling water tightly, not knowing where to go next. I reconsider the possibility of joining a group of strangers but reject that idea—it seems too high stakes. By now I feel ultra-self-conscious: I have been standing at the bar for what already seems like an eternity, all by myself. I am convinced now that everyone in the room has taken notice: “Who is this weird loner at the bar that no one wants to talk to?” Did I hear little murmurs? Seconds now feel like hours—tick-tock. All I want to do is disappear at the bar, maybe fall into a secret hole or something. There’s usually no happy ending to this: I awkwardly stand around, make a few clumsy attempts at conversation, and then make for the nearest exit. 

I have tried to work with this fear in different ways over the years, with some success. At a cognitive-behavioral training for therapists, I let the trainer convince me that I needed to do something he called “shame-attacking.” “By doing the very thing we feared most,” he explained, “we would realize that it wasn’t ultimately that bad, and so overcome our fears.” He suggested I find a coffee shop, go in, and yell at the top of my lungs, “I feel very lonely. Is there anyone here that would like to go out with me?” which is precisely what I did. I was so scared that for a second it felt like my heart might stop beating. But after the tsunami of fear faded, I did feel a sense of relief—I was still alive. Still, this exercise didn’t make my fear of rejection go away. 

I have also worked with skilled therapists on understanding where this fear of rejection comes from: an old and deeply held belief that I am not OK. That being my full self would mean people would not love and accept me. And while those sessions helped me to cultivate greater empathy toward my fear and feel less ashamed of it, going to a party full of strangers still feels scary to this day.

I began practicing Zen in my teens (around the same time I started going to parties), partly in an attempt to deal with the pain of not feeling truly OK and the confusion around who I authentically was. One of the Zen sayings that stuck with me early on was by the 13th-century Zen master Eihei Dogen: 

To know the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things. When actualized by the myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away.

What did Dogen mean by the myriad things? “Actualize” means “make a reality of,” and the “myriad things” are nothing other than the very things in front of us right now. Whatever that may be at that moment. So making the very thing in front of us a reality is the same as forgetting ourselves. In Zen, “making something a reality” means dedicating ourselves completely to that very thing. And by dedicating ourselves to it—by looking at it without any interfering thoughts, ideas, or concepts—we free it from the ideas we have about it, thereby making it a reality. 

In zazen, this usually means dedicating ourselves to our breathing. We allow ourselves to be actualized by the breath by practicing to be 100 percent with the breath. A Zen saying goes: “When we completely hand ourselves over to the breath, nothing remains between heaven and earth except the weight of a flame.” When we manage to completely focus our attention on the breath, all sense of self drops away. Just breath remains, with no one breathing it. This is what Dogen is saying. Of course, the myriad things do not have to be the breath. Anything and everything can be the myriad things—the dirty dishes in your sink, the email in your inbox, your overbearing boss—but the practice remains the same. We surrender to what arises in the now, thereby releasing the constant notions we create about things and ourselves.

So what about the party guests? After nearly three decades of Zen practice, why do they still scare me instead of actualize me? Several months ago, I was invited to a professional mixer. When reading the email invite, I realized that I never thought to actually use these parties as a practice ground. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking Zen is something we practice mainly on our cushion. In reality, every moment of our lives is an opportunity to practice, an invitation to awaken. But how do we practice at a party we dread, a meeting we fear, an encounter we try to avoid? How do we forget our self during those moments?

It starts with setting the intention to practice. We say to ourselves, “I am going to use this next thing as a practice ground.” That little shift in our approach already makes a big difference. Effectively, we are saying, my focus is on how I approach this situation, rather than the outcome of this situation. Instead of focusing on an imagined future, which is always an idea (“They will think I’m intruding”), my focus remains on the present moment (the very word a person says, the sensation of the handshake, and of course the ever-changing sensation of breath).

I usually feel a great amount of self-judgment and shame for my lack of self-confidence at a party. Through my practice, I can increasingly allow all of this to soften a bit by unconditionally accepting whatever is arising. What is present right now? Fear of rejection. Where do I feel it? In my heart and gut—pressing and pounding. What else is there? Judgment. What does the judgment say? You are a joke, Matthias—it’s ridiculous that you feel like that during a party. All of it is OK. The fear is OK, as is the shame about the fear, as is the judgment. In Zen practice, we shift from a participant in the drama of our mind to a simple witness. The witness simply witnesses what is—it doesn’t control, interfere, or try for any particular outcome. It just shows up. And when our mind judges and controls, we witness that too. 

I can fast-forward to tell you that my attempt to apply my practice to the professional mixer wasn’t without its challenges. After the elevator doors to the event popped open, my intention to use the event as a practice ground and to accept whatever arose immediately vanished. Nope! I saw small groups of complete strangers scattered across a huge hall—my general nightmare. There was that deep fear of rejection rearing its head again. But one of the wonderful things about Zen practice is that every moment is an opportunity for a fresh start. So I took a deep breath, refocused on my posture, and simply walked up to the first small group I could see. I used the short walk toward the group to practice walking meditation, focusing my attention on each step (although I tried not to make it look like anything special—just mindful walking). 

Once I arrived at the first group, I reached out my hand and said, “Hi, my name is Matthias. What is your name?” Another rush of fear showed up in that moment (“They sure think I intruded on their conversation”), but my conscious focus remained on the breath and the very act of reaching out my hand. “Jamal” was the answer from the first person. And then something wonderful happened. Just as our focus can be completely immersed in the breath during zazen, my focus was now completely immersed in Jamal’s words. I listened to him deeply and intimately, and for brief moments, there was only the present-moment experience of listening and talking. No Matthias left, no Jamal, no fear of rejection. There were brief moments when self-consciousness flashed up, like when the time came to move on and meet a new group and I could hear my mind say, “Oh, no, what do I do next?” I thanked Jamal, took a deep breath and a few steps, and reached out my hand to the next group with the intention to pay complete and utter attention to whatever would arise. 

Just as Dogen said, I forgot myself. I forgot myself by being actualized by the various party guests, the words, handshakes, looks, etc. In a way, you could say that for stretches of the experience, I was not there at all. No one was. It was free, unbound, intimate, and completely new. 

Has the experience healed me from my fear of rejection? No. In fact, a few weeks later, I attended a holiday party, where, although I knew a few folks, I didn’t know most of the rest. I completely forgot about my intentions and fell right back into old patterns of feeling and thinking, wanting to leave the very moment I arrived. You don’t graduate in Zen. Sometimes practice can be pure grace: everything suddenly clears up and we are free. But often, Zen is simply grit, and we must remind ourselves to practice again and again and again in ever new domains and areas of our life. With the myriad things. Even when the myriad things are party guests.

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There’s no karma we can’t change. Our mind is not set in stone. As Lama Yeshe says, we create negativity with our mind so we purify it by creating positivity with our mind. 

If you’ve eaten poison, because you know the meaning of poison and its consequences, your first step is to acknowledge it and immediately think, quick, what can I do about it?

That’s the attitude to have in the process we’re involved in of cultivating our minds. The bottom line is we’re trying to lessen the neuroses and grow our goodness; as a neuroscientist would say, we’re trying to develop new pathways. 

But our problem is because we’re so addicted to guilt, the moment we acknowledge we had that fight with our sister, for example, we rush to guilt: I’m a bad person. This is useless! It’s anger against ourselves.

The problem with guilt is that it’s related to the punishment/reward mode, which we’re addicted to. We’re going to get punished, disapproved of; it’s so instinctive.

But if you’ve taken poison, you don’t say to yourself, “Oh, I’m a bad person, I ate poison.” There you are getting sicker every day, and you’re thinking, “I’m a bad person.” How foolish! We drown in guilt. What good is guilt? We need to do something to solve the problem.

The first step of acknowledging the anger, the poison, is called regret: a healthy, grown-up recognition that, yes, I got angry. It’s the first of the four steps in the process of purification, as it’s called. As Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, we’re insane not to do this practice every day.

Then, like with the poison, we don’t want the future consequences—because everything we think and do and say programs us; that’s the natural law of karma—so we think, what can I do about it?

And it’s not guilt; it’s accountability. We simply don’t want the consequences within ourselves of our own actions. We’re the boss. There is no punisher, no rewarder. 

So at the end of the day, you check up. You fought with your sister, you bad-mouthed your boyfriend; you kicked the dog; you did this; you did that. Join the universe, we’re all the same!

And like with the poison, this harms you. This is the key point about the first stages of practice and karma: you’re harming yourself. So this regret is like compassion for yourself. If you hear it this way, it transforms the process. It’s self-respect.

Then of course you can regret other old bad habits, in this life and from previous ones. There’s a million other things that we don’t remember, of course, and they’ve all left imprints, tendencies in our mind, which of course we don’t want. 

If we’ve had countless lives then there are countless things we’ve done driven by ignorance, anger, and the rest. It’s natural. And we’ve broken our vows. So we can say to ourselves, “And whatever I’ve done since beginningless time with my body and speech to harm any sentient being, I regret, because I do not want the future suffering!” Especially as animals. It’s the heaviest rebirth for harming because they’re so driven by ignorance and fear, so driven by attachment and aversion and aggression, so they just eat each other and get eaten. So much suffering and therefore so much harm!

So, you think, “All the lives that I have been an animal, every action I’ve ever done to harm sentient beings, I regret from the depths of my heart because I do not want those karmic seeds to ripen as my suffering. Because you know what, Robina?”—you talk to yourself—“I am sick of suffering.”

That’s the point about regret. You’ve got to make it sound like that: compassion for yourself.

So then the next step, reliance: “Whom can I turn to? Where’s the doctor?” Well, the Buddha is our doctor; he’s the one we rely upon for the medicine. 

There are two parts. The first part is you visualize Buddha in the form of Vajrasattva above your crown in the bodhisattva style, holding a dorje and bell, radiant white light body, and his mind is oneness with the mind of your lama. So delight that you have found a doctor: the Buddha.

Regret is for your own sake, compassion is for the sake of others. 

The second part of this second step, reliance, is where you have compassion for others whom you have harmed. You think of those you’ve harmed—the dog, the cat, the ex-boyfriend, the baby you aborted—and you have compassion for them. They don’t want suffering either, and you wish to purify for their sake. Regret is for your own sake, compassion is for the sake of others. 

Then, also here, if you’re brave enough, you can have compassion for those who’ve harmed you. And why would you do that? Because they are going to suffer terribly in the future as a result of their harming you, so they’re the real object of your compassion. As Geshe Sopa said, “The bodhisattvas need their enemies.” The best object of compassion, if you can. If you’re not ready to forgive the person who’s harmed you, then don’t go there, but have compassion for those you have harmed.

Third step: the remedy. You apply the antidote, you take the medicine. So, here, you’re visualizing Vajrasattva, nectar coming, imagining purifying, and reciting the mantra. All the lamas praise this as the best remedy, the most potent, because of the power of the holy beings. Any practice we do that brings them in is so beneficial, so productive.

And the fourth one is resolve. Pabongka Rinpoche says it’s the most important. You make a decision to change. You resolve to not break your vows, etc. Don’t lie to yourself and resolve never to fight with your sister again; give yourself a timeline: I won’t get angry for a day. Then you’ll keep it.

This is a psychological process, I tell you. Don’t think of it as religion. You are deciding. You. And as Lama Yeshe says, “What purification is is the power of regret, the power of reliance, the power of the remedy, the power of the resolve to change.” 

⧫

Excerpted from Robina Courtin’s blog post “Purification is a psychological process”. 

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