What is the role of contemplative practice in times of crisis? And how can meditation actually support us in meeting the greatest challenges of our time?

Meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer takes up these questions in his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. As a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, Sofer has spent decades exploring the relationship between contemplative practice and nonviolent communication. In his new book, he lays out twenty-six qualities of the heart that can expand our capacity to respond to the challenges of oppression, overwhelm, burnout, and injustice.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Sofer to talk about the dangers of burnout, the power of being patient with not knowing, and the role of curiosity in nonviolent approaches to conflict. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, then listen to the full episode.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You begin the book with the quality of aspiration, which you describe as an act that connects us with a sense of what is possible. Can you say more about the power of aspiration?

Oren Jay Sofer (OS): Aspiration is a verb. It’s not something that we have; it’s something that we do. To aspire is to connect with the energy of our life, to the spirit inside that moves us. Aspiration is how I translate the Pali term saddha, sometimes translated as faith, conviction, or confidence. I think about saddha as a stirring inside of our heart that yearns for something better and that trusts that there’s something meaningful about being alive, that there’s something fulfilling, just, or good in this remarkable, mysterious experience of being conscious. The Buddha’s placement of aspiration at the beginning of his teachings is so brilliant to me because he makes the connection that if we don’t have a sense of what’s possible, we won’t try.

[The meditation teacher Anagarika] Munindraji was fond of saying that any aspiration can be accomplished if you’re wholehearted and you know the way. That stayed with me all of these years as an invitation to really look deeply and ask, What is my aspiration? What is it that I’m here on this planet to do? If we all were able to listen deeply and ask ourselves that question, we could change this world so profoundly because I think that what all of these crises are calling for is not for all of us to do the same thing but for each of us to find our vocation and to contribute in the way that only we can, whether that’s through teaching or parenting or making art or doing direct social change work. The articulation of an aspiration on a collective level can move entire populations, and holding fast to that vision can power social movements in the face of tremendous resistance and odds.

James Shaheen (JS): You write that aspiration can help provide us with the energy for change. Sometimes we think of energy in terms of all or nothing, and it can be very easy to get burnt out. So how have you come to view energy in a more sustainable way?

OS: I love exploring [the theme of energy] because it’s present in our lives at all levels. In Western society, we tend to have an all-or-nothing approach to energy, which comes from the fossil fuel industry’s extractive model of getting as much as possible as fast as possible for the most productivity. Many of us are conditioned to live our personal lives with this sense of pressure to strive and to push past our limits.

There are many ways to reclaim a more balanced relationship with energy and cultivate the kind of sustainable power you’re referring to. We can look to nature and the cycles of the seasons, day and night, and our very breath. All religious traditions honor cycles of activity and rest. This is a very potent investigation in each of our lives to explore how we relate to our energy and how we can start to see the degree to which we’ve become disconnected from our bodies and from the rhythms of the planet. 

JS: Do you think that disconnection is what leads to burnout?

OS: Absolutely. When we’re disconnected, either we’re unaware of the signals that our body is sending us to rest, or we’re aware of them and we override them. This is one of the key factors that leads to burnout. Angela Davis says that anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn to take care of themself. I think that the conversation about energy is deeply connected to the conversation about rest. In order to have sustainable energy, we need to learn how to rest—and how to reclaim our right to rest. Once we start to examine this, we begin to see that self-care and rest are actually radical acts.

JS: Learning to rest often requires patience, and it can be particularly hard to practice when we feel stressed or under pressure. How have you come to understand patience, and how can practicing patience actually support us in responding deliberately?

OS: There’s a powerful quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he says, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait’ . . . this ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” When we look at social transformation, sometimes patience can mean passivity, and there’s a certain kind of healthy impatience with oppressive conditions that urges us to act. And yet at the same time, there’s a need for patience on the moment-to-moment level.

Through the lens of contemplative practice, I’ve come to understand patience in relation to our resistance to whatever’s happening. With patience, we can learn to bear the internal tension of resisting pain and unpleasant experiences, whether it’s unpleasant sensations or the pain and rage related to oppression or the destruction of the earth. Having patience on the moment-to-moment level allows us to have more breathing room so that we can tolerate the discomfort we experience when we disagree with what’s happening or when it goes against our values. That capacity to bear discomfort on a moment-to-moment level starts to open up more space inside us so that we can draw on other resources to make a more wise and empowered response. That way, we’re not reacting based on discomfort and resistance.

JS: You also mention the etymology of the word patience. Can you tell us about that?

OS: Patience comes from the Latin patientia, which means “suffering.” To be a patient in a hospital is to be one who suffers. In a sense, patience includes the willingness to bear discomfort consciously. And I think for many of us who are troubled about what’s happening in the world, I see us called to be patient with not knowing. The more we’re able to be patient with not having an answer and not being able to see the outcome, the more sustainable our energy can be because the more we need certainty, the more strained our internal resources become and the less resilience we have to stay engaged.

SS: You’ve mentioned the connection between patience and rest. Can you say more about how we can reclaim our right to rest?

OS: There are a few things that are important to me in examining our need for rest and how to honor it. The first is expanding our definition of rest. I love Tricia Hersey’s definition of rest in her book Rest Is Resistance and her social media platform, the Nap Ministry. She defines rest as anything that connects the body and mind, which broadens the sense of what it means to rest. If we take an evolutionary perspective, we can see that our ancestors engaged in downtime activities that were very regulating for our nervous system, whether it was threshing or weaving or toolmaking or engaging in chit-chat conversations. Any kind of downtime can be recharging.

I think it’s also important to be very real about the barriers that are there to rest. Rest is a human need. It’s a right; it’s not a luxury. And yet the structures of our society often make it so that those who have access to rest are those who have resources. There are very real economic pressures just to meet basic needs like housing and healthcare, and then there are also internal barriers to rest, like how our sense of self-worth and belonging gets tied to how much we accomplish and how well we perform. We might think that the busier we are, the more important we are, so some people feel proud of being busy and not resting.

I’ve found that it takes a very deliberate effort to learn how to rest. It involves learning to honor our limits. What can we let go of and say no to? A lot of that rides on cultivating self-compassion, seeing the suffering of being tired and strained and stressed and actually being willing not only to do something about it but to feel it. We can also investigate other questions: How much of my activity is necessary and how much of it is self-imposed? Can I relinquish my need to please others to take care of myself? Can I lower my standards in order to get more downtime? What would it be like to not always be productive? I think that we can find rest in small ways in short moments if we’re willing to look for it and break from our habits.

JS: Patience and rest can also open up space for curiosity. Can you say more about the power of curiosity in transforming our relationship to afflictive emotions?

OS: Well, we can’t transform anything if we don’t understand it. In order to understand it, we need to get curious. Curiosity doesn’t have an end or a goal. It’s just an openness to understand and to receive and absorb and learn. And there’s a certain kind of radical curiosity that we cultivate in contemplative practice that I think has a direct connection and support for social change, which is that we get interested in all of our experience, including what repels us.

It’s one thing to be curious about a beautiful sunset or a fascinating connection we have with a person in our life. It’s another thing to be curious about someone who annoys us or about our back pain, our depression, or a social condition that troubles us and keeps us up at night. Curiosity brings us into the experience of something to start to understand how it’s functioning so that we can engage with it in a more clear and skillful way.

Curiosity plays a direct role in nonviolent approaches to social transformation. Dr. King and Gandhi were both huge proponents that the initial stage of a noncooperation campaign began with being curious and gathering information. A strategic nonviolent approach to any social change work includes curiosity and openness to one’s opponent and really understanding what their needs and values are, not creating an enemy in our mind’s eye but seeing a potential partner to join us in beloved community. And so curiosity has that power to open the door to empathy and to deep connection.

The post Nurturing the Energy for Change appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Lama Rod Owens has long been fascinated by the relationship between social liberation and ultimate freedom. As an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, he has worked at the intersection of social change, identity, and spiritual practice, exploring how activist work and spiritual practice can support each other. Recently, he’s been grappling with the question of what freedom looks like in our current political context and how spiritual practice can support us through our current crises.

In his new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, Owens draws from the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Black liberation movements to put forth the notion of the New Saint. “The New Saint is a rethinking of what it means to be a bodhisattva right now, with a particular focus on relative justice and its relationship to ultimate liberation,” he told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen. “It’s about the contemporary experience of people in a world that seems to be on the edge of catastrophe.”

Shaheen sat down with Owens on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks to discuss why he believes that the apocalypse is an opportunity for awakening, the power of connecting with our ancestors and unseen beings, why the New Saint is not necessarily a good person, and how fierceness can be a form of awakened care. Read an excerpt from their conversation, then listen to the full episode.

You refer to the New Saint’s magic, which depends on two practices: the expression of awakened care and the development of our capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity. Can you walk us through what you mean by awakened care? Awakened care is my experience of bodhicitta. We traditionally define bodhicitta as the awakened heart-mind, but I would say that it’s the magic of the bodhisattva. It’s this view of deep connectedness and deep empathy, where we’re doing the work of liberation not just for ourselves but for all beings. When I am attempting to get free, that labor is also helping others to get free.

Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

When I began to think about this in terms of the New Saint, I began asking myself, What is my actual felt experience of bodhicitta? The first thing I felt was love, this deep acceptance, holding space for everything and wishing for everyone and everything to be free. I also experienced compassion, tuning into the suffering of both ourselves and the world and actually committing to freeing ourselves and others from suffering. The other piece of this is joy. I feel deep joy for having the capacity to choose to benefit beings through my practice. I’m overwhelmed by that, and there’s deep gratitude in that joy as well. And of course, everything is based in emptiness, so we have the capacity for all of this to happen because of the profound potential of emptiness and space.

When all of this is streamed together, it begins to awaken care, a deep, profound care, the kind of care that says, “I’m going to do everything that I can to get free because I care that much for myself and for others.” An important point here too is that I have to care for myself enough to want to get free to begin with. And a lot of us aren’t there either. Some of us don’t really believe that we deserve to be free from suffering. Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

You write that awakened care can cause us to lose a sense of agency so that we’re swept up in the agenda of the liberation of all beings and things. So how is it that we surrender to the agenda of liberation? [The author and filmmaker] Toni Cade Bambara has this notion of wanting to make revolution irresistible so that it’s the sweetest, most important thing that we could be doing, and it just becomes what we do and who we are. In awakened care, I’m trying to dissolve the sense of self, and that’s going to bring me into a more direct relationship with the essence or with emptiness itself. In a way, we can describe it as the cultivation of virtue.

When we practice goodness, it becomes a habit, where we’re choosing how to reduce harm moment to moment. We’re just attuned to choosing what will reduce harm. For me, that’s another way that we get swept up: we’re reprogramming ourselves to choose what is conducive to liberation. I want to get lost in that so that everything I do becomes an expression of goodness and therefore an expression of virtue.

One stream of awakened care is love, which you describe as a form of radical acceptance. Can you say more about how you’ve come to understand love? It’s hard to change when you haven’t really told the truth about what’s actually happening, and so the first expression of love is actually allowing ourselves to hold space for everything that’s arising. This is how it is. I don’t have to like it; I just have to name it and notice it.

I think what keeps us from doing that profound radical work of love is heartbreak. When I start telling the truth about how things really are, then my heart is going to break because I have been so concerned with telling myself narratives about how I want things to be in order to feel good about what’s happening. When I let go of that and say, “This is it. This is what’s happening,” my heart breaks, which is the experience of having to touch into this deep disappointment.

Once I start doing that, then there’s an honesty that awakens, and that profound holding becomes love. This is what’s happening, and therefore, I can make a choice to change what needs to change now because I’m not lost in these delusions and narratives about how I think things are; I know how things are. It creates a deeper intimacy with all phenomena and all beings, because you’re with the truth now, and you know that the truth is that everything and everyone deserves to be free.

Another aspect of the work of the New Saint is reclaiming beauty while also disrupting capitalism and overconsumption. So how can beauty help us access the sublime and the transcendent? When I surrender to beauty, I’m letting go of the ways in which I’m protecting and guarding myself. I’m allowing myself to expand, and I’m letting go of the sense of who I think I am, and then beginning to experience and touch into the actual expression of spaciousness. And when I do that, things get more fluid and more inviting. The world becomes less antagonistic, less rigid, less sharp. It becomes more translucent for me when I’m surrendering and opening. And that is the experience of the sublime. That translucent fluidity really is about connecting to this ultimate experience of emptiness itself. But it’s not about materialism. And so instead of accumulating luxury goods that I can’t afford, I connect to the energetic expression of beauty, which feeds a deeper sense of self-worth. That self-worth is about me wanting not to suffer and wanting to actually experience ultimate liberation.

Let’s go a step further and talk about desire. You say that yearning is the first step in touching the divine. How have you learned to work with and channel yearning? You have to want to get free. Desire or yearning is the last thing we give up before ultimate enlightenment. That yearning for enlightenment is going to take us to the threshold, and to go beyond that threshold, we have to let go of wanting to get free, which I think will be a really hard choice to make. But I am training myself to yearn for things that lead to freedom, liberation, fluidity, and movement, not to continue yearning for the things that create rigidity and separateness. And the more I yearn and the more I practice, the more I begin to experience what freedom is, so I know that this is what I should be focusing on: not the rigidity but the experience of getting open and clear and translucent and fluid. That’s it. And so I just start yearning for it. In the same way that we yearn for our bad habits, we can start yearning for experiences of liberation.

The post The Magic of the New Saint appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In her first book, How to Do Nothing, artist Jenny Odell examined the power of quiet contemplation in a world where our attention is bought and sold. Now, she takes up the question of how to find space for silence when we feel like we don’t have enough time to spend.

In her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Odell traces the history behind our relationship to time, from the day-to-day pressures of productivity to the deeper existential dread underlying the climate crisis. In the process, she explores alternative ways of experiencing time that can help us get past the illusion of the separate self and instead open us to wonder and freedom.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Odell to discuss the social dimensions of time, how paying attention can unsettle the boundaries between us, why she views burnout as a spiritual issue, and how love can bring us out of linear time. Read an excerpt from their conversation, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen (JS): These days, it can be so easy to fall into apocalyptic thinking and what you call declinism, which you describe as the belief that a once stable society is headed for inevitable and irreversible doom. Can you walk us through some of the dangers of this view?

Jenny Odell (JO): I think declinism can foreclose a really crucial space of questioning or imagination that would allow you to imagine other pathways forward. It may be the case that that space is vanishingly small, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still very important. Rebecca Solnit has written really beautifully about this: what you believe very literally affects what it is possible for you to do. You see this individually in people where what they think they’re capable of doing affects what they’re able to do, but I think it’s also true collectively. So I worry a lot about not only giving up before it’s over but also how the world looks to someone who’s given up. 

Declinism goes hand in hand with the idea that things used to be better—and a lot of things did used to be better. But a blanket notion that things were stable for a long time and now we’re going over the edge is a myopic view in both directions. I’m much more interested in a notion of history where every moment is actually contingent and at every moment things could have gone different ways. If you look at history that way, the present moment appears very different—it looks like it could also go a lot of different ways.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You also discuss the phenomenon of climate grief, and you suggest that grief can be incredibly useful as it can teach us new forms of subjecthood. Can you say more about the types of subjecthood that grief makes possible?

JO: Climate grief is so much grief for something—or for someone or someones. I think in that acknowledgment is this recognition that you don’t really belong to yourself. In How to Do Nothing, I describe going to Elkhorn Slough and seeing all of these birds. At that moment, there was such a profusion of them and they were so beautiful, but I also couldn’t see them not against the backdrop of loss.

In that moment, I realized that it doesn’t really logically make sense to love anything. From the point of total utilitarian logic, why would you tie your fate to something that is endangered? And yet that is the moment when you experience your deepest sense of humanity. The experience of grief itself is that I care about something so much that it’s disassembling my ego. It’s almost like the center of gravity is between you and the being that you’re grieving for.

JS: Moments like the one you just described seem to unsettle the boundaries between us. So what have these experiences taught you about what you call the illusion of the bounded self?

JO: What the self is is still a very active question for me, and it’s only become more fascinatingly complicated for me through experiences like that. I am someone who has thought a lot about context for a long time. A lot of my art asked the question about how you can separate an individual thing from its context. I was an artist in residence at a dump, and I researched 200 objects, everything I could find about them, and the conclusion that I came to was that this object you’re holding in your hand is the crystallization of economic patterns: people thought they wanted this, or people thought they could get people to want this, or these materials were available and cheap at this time. You have this thing that seems like it’s just given, but actually all of these factors fed into it. So I’ve always been interested in that in all domains.

The same is true for the self. I do feel like I have some sort of core vaguely, but I do also feel like there’s Mountain Jenny, and then there’s Oakland Jenny, and there’s Paralyzed by a Butterfly Jenny, and I’m very different around different people. I think someone could come to the conclusion that there just is no self and it’s all totally meaningless, but I don’t really think that. Instead, I have a very ecological view of the self, like it’s something that’s alive. It’s entirely made out of relationships.

SS: Along those lines, in contrast to the notion of an isolated individual, you write that you’ve come to define being alive as an embrace. What does it mean that being alive is like an embrace?

JO: I think of it as a mix of sensitivity and love. I feel alive to the extent that I can see the birds [around me]—and not just see them but also feel moved by them. I think that is the kind of engine behind wanting to see what the next day brings and also wanting to see how I change in response to those things. My nightmare is feeling like I’m just an isolated unit that’s just incidentally here on earth without having any relationship to anything.

I’m very fortunate to have been able to mostly live in the same place my whole life, and the relationship that I have to this place is so, so meaningful. It’s so much a part of who I am. Someone recently said to me, “I don’t just think that we see places. I think that places see us.” That’s what I mean by the embrace: I want to feel like I’m sensitive to things that are happening around me, but I also want to feel seen—there’s a reciprocal relationship where I’m looking at a world that’s also alive.

SS: You quote the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who writes that when we are actually seeing, we’re in a state of love and there’s no yesterday and no tomorrow. Can you say more about this state of love?

JO: One of the reasons love feels related to time for me is that there’s nothing instrumental about love, and there’s so much right now that feels instrumental. In How to Do Nothing, I talked about Martin Buber’s idea of I-Thou versus I-It relationships. Having an I-Thou relationship to something is much closer to what I was saying earlier about the center of gravity, and I-It is more like things exist in the world for me to either use them or discard them.

Anyone who’s experienced even one second of love toward anything or anyone knows that the notion of gain or strategy just doesn’t make any sense. It is the ultimate end in and of itself. If you’re there, you just want to be there. I have the linear timeline of my life, but I also know that in these moments that I’ve had where I felt a feeling of love, it felt like time stopped. I don’t really think of myself as having an age in those moments. They’re very strikingly similar, and I suspect they will continue to be similar.

♦

The post There Is No Yesterday and No Tomorrow appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One of the questions we ask ourselves in evaluating articles is, in what way does this matter to our readers? What is at stake in the issues that a particular piece explores? Since we are a Buddhist publication, for many of our articles, the answer is obvious. The value of pieces on Buddhist teachings and practice, for instance, goes without saying. And narratives by practitioners do what good narrative writing is intended to do—act as a lens to better examine one’s world and one’s own life. But for the historical pieces based on scholarship, the answer may not be immediately clear, although such pieces are no less important in understanding our traditions. As an example, a topic we have been exploring for years is Buddhist modernism. As best I can recall, the first time the term appeared in Tricycle was in an interview with Jacqueline Stone, then a professor of Japanese studies at Princeton University. In it, Stone laid out Buddhist modernism’s origins:

Buddhist modernism began in the late nineteenth century, as Asian Buddhist leaders and Western converts … sought to present Buddhism as the answer to the so-called crisis of faith brought on by the alleged incompatibility of Christianity and the modern rational-scientific worldview. So certain elements were abstracted from the larger religious context and presented as constituting the core or essential teachings of Buddhism, and other elements—elements that always had been a vital part of the tradition—were marginalized.

Stone adds that “the point is not that Buddhist modernism is wrong. Actually, I think it is part of Buddhism’s continuous interpretive effort to frame itself in accordance with the demands of time and place.”

Not long after that, on Stone’s advice, Tricycle’s features editor, Andrew Cooper, interviewed the scholar Robert Sharf (Summer 2007), to take on a subject that in Stone’s interview was all but an aside. In fact, with other scholars like Donald S. Lopez Jr., Sharf was one of the first to open modern Buddhist studies as a legitimate field of research, notably with his 1995 paper “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience”; likewise, Lopez’s seminal Prisoners of Shangri-La (1998); A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West (2002); and his inaugural lecture at the University of Michigan, “The Making of Modern Buddhism” (2001), anticipate works that follow, among them, David McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism.

In this issue, Seth Segall’s review of McMahan’s new title, Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds, continues our exploration. Like all good works of scholarship, McMahan’s rests on the surface of a much deeper ocean, drawing from the research of those who preceded him and building upon it. Rethinking Meditation reflects a central concern of the author: while Buddhism is often presented as a means by which to deconstruct our world, it is itself constructed within ever-changing historical and cultural contexts. As we learned much earlier from the work of Sharf and Lopez, the Buddhism we practice today bears little resemblance to the Buddhism of even a few centuries ago. To quote Segall’s review, “McMahan demonstrates how every culture and historical era reinterprets and repurposes Buddhist practice to make it relevant to its place and time.”

We often dismiss ideas as, well, mere ideas. But Buddhist history for Buddhist practitioners, to cite an approach used by the late scholar and Tricycle contributor Rita Gross (Fall 2010), can reveal otherwise hidden assumptions, sectarian attachments, and personal biases. And isn’t shedding light on such blind spots a big part of why we practice Buddhism in the first place?

The post Mere Ideas? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 2016, poet Ross Gay set out to document a delight each day for a year. Shortly after he completed the resulting essay collection, The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Recognizing delight’s potential endlessness, Gay decided to turn his yearlong exercise into a lifelong project.

Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights, demonstrating that the sources of delight are indeed limitless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. For Gay, delight serves as evidence of our interconnectedness, and it is inextricable from the fact of our mortality. With characteristic humor and grace, he chronicles his everyday encounters with delight, from the fleeting sweetnesses of strangers to the startling beauty of the falsetto to the unexpected joys of aging.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and Insight Meditation Society cofounder and teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Gay to talk about the relationship between delight and impermanence, how he understands faith, and how delight has restructured how he pays attention.

James Shaheen (JS): The last time we spoke, you had just published a book on joy. How do you think about the difference between joy and delight?

Ross Gay (RG): I’m starting to feel like among the definitions for delight is something like the pleasant evidence of our connection. It’s occasional—a hummingbird lands very close to you, and you feel delight. But joy feels like it’s always there, and you can enter into it.

In a way, joy feels like the connection itself, and delight feels like the little bells—the little reminders that, oh yeah, there’s this fundamental connection here. So that’s how I think of it: delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.

“Delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.”

JS: In your practice of noticing delight, you write that you’re not being optimistic; you’re just paying attention. Do you think delight has shaped or restructured how you pay attention?

RG: Absolutely. I feel like just by doing this practice, I’ve built a kind of reservoir of things that now I know delight me. Instead of just, “Oh, that’s happening,” it’s like, “Oh yeah, this is another thing that I love.” I find myself arguing with the notion of delight as optimistic in part because in this practice, I don’t mean to diminish the fullness and complexity of life.

What I mean to do is attend very fully. And in attending very fully, I’m also attending to what is astonishingly beautiful. I’m not looking at the bright side of things; I’m just trying to look at everything.

JS: Right. Often what you’re fully attentive to is what we might otherwise take for granted, and in your work, the everyday becomes unfamiliar and new. You describe this as being “perpetually wonderstruck.” Can you say more about the relationship between wonder and delight? 

RG: It might be the case that while I’m doing this practice, I’m alert in a certain kind of way to what’s going to delight me. It’s starting with a question: I wonder. I wonder what’s going to delight me. And I wonder too if that experience of not knowing what’s going to delight you prepares the ground of not knowing. In a way, the vocation is to not know. Maybe there’s a first knowing, which is like, “Something’s probably going to delight me,” but the not knowing is like, “I don’t know what it is.” That practice of not being sure feels connected to wonder, which to me feels like a fundamental unknowing.

It’s an opening question: What do we love in common? What is beautiful? What is given to me? These are questions that can bring us closer to one another and help us acknowledge our connection, which then further makes that connection possible. They grow [the connection] that they witness.

JS: You’ve said that the most interesting thing about us as humans is that we die and we change. How do you see our mortality as an occasion for joy?

RG: There’s something really moving about walking down the street and seeing whoever is walking toward me and being like, “Oh, yeah, you too will die. We’re both going to be dead.” It’s an interesting ground to operate on, where there’s a shared fleetingness of things. If we can get a handle on that and be less afraid and more curious, it also seems to me to be another ground of sharing: to be witnesses of how fleeting this whole thing is. It offers a possibility for a different kind of generosity.

This also comes back to the fact that we are not one thing. We are many things, and in fact, we are many things in the process of becoming many more things. And that feels to me like a kind of faith—a kind of faith that also inclines me to feel tender toward someone when I can hold that, oh yeah, we’re changing. I don’t know what I’m going to be tomorrow or next week. But I also don’t know what anyone else or anything else is going to be tomorrow or next week. And although it’s a kind of groundlessness, it also feels like a potential for sweetness.

Sharon Salzberg: You write that delight can be occasioned by faith—faith in each other and our capacity for “radiant, unpredictable, sloppy, mycelial, transgressive care.” So how do you understand faith?

RG: This feels like a lesson for me regularly, and maybe it’s part of the practice of delight. To write a delight every day requires a kind of faith that there will be a delight every day, which I think comes from practice. The faith actually follows the practice—the practice has provided the evidence that you can have faith. Maybe faith and delight arrive together. They have a connection to one another.

In one essay in the book, my friend Kate’s cat gets lost. Every time I see a sign on a telephone pole that says “Lost Cat,” I’m like, “Oh, man, that’s a bummer. You’re never going to see your cat again.” In a way, I have faith in a certain kind of universe, and my faith in that universe compels me to contribute to that universe, which is to say that when I say, “Oh, bummer,” I’m not looking around for anyone’s cat. And if my friend’s cat gets lost, I’m not helping them out. I’ve been an asshole on account of that.

My friend Kate, on the other hand, has faith in this other kind of cat-rescuing universe. It’s a beautiful story, actually. Her cat got lost, she put up signs, and at dawn, when she went to the place where her cat got lost, which is behind a strip mall in a murky, swampy area, there were people out there calling her cat’s name. And she got her cat back.

That’s the kind of faith that she gave me. But I needed a reason to have that faith. Often, these things are given to us by other people. Someone has to teach you that when you put signs up, people will actually try to take care of you.

♦

Listen to the full conversation at tricycle.org/podcast.

The post Limitless Delights appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Michael Imperioli has a knack for playing mobsters and villains. Best known for his roles as Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos and Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, the Emmy Award–winning actor has made a career out of exploring addiction and afflictive emotions on-screen.

Off-screen, though, Imperioli is a committed Buddhist practitioner. In 2008, he and his wife took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, and during the pandemic, they began teaching online meditation classes together, exploring Tibetan Buddhist texts like The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. Though Buddhism no doubt influences his creative work, Imperioli prefers to focus his practice on his everyday life. For him, Buddhism offers a way to liberate harmful emotions and cultivate patience and compassion on a day-to-day level.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Imperioli spoke with Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen about the dangers of the instrumentalization of Buddhist practice, what The White Lotus can teach us about craving and dissatisfaction, his relationship to his dharma name, and whether he believes that liberation is possible in this lifetime.

James Shaheen (JS): You’re best known as an actor, most recently in The White Lotus and famously in The Sopranos, but people may not know that you’re also a devoted Buddhist practitioner. How did you first come to Buddhism?

Michael Imperioli (MI): When I was a teenager, I started reading Jack Kerouac, who knew an awful lot about Buddhism. I mean, if you read his poems, like The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, you really see the depth of knowledge he had about dharma. I was very curious about Buddhism through his writing, so I bought a copy of the Diamond Sutra at St. Mark’s Books [in New York City’s East Village], and I really couldn’t penetrate it. Buddhism stayed somewhere in the back of my mind until much later.

In 2007, my wife and I started going to Jewel Heart, which was in Tribeca at the time, and Gelek Rinpoche was teaching there. That was the first time we went to a Buddhist teaching, and he was our first teacher. Shortly after that, we ended up taking refuge with Garchen Rimpoche. It was funny, because when my wife and I first walked into Jewel Heart, we realized we had both been there in the ’80s when it was Madam Rosa’s, which was a very decadent late-night nightclub.

JS: I remember that. You’ve come a long way.

MI: No mud, no lotus, as they say.

JS: Absolutely. I’ve heard you say that you came to Buddhism during the height of your success when you felt that something was missing. So what was missing?

MI: Maybe it’s not so much what was missing but that there was no ultimate satisfaction in the success that came. I spent my late teens only pursuing acting. I didn’t do anything else. I barely traveled, I was in New York, I did every job I could. I really wanted a certain degree of success, and I was driven toward that. And when that success did come, I realized that it wasn’t an end unto itself. I felt intuitively that what was missing was on a spiritual level—that there was a wisdom that was lacking. Just doing another successful TV show or winning an Academy Award wouldn’t be the answer.

I started exploring a lot of different spiritual paths before Buddhism, not really committing to any, reading books and going to different meetings and centers. I would read stuff like Krishnamurti, and when I was reading the book, it made a lot of sense. Then the book would be over, and I just felt like, “OK, now what?” There wasn’t really a practice to implement in your daily life. And then, when we stumbled into Jewel Heart, I saw the potential for a path and a practice.

JS: You mentioned your ambition and your desire to succeed in your career as an actor, and I remember many years ago, you sat on a panel with Gelek Rinpoche and Philip Glass. Philip said that the very qualities that made him a success professionally were the same that he applied to his practice: attention, focus, discipline, and creativity, among others. Has that been the same for you?

MI: Yeah, ambition has a negative connotation in some ways, but to succeed in anything, let alone an art form, you need a lot of tenacity and perseverance and discipline and passion and creativity. A lot of those are positive qualities, admirable qualities even. Practicing Buddhism takes a lot of discipline, and it takes a lot of perseverance, commitment, open-mindedness, and honesty. I agree with Philip on that.

JS: You know, I met you after that panel, and I interviewed you in 2009. I’ve been listening to your recent interviews, and it’s pretty amazing to hear you talk about your practice nearly fifteen years later with such commitment and depth. It made me realize that it helps me to see change in others that I often miss in myself. Do you ever feel that way?

MI: Yeah, especially with my wife, because we got into it together, we practice together, and we talk about it a lot. It’s a big part of our lives. I see it in her. I see it in simple ways, like when somebody annoys you, you have an awareness that somebody’s annoying you.

When you behave in a way that lets the afflictive emotion of anger get the best of you, you see that and make amends and realize that it’s not what you want to do. I mean, I see the discipline she has and the commitment to it [in reading Buddhist texts]. That’s very clear. But in those simple, day-to-day ways, I see the practice at work. And it’s very inspiring to me to see those changes.

JS: What sort of changes do you see in yourself in your own day-to-day?

“Maybe it’s not so much what was missing but that there was no ultimate satisfaction in the success that came.”

MI: You know, I find that more positive people come into my life—kinder people, more generous people, more compassionate people. And that’s amazing. Ultimately, the practice is bringing awareness to your existence, second by second, day by day: What am I doing in this moment? What am I thinking? I went through most of my life justifying my emotions and my reactions: “I did this because they did that. She took too long in the line in front of me at the coffee shop, and now I’m angry.” We can justify those emotions all the time, and that’s fine. But you’ll be stuck there. Those things don’t just go away.

JS: Often I think about Buddhist practice in terms of becoming a kinder, more compassionate person, and I don’t think that’s a modest goal. But I recently interviewed Anne Klein (Rigzin Drolma), and she said she was challenged by her Dzogchen teacher when he asked her, “Do you have confidence that you can achieve liberation in this lifetime?” I’m still focused on not snapping at my partner or the people I work with, and I consider it a victory when I have the intelligence and poise to make a decision not to be that way. And yet, sometimes I go back to Anne Klein’s teacher’s question: Do I believe I can be free? Does that ever come up for you?

MI: First, I agree with you that it’s not a modest aspiration to work with those afflictive emotions and become aware of them. I think liberation is possible in this lifetime, but it takes an awful amount of commitment. I’m confident that it’s possible; I’m not confident that I’m going to get there. But I don’t really think about it that much.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said to his sangha, “So you become enlightened. Then what?” He likens enlightenment to being present at your own funeral, particularly the idea of “you” with this ego mind becoming enlightened. They’re kind of conflicting because enlightenment is the opposite of that. He’s almost saying you can’t really have your self and your ego and be enlightened.

Enlightenment is not this better version of you. It’s not Clark Kent becoming Superman. It’s something else. One of the mahasiddhas said, “I am not really impressed by someone who can turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle is if someone can liberate just one negative emotion.”

JS: On the note of negative emotions, you play Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, and he seems like a case study in dissatisfaction, addiction, and regret. Dominic can’t prevent the mistakes he has to make, although he pays for them in cash. I’ve found that practice can offer an opportunity to intervene, yet most people won’t come to the practice. How do you think of this in terms of the bodhisattva vow? Or is that too crazy a question?

MI: No, it’s not a crazy question at all. The bodhisattva vow is a really big commitment. [laughs]

JS: Kind of like enlightenment.

MI: Yeah. Maybe when you first hear about Buddhism, you think that there’s a way to reach nirvana or some place where all the suffering is gone. Then you take a bodhisattva vow, and you realize that whatever that state is, you’re not going to get there until everybody else gets there, and you’re hanging around for everyone else.

I think The White Lotus really shows the habitual tendencies that become so ingrained through your own karmic imprints from past lives, through your DNA, and through the learned behaviors that you saw in your younger years from your parents or the culture you were in. Those things can really stay with a person and stay in a family unless something cataclysmic happens or some kind of light bulb goes off—or both, maybe at the same time.

The White Lotus is interesting to me because you have very, very rich people in the most opulent, luxurious god realms, and they’re all miserable. When you don’t have those things, you might think that it would make you really happy to live like this or travel first class and stay in the best hotels. And here we have a story of these people who actually do that and are not very happy at all. There’s momentary happiness and fleeting pleasures, and yet there’s still dissatisfaction. Something is not being fulfilled.

JS: Right. There’s an interesting experiment I did when I was much, much younger. I found this apartment in New York, which was no mean feat at the time, and I really loved it. I had a view of the Hudson River, and the apartment even had a window in the bathroom, which in New York isn’t guaranteed by any means. I remember thinking, “I wonder how long before I take this for granted.” I wasn’t yet a Buddhist; I didn’t have a practice. But it occurred to me that we fall for it every time. We think, “Just this will make me happy.” And in The White Lotus, it’s really clear that we fall for it every time.

MI: Yeah, how long did it take before you took it for granted?

JS: I think it must have been about six weeks, and all of a sudden, I was in a mood again. I didn’t care about that window. I didn’t care about the Hudson River. But when I see the character you played, it would be easy for me to hate him if I didn’t also identify with him. He wants his wife back, and yet he’s in the throes of addiction—he can’t help himself, and he can’t help his son. It was such an accurate description of the samsara that we all live in, and again, I think that practice can interrupt that. Or it’s a possibility anyway.

MI: It is a possibility. But even with practice, those ingrained behaviors, especially addiction, are very hard. Pema Chödrön talks a lot about how a lot of the path is one step forward, two steps back. Maybe one day you go one step forward and only one step back, and you should rejoice in the fact that today it was only one step back. That’s progress. I think practice can help because to practice Buddhism requires real honesty with yourself. You really have to have a bold, honest view of your own mind. People can uncover this through psychotherapy with psychologists and psychiatrists. But with Buddhist practice, it’s in a different way, sometimes a mundane, day-to-day way. You really have to make a commitment to being honest with yourself, and that’s sometimes very hard.

JS: Yeah, I’ve found that sangha and a teacher are essential in being honest with myself. Sometimes a teacher can say something that cuts right through your fabrications. I remember once I was harping on something, and my teacher looked at me and said, “Why do you care so much?” And all of a sudden it shattered. I was sitting there seeing myself as this repetitive person harping on the same thing, and I had to really consider, why did I care so much? Practice is important in relationship with others and with a teacher, without which I don’t think I’d have made any headway at all.

MI: Oh, same for me. I don’t think it really exists outside of that.

“The goal of Buddhism isn’t to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to drive next door.”

JS: In addition to being an actor, you’re also a musician. Can you tell us a bit about your band, Zopa?

MI: Zopa is an indie rock trio that was formed in 2006. We took a hiatus when I moved in 2013 for about seven years, and then two and a half years ago, we started playing again. I play guitar, and I sing some of the songs. It’s a very collaborative group. We’re influenced by a lot of the New York bands from the ’70s like the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed, as well as a lot of ’80s post-punk and ’90s indie rock.

Over the years, there have been some Buddhist themes in the songs, and we have a new song that includes the Seven Line Prayer of Guru Rinpoche in Tibetan. There’s something cool about playing those songs live—those mantras and prayers have a certain frequency and resonance that I think might touch people in positive ways.

JS: The name of your band is also your dharma name, Zopa. When did you receive the name, and how has your relationship to it changed over time?

MI: When I took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, I got the name Konchog Zopa Sonam. Zopa means patience in Tibetan, and the day I took refuge, he said, “Patience is the key to your practice because when you lose your patience, you lose your love.” At the time, I was still very new to Buddhism, and I took that as a pithy Hallmark card nugget—I didn’t really take it to heart.

Years later, I said to myself, “The day you took refuge with him, he said this to you. Maybe you should give it a little bit more importance. Maybe you should really look into what it means for patience to be the key to your practice.” Since then, I’ve started to take it more seriously and really focus on it as much as I can or as much as my awareness allows me to.

Trungpa Rinpoche said that if you’re a dharma practitioner, patience is an obligation. It’s not just something you do because you want to be kind. It is an obligation. Not only that, but it’s also an opportunity to practice. When you feel yourself becoming impatient, you can become aware of that and choose to bring some patience into the situation. These little annoyances become opportunities for practice.

JS: We recently had the interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk on the podcast, and she said that a lot of our artistic practice is waiting and trying to get out of the way. Does this resonate with you, and how do you think about the creative process?

MI: God, yeah. Especially on a movie set, you spend most of the time waiting. But also with writing, if you’re working on a writing project that’s going to take some time—let’s say you set up a schedule to write Monday through Friday from 10 to 3—chances are you’re not going to be literally writing fingers on the keyboard for five hours, and there might be a big chunk of that time where nothing’s happening. You’re not really waiting for inspiration because you can’t wait for inspiration—you’d probably wait forever. But you have to trust that there’s some other process going on subconsciously and that for those hours that you’re there, there is some kind of alignment where you’re in tune with the story or the character. Even if you’re not actively writing or actively imagining it, somehow, your consciousness knows that that period of time is related. You have to trust that, and there’s a lot of waiting involved.

JS: More generally, how does practicing Buddhism shape your artistic work?

MI: Typically, I don’t like talking about this because the goal of Buddhism is not to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to drive next door. But I do think that meditation can help with focus. Art demands a certain intensity of focus and concentration, be it performing onstage as an actor or as a musician, sitting down writing, or acting a scene. The more focused you are in the moment, the better, and I definitely think meditation can help with that.

JS: So in other words, it’s an ancillary and unasked-for benefit. But you pointed out something very important, I think: the instrumentalization of our practice in order to get something. Any of us can fall into that.

MI: Yeah, back to Trungpa Rinpoche: it’s kind of like being present at your own funeral. The fact that this 2,500-year-old tradition is still in the world and there’s still a lineage and a connection to that wisdom is so unbelievably precious that to instrumentalize it for some worldly purpose really runs counter to it. If you’re making a commitment to practice, at some point, there’ll be shifts in everything: in the way you interact with and perceive the world. They may be little shifts, but they’re there.

♦

Listen to the full conversation on Tricycle Talks here. 

The post No Mud, No Lotus appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A Zen practitioner for nearly fifty years and one of America’s most celebrated poets, Jane Hirshfield has long been fascinated by the power of unanswered questions. When she first arrived at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center as a student, she was instructed that it was a good idea to always practice with a question. She’s been asking questions ever since.

Both in her Zen practice and in her poetry, she is guided by questions that resist easy answers, allowing herself to be transformed through the process of asking. “There’s always the intention of questioning,” she told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen. “You say to each moment, ‘Who are you?’ You say to yourself, ‘Who am I?’ You say to each other person that you meet, ‘Are you a buddha? What is your teaching?’”

In her new book, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, she takes up the question, “How can I be of service?,” inviting readers to resist fixity and certainty and instead to dwell in not-knowing. Shaheen sat down with Hirshfield on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks to discuss the questions she’s been asking lately, the role of poetry in the face of injustice, and the liberating power of being no one and nothing. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, along with two poems from her book, and then listen to the full episode.

What are some of the questions you’ve been asking lately? Questioning has always been important to me, and as a practice issue, that goes back to my very first week of Zen practice when I was a guest student at Tassajara. Soto Zen is not Rinzai Zen. One doesn’t work with koans as the main focus of meditation. Stories are told and thought about, but it’s not the central practice. Nonetheless, the teacher suggested that it’s a good idea for you to always have a question in your practice.

Over the years, that central practice question has evolved. For a very long time, it was a question that I actually ended up writing about in a special section for Tricycle, which was “What is the emotional life of a Buddha?” I looked at that question for many years until I felt that I had saturated myself in it and come up with my own answer. And then I had to find a new question. The new question of the last quite a few years is one that I think is widely shared, which is “How can I be of service?” How can I serve? How can I help? What can I do? How can I add my one molecule to the tiller of change?

You write that from your earliest work, you have investigated justice. So how do you understand justice? And how do you view the role of the poet in the face of what you call failures of justice and compassion? Poetry can be used in many ways for many purposes. I don’t want to pretend that it is an act that always includes interconnection and empathy and all of the values that those on the path of practice are trying to raise in one another and in ourselves. There are war poems. There are angry poems. There are silly poems, which might be more neutral. But for me, when I look at how poems work in our lives, I see that in their very fabric, there is empathy and interconnection. The very act of entering another person’s language and hearing it inside yourself as if it were your own is an act of permeability and a recalibrating sense that we are not separate from one another.

If you read a line about a mountain, you cannot understand the mountain without becoming it for an instant within yourself or becoming the creature walking on the mountain and feeling that steepness in your legs and seeing the sharpness or smoothness of the surfaces and seeing the many beings who are inhabiting the mountain with you. To actually participate in any work of art is to lower the barricades between yourself and other beings. And so poetry, by its own fabric of what it is and how it works, is already an act that moves the psyche toward the values of practice, the hopes of practice, the vows of practice.

For me, every poem I write is an act of trying to discover a larger and changed and new way of seeing in the face of the evidence and experience of existence. Many poems are written when I feel inadequate—they’re written out of grief and the sense of my own impotence before the disaster that we are all witnessing. The question is, “What can I do?”

Because I am a poet, I can do a few things. My daily practice for many years was to take some political action every single day having nothing to do with being a poet: donations, sending letters, sending postcards. But then sometimes I get to do something as myself, not just as one more set of hands pitching in. And when I’m doing it as myself, this is what I am: I’m a poet. I’m not a union organizer. I’m not a giver of speeches or recorder of TikToks. And so what I can do is write a poem and make that poem available and say that poem when the opportunity arises and hope that because the poem changed me first, it might help change someone else once it’s been written.

I write poems to change myself. I write them to see more clearly, largely, compassionately, less from the small self and more from the large self. And so those changes are in the poem because they are why it became a poem in the first place, and perhaps someone else reading the poem will go through the same experience and move, for instance, from anger or incomprehension to compassion.

Some of your poems read like imagined rituals or liturgies, like “Spell to Be Said Before Sleep” or “Invocation.” How do you think about poetry in relation to ritual and prayer, and are there any Zen rituals that inspire your writing? A poem is very much akin to a ritual for a rite of passage. I’ve been interested in rites of passage ever since I took an anthropology course in high school and read The Ritual Process [by Victor Turner]. That was kind of a life-changing book for me, not least because it talks about how in any rite of passage, there is a moment when a person is no longer the old self and not yet the new self. They are in a state of threshold and liminality. That idea has informed my life ever since.

The strongest experience of this particular kind of liminality I have known in my own life was a Buddhist rite of passage. When you go to Tassajara to stay there as a practicing student, you do five days of what is called tangaryo. Tangaryo is a ritualized reenactment of the earlier practice where a monk would arrive at the monastery gate and simply sit outside until taken in. There is no form. When you are in the zendo sitting your five days of tangaryo, the only requirement is that you not leave. You stay on your zafu. There’s no kinhin, or walking meditation. There’s nothing but you sitting there, and you are so no one that the year that I was there, they continued to do construction projects in the zendo while we were sitting there.

You just didn’t count. You were no one and nothing. And it was physically almost unbearable because I don’t have a body that was meant to sit with its legs crossed. In all my years in the monastery, I don’t think I sat more than three periods of zazen when I wasn’t in pain. But I adored the experience of being no one. This is a paradoxical thing to say, but it felt such a deeply human thing to not be Jane—to just be this ignored intention, the intention to manage to stay to practice. That was informing and life-changing.

“I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being is to have my first impulse be not to assert something but to ask something.”

From the ritual of tangaryo, I learned that no matter how hard the pain is, you can survive it. In any period of zazen, part of what is being learned is that whatever your experience is, you can simply stay with it. You need not run away. You need not be frightened. You need not reject it. Your only job is to stay on the meditation cushion and be with it and notice that eventually, something will change because something always changes. I think that was a very good instruction to me for practice and for what it is that I am interested in as a poet, which is to not turn away from anything.

There is a famous sentence from the Roman poet Terence, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I think sitting on the zafu and seeing who visits in all of those hours and weeks and months and years is identical to the practice of writing poetry: you see what arises, and you notice if there’s anything you might want to do to help what arises unfold into something larger and deeper.

And so there’s always the intention of questioning. You say to each moment, “Who are you?” You say to yourself, “Who am I?” You say to each other person that you meet, “Are you a buddha? What is your teaching?” I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being is to have my first impulse be not to assert something but to ask something.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.

⧫

Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, 
fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. 

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. 

For years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question. 

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised. 

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For years, each day, something. 

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, 
bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend— 

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet       didn’t it give you the asking 

Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting

Each morning
waking
amidst the not-ever-before,
dressing inside the not-ever-again. 

Under sunlight or cloud,
brushing the hair. 

Not yet arrived
at the end-crimped finish,
drinking coffee
and buttering toast. 

Permitted to slip into coat, into shoes,
I go out,
I count myself part, 

carrying only
a weightless shadow,
whose each corner joins and departs
from the shadows of others. 

Mortal, alive among others
equally fragile. 

And with luck—
for days even, sometimes—
this luxury, this extra gift: 

able to even forget it.

From The Asking: New and Selected Poems by Jane Hirshfield (Penguin Random House 2023)

The post Abiding in the Asking appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As a young oncologist, Anthony Back turned to Buddhism as a practical way of processing the suffering and death he encountered each day. “I came to Buddhism out of a sense of trying to survive,” he told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. Over the years, his practice has become an essential support to his work in accompanying patients as they navigate illness and death, and it has radically transformed his understanding of what it means to provide care.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Shaheen and Salzberg sat down with Back to discuss how he integrates his Buddhist practice into his work as a physician, how he deals with burnout and moral injury, and what James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have taught him about paying attention. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen (JS): You’re currently the co-director of the University of Washington Center for Excellence in Palliative Care and a professor of oncology and medicine, and you’re also a practicing Zen Buddhist. How did you first come to Buddhism?

Anthony Back (AB): I came to Buddhism out of a sense of trying to survive. I was a young oncologist, and I was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of suffering and death that I was dealing with. I thought, “How will I make a career of this? How will I keep doing this day in and day out?” That led me first to mindfulness and then to Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya Zen Center.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You currently work in palliative care, and so much of palliative care seems linked to honest communication about illness and death. How has your Buddhist practice influenced your ability to have these conversations?

AB: What my practice has enabled me to do is work at a layer that is below the words. Of course, there’s a lot of teaching about what words to use and what words help you come across as empathic. But what my practice has taught me is that my stillness can make space for whatever the other person is experiencing and that my ability to be with it and not push it away can create a field for deeper communication. I don’t think I would’ve learned that any other way. The priority in my world is not about stillness. It’s about efficiency. And it really took taking myself out of the hospital to learn to practice that kind of stillness inside and outside to be able to sit with people.

SS: When we’re confronted with suffering, it can be so tempting to look away or to try to avoid it at all costs. How have you seen this avoidance or resistance to suffering play out in the medical field, and how do you train providers to be able to talk openly about suffering?

AB: In the medical field, the usual reaction to suffering is that we should be able to do something about it, and if we can’t treat it now, we need to find new treatments, and so we need to do more research. There is something really good in all of that—that is how medical practice improves. And yet if we don’t pause to be with that suffering and to witness it and to be present with the person, then something gets missed.

It is a constant struggle to make the time to be still in the midst of these busy practices. And because it’s not reinforced by the system, because it’s not reimbursed or formally taught, very often mindfulness gets the label of being just another technique. Of course, what you learn after years of practice is that it is a way that you bring yourself into everything. It’s not just something that you apply at the moment; it is a way you are present in the moment. It is the ground that you’re coming from.

The more that we can both be present with everything, the more there is really potential for a kind of healing.

JS: You’ve talked about the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness you can feel in the face of a patient’s suffering. Has your Zen practice shifted your relationship to this powerlessness, and more broadly, has it changed your understanding of what it means to provide care?

AB: First, I would say that Zen practice has radically shifted my sense of what powerlessness means in the sense that I appreciate all the things that medical technologies can do, and yet I don’t use them with the same kind of expectation that I will be able to have power over another person’s body. There are things going on biologically that are so complicated that we’ll never be able to completely understand them. And so coming at it that way gives me a kind of humility about the situation, which changes my expectations about what will happen.

The other thing that has shifted in my understanding is that there’s a technical aspect to the care that I provide, but then there is also a more personal aspect, which is more than just emotional care. It is the care of being present. It is the care of witnessing. It is the care of sharing space with another human being. And I think that’s a very different sense of care than the one I had earlier in my career.

When I was a young physician, I was trained that care was all the nice things that you did that were beyond the minimum. Now, I think of care as the way I bring myself to the room to meet the other person. It is the way I can stay there—or try to stay there—regardless of what is coming up for them and, in the time that we are together, to invite everything into the room. The more that we can both be present with everything, the more there is really potential for a kind of healing.

SS: You’ve discussed how your practice influences your clinical work, but I’m also curious about the other direction. Has your day-to-day work as a palliative care doctor changed your relationship to Buddhist practice?

AB: My experience as a doctor sitting with people who are dealing with serious illnesses has totally changed my worldview. I started out in this work as kind of a materialist: I thought that you have a body and it’s just stuff and you die and it’s over. Sitting with people has given me the sense that something very, very different is going on. Being with somebody at the moment of death and being really present for that, there is clearly something happening that is not described by medical science—there is a profound shift when someone’s spirit leaves the room. That has forced me to recognize that there is something else going on in the universe that I was never trained in. My Buddhist practice is what has allowed me to perceive that.

If I had not learned to stay still long enough to feel inside myself, I don’t think I would have noticed that that was happening. And I see it all the time at work. Everyone [at the hospital] is running around so much, and someone dies and they don’t even notice. They don’t feel it. I think those experiences [of being with people at the moment of death] have tuned me in to a level of my practice that I’m not sure I would have accessed on my own.

Being with people in this way has changed what it means for me to be present in my own body. That has given me a different reference point for myself, but it’s also given me a point of reference about how we are all interconnected. If I pay close enough attention and my mind is quiet, I can actually feel this interconnection all the time, and that is a source of encouragement and a kind of joy and curiosity and awe. Even in really busy moments, I can get a taste of that.

The post Inviting Everything into the Room appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

According to the Dzogchen tradition of Buddhism, we are all already perfect and complete. But what does this actually mean on a practical level? And if we’re already perfect, then why do we have to practice?

According to Dzogchen teacher Anne C. Klein (Rigzin Drolma), this is the central paradox of the Buddhist path. In her new book, Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training for a Sunlit Sky, Klein takes up the question of what it actually means for each of us to be complete, as well as what happens to our humanity when we seek awakening.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Klein sat down with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, to discuss how she has come to understand buddhahood, the difference between wholeness and perfection, and how wholeness honors the variety of human experience. Read an excerpt from the conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

To start, what inspired you to write this book? In 2007, Adzom Paylo Rinpoche taught [Longchenpa’s sevenfold mind training], and it was my first acquaintance with this teaching. It hasn’t been taught in the West that often, and I really enjoyed it.

[As I was working with this teaching,] I reached back to a kind of koan that I’ve been chewing over since high school when I first heard this idea that you somehow were a buddha, which sounded insane and yet was compelling. Of course, it’s absolutely pivotal to Dzogchen. Adzom Rinpoche will ask new students, “Do you think you could be a buddha in this lifetime?” And it’s kind of a wake-up call: Do I think that? And if I don’t, why not? And if I do, really? So these are things that were on my mind that I wanted to bring forth in some way, and it felt like this was the way to do it.

The theme of wholeness is something I’ve been reflecting on a good bit. What does wholeness mean to an ordinary human being? Because I’m clearly a human being, but there’s a buddha too that’s actually not separate. This is what I’m exploring, and I would say it’s been a continuing exploration.

You write that Dzogchen understands all paths to move toward a natural state of wholeness. Can you say more about this state of wholeness? This state of wholeness is one of the central symbols of Dzogchen. For example, think of the vast ocean. There are waves that are catastrophic, there are little ripples, there is water crashing on the shore, but it’s all unquestionably ocean. The ocean is whole. I think this is one of the reasons humans love to look at the ocean: somehow the usual sense of “me” and “that” dissolves naturally. There’s still some kind of subject-object sensibility there, but it softens. And there’s something about that that we as a species fall in love with. We love that vastness, and there’s actually a very deep yearning for it. [We’re] nourished by the experience of wholeness.

You say that this wholeness is already accessible to each of us, yet Dzogchen also has a very highly structured path of practice. This may seem paradoxical: If we are already whole, then why do we need such structured practice? How do you understand the relationship between wholeness and the path of practice? This is the central paradox of the path. You’re a buddha. You’re told this from the beginning. You also don’t understand that. How can that be? How could you be that which is utterly perfect, the ground of everything in which everything arises? But everything arises in your experience also. Your experience is in some sense the expanse in which everything arises. This is not an esoteric thing: you’re happy, you’re sad, but it’s all part of the domain of your experience.

The mind is of infinite variety, and that’s important to recognize. This kind of wholeness is the ultimate creative space. Everything arises in it and never leaves it. Dzogchen practice helps open our radar to flux and change and lightens up our desire for things, especially “me,” “mine,” to be permanent. Then it takes us through various kinds of permutations using vivid imagery and imagination, allowing things to arise in fullness of color and drama and emotion and then dissolve. It’s seeing that kind of process over and over again in daily practice that really opens us up to the wholeness—to the ground that is actually always there and never shaken because nothing ever happens to it. But in some sense, a lot of stuff happens, and we can’t ignore that. Life is not just looking at the sky. The sky has clouds; the ocean has waves. Wholeness without arisings in it wouldn’t be wholeness; it would be some kind of exclusive zone. Practice is a way to reckon with that experientially.

Right, you say that this completeness is not the same as sameness in that it doesn’t erase difference. So how does Dzogchen honor and celebrate the vast diversity of human experience while also acknowledging completeness? We tend to think that difference has the last word, and this blinds us to the wholeness. But wholeness is not a dead expanse with nothing in it. Wholeness is the open space in which everything occurs, which is boundless and unlimited. Within this state, anything can occur without in any way leaving this unnameable wholeness.

This is central to the Dzogchen approach: nothing ever leaves this state. It’s like the waves in the ocean—they never leave the ocean. The clouds never leave the sky. They arise there, they dissolve into it, they don’t disrupt it. And in some ways, the more clouds and lightning and thunder and rainbows and birds that you can see in the sky, the more you can appreciate its openness and boundlessness. It is often said that for a developed practitioner, the more activated your mind can be, the more you can notice that this wholeness is not getting disrupted.

Variety is like the blossoming of wholeness and creativity. Dzogchen means the Great Completeness, and it’s great because there’s nothing outside of it. Nothing. Not your worst enemy, not your worst fears. It’s all a wave in the ocean.

The post Softening into Wholeness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Growing old is not all bad. A young friend recently complained that he was unable to shake off self-consciousness about how he looked and sounded. With some irony I told him that the great thing about getting older is that as you begin to fall apart, people stop looking at you altogether. Aside from joint pain and the occasional blow to one’s vanity, age can come as a great relief, affording unexpected privacy, even when in public. Now, despite my habits of cynicism and irascibility—my personality isn’t much more than a habit after all—I can grudgingly though gratefully acknowledge that I am content.

In the days that followed the exchange with my young friend, it was a special joy to reflect on the nature of my contentment—a sense of completeness: nothing need be added or, for that matter, subtracted. Nowadays, work, personal relations, and social life sail along pleasantly enough. Until, say, I get a call from the sort of friend who likes to dangle new and shiny things before my eyes. Before I know it my competitiveness is awakened, a resentment is born, and I feel a pressing desire to be seen again, if only just one more time. Worse, the pettiness of it all deals a blow harsher than anything age can muster. In a brief moment, I have become someone who is not content. How to come back?

In “The Big Picture,” the Buddhist scholar Anne Klein (Lama Rigzin Drolma) writes about Dzogchen, the tradition in which she teaches and practices. The word is commonly translated as “The Great Perfection,” although Klein prefers “The Great Completeness,” a translation I find far more relatable. The notion that I am perfect, or even a part of perfection, is pretty tough to digest, and apparently, I’m not alone. In this month’s episode of Tricycle Talks, Klein describes an exercise that she sometimes assigns her students: sitting face-to-face in pairs, they tell each other, “You are perfect.” It’s an awkward moment; like me, the students squirm at such a notion. Yet, as I remarked to Klein, completeness is another matter altogether; it’s precisely the wholeness I experience when I am content. And what I tend to forget is that whatever state I’m in, there is no need to “come back.” A moment of awareness—always available to us—reminds me that I am already there, already whole, already complete.

Self-deprecating humor aside, practice over the years, with its ups and downs, its moments of clarity and its long slogs through struggle, its joys and miseries, has made a difference. I am far less likely to brood over my imperfections, or even consider them as such; or kick myself for taking the bait the world is in fact always dangling before us. As an exaggerated sense of agency subsides, a sweet surrender takes hold, allowing me to relax into a life that, as Klein puts it, “is backlit by completeness.”

Yes, practice has made a difference. And, maybe, too, I’m just getting old.

The post Backlit by Completeness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.