Attachment is a mental factor that causes us to exaggerate the good qualities of an object, person, idea, etc., or project good qualities that aren’t there. It then leads to our wishing for and clinging to the object, seeing it as permanent, pleasurable, and existing in and of itself. This practice helps us to reflect on and work with attachment.

To begin, ask yourself: What specific things, people, emotions am I attached to? How do I view them when I’m attached? If that person or thing exists the way it appears to my attached mind, why doesn’t everyone see it that way? Why do I sometimes feel differently about it? What is a more realistic attitude toward the object of my attachment?

Keep these questions in mind as we continue our exploration. In order to take the ache out of attachment, it’s helpful to first consider its disadvantages. For example, it breeds dissatisfaction and frustration because we continually want more and better things, which prevents us from enjoying what we already have. It causes us to go up and down emotionally according to whether we have the object of our attachment or not. It might motivate us to connive, manipulate, and plot to get what we want. Under the spell of attachment, we could act hypocritically or with ulterior motives, which ends up damaging our relationships with others. Attachment might drive us to act unethically to get what we want, to harm others and increase our own sense of self-hatred and guilt. Ultimately, it causes us to spend our lives chasing after pleasures, none of which we can take with us when we die. Meanwhile, our potential to develop inner qualities such as love, compassion, generosity, patience, and wisdom goes untapped. In this way, attachment effectively blocks our clarity and even our potential for awakening.

Another by-product of attachment is anger. When we are strongly attached to something, we become disappointed and angry if we don’t get it or are separated from it once we have it. Think of an example in your life when that has been the case.

Then examine: Why do I get angry? What is the relationship between my expectations and my anger? What did I expect from the person, thing, or situation that it didn’t have or do? Were my expectations realistic? Was the problem in that person or thing, or in my thinking the person or object had qualities that he, she, or it didn’t? What is a more realistic view of that person, thing, or situation? How does this new view affect how I feel and relate to them?

Attachment causes us to fear not getting what we want or need, and losing what we have. Think of examples in your life in which this has been the case.

Then ask yourself: Do I really need those things? What is the worst-case scenario if I don’t get or lose them? Even if I did, would I be completely without tools to handle the situation, or are there things I can do to meet it effectively? What would happen if I gave up being attached to that person or thing? What would my life be like?

When it comes to relationships, attachment can lead to codependence, causing us to remain in harmful situations out of fear of change.

Consider: What am I attached to that makes me remain in that situation? Is that something worth holding on to? Is it in fact as wonderful as my attachment thinks it is? What would happen if I gave up being attached to it? What internal and external tools do I have to help me deal with the situation?

It is not realistic to expect external objects to be a lasting source of happiness.

Contemplate the disadvantages of being attached to those people, things, experiences in your life that you strongly cling to. Think of the transient nature of the object of your attachment and see if you can accept that change is the very nature of existence. Remind yourself that it is not realistic to expect external objects to be a lasting source of happiness. Reflect on the fact that by letting go, we can enjoy our health, our relationships, any wealth we might have when it’s there, and be relaxed when it isn’t.

Next, we’ll consider some antidotes to attachment. The main attitude to cultivate is one of balance: by eliminating our exaggerations and projections, we can be more balanced in our relationships to those things we want or need. Free of grasping and compulsiveness, we can be involved and caring in healthy ways. The points below are meant for repeated reflection. An intellectual understanding alone does not yield the force necessary to stop destructive patterns.

Reflecting on our mortality helps us to see clearly what is important in our life. Take a moment to imagine yourself dying. Really visualize where you are, how you are dying, the reactions of friends and family. How do you feel? What is happening in your mind? Then ask yourself: Given that I will die one day, what is important in my life? What do I feel good about having done? What do I regret? What do I want to do and to avoid doing while I’m alive? What can I do to prepare for death?

Contemplate the changing nature of the body, from fetus to infant, child, adult, to old person. Some guiding questions you can use are: Is my body composed of pure substances? Is it inherently beautiful? After death, what will my body become? Is it worthy of being attached to? Is there some
inherent essence that is my body? Am I my body?

There’s no question that we must take care of our bodies, keeping them clean and healthy, because they are the basis of our precious human life. By protecting them with wisdom but without attachment, we will be able to practice the dharma and benefit sentient beings.

We often cling to our ideas about how things should be done, to our opinions of who others are and what they should do, to our beliefs about the nature of life. We then become upset when others disagree with our ideas. Ask yourself: When someone criticizes my ideas, are they criticizing me? Is something right just because I think it is? What would happen if I saw things the way the other person sees them? How can I let go of the fear of losing power or getting taken advantage of?

If we see shortcomings in another’s ideas, we can express these in a kind way, without being defensive of our own views. Imagine yourself speaking firmly and clearly to state your opinions, but also remaining nondefensive. Remember to keep opening into a wider view.

Imagine receiving all the approval and praise you have ever craved. Imagine people saying or acknowledging all the things you have ever hoped they would. Enjoy the good feeling that this might bring. Then ask yourself, will this really make me lastingly happy? How do praise, approval, or a good reputation benefit me? Do they prevent illness or extend my life ? Do they really solve the problem of self-hatred and guilt? Do they purify my negative karma or make me closer to liberation or enlightenment? If not, is it worth being attached to them?

To develop our sense of being interconnected with all others and being the recipient of much kindness from them, contemplate the help, support, and encouragement you have received from friends or loved ones. Recognize these as acts of human kindness. Reflect on the benefit you have received from parents, relatives, and teachers—the care they gave you when you were young, protection, education. All talents, abilities, and skills we have now are due to the people who taught and trained us.

Consider all the help you have received from strangers: the home you inhabit, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, were all made by people you do not know. Without their efforts, you wouldn’t be able to survive. Then reflect on the benefit you have received from people you do not get along with and people who have harmed you. Through their actions, they give us the chance to develop patience, tolerance, and compassion—qualities that are essential for progressing along the path.

Love is the wish for others to have happiness and its causes. Begin by wishing yourself to be well and happy, not in a selfish way, but because you respect and care for yourself as one of many sentient beings. Gradually spread this love to friends, strangers, difficult people, and all beings. For each group of people, think of specific individuals and generate love for them. Then let that feeling spread to the entire group.

Think, feel, imagine, “May my friends and all those who have been kind to me have happiness and its causes. May they be free of suffering, confusion, and fear. May they have calm, peaceful, and fulfilled hearts.”

Generate the same feelings toward strangers. Spread the feeling to those who have harmed you or are difficult. Recognize that they do what you find objectionable because they are experiencing pain or confusion. How wonderful it would be if they were free.

As a conclusion, recognize attachment as your enemy. We usually think of attachment as our friend, but when we look carefully at our experience, we begin to see how clinging to things actually destroys our peace of mind and destroys our happiness. And when we see this, then that gives us some energy to want to counteract our attachment and not just to follow it blindly.

This article is based on a guided meditation that Venerable Thubten Chodron often leads on retreats.

The post Taking the Ache Out of Attachment appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Pus, boogers, peepee, poopoo. Would you believe that there is a meditation practice based on contemplating these items? It isn’t for two-year-olds, it’s for adults. And it is intended to lead to peace of mind, not agitation, amusement and disgust. It’s one of the classic meditation practices of the Theravada tradition, an orderly contemplation of the thirty-two parts of the body, starting with hair of the head and ending with urine.

If this sounds gruesome, consider that life is gruesome: no one survives. Our opinions and beliefs about life and death won’t offer us any special privileges. Worse yet, it’s the nature of all bodies not only to die, but to rot, crumble, shiver, itch, and to display various forms of ugliness. Yet the extra pain that all of us give ourselves over this entire situation seems, on reflection, unnecessary.

Buddhism offers a number of practices designed specifically to cut through our delusions about the body—charnel ground meditations, contemplations of death and loathsomeness. They are meant to undermine our normal relationship with our bodies. They ease the moment of death, and the moments before death. They don’t aim to ruin our happiness; instead, they expand the scope of love. If taken to heart, they exhaust the source of our greatest terrors.

The sheer volume of thoughts we devote to the body is dismaying. If we look closely at our moment-to-moment experiences, our thoughts, our wishes and feelings, we will see that we constantly strain for more pleasure and beauty. We feel that we should be immersed in a constant orgasm of satisfaction and attractiveness.

Meanwhile, our elderly and uncompromising tradition asks us to recognize the pain involved in carting our body around; to look directly at what goes into keeping the body together. As long as we’re healthy adults, we ignore it as much as we can, denying the amount of work it takes to keep it clean, fed and exercised; submitting without a second thought to the pressures to create for ourselves a super-bionic, pleasure-giving, pleasure-attracting, never-sick body. Then we’re trying to lift a heavy box and suddenly—Spang!— there’s a muscle spasm in the lower back and we fall to the floor wondering if we’ll ever walk again. Or, trying on jeans, in the ugly light of the changing room, we see ten pounds of clabber hanging off the backs of our thighs. Or, sitting in the car, waiting for a train to go by, suddenly a black amoeba crosses the lower corner of one eye. As the sky goes dark, a shaft of the pure terror of death bolts us to the driver’s seat.

And that dauntless, unstoppable little commentator that lies inside us utters a peep of shock. This fear that is so overwhelming: where was it stored? Up to a second ago we thought we knew all the cozy rooms of our body’s mansion; now we suddenly find ourselves alone and frightened, as if we were stranded on a high crag in a thunderstorm. Indeed, we may be passing into the dreaded kingdom of the ill, where we are no longer the persons we wanted to be, no longer able to become what we wanted to become, do what we wanted to do. We will be ruled by unwanted problems: pain and exhaustion, obsession and fear. We may feel that we have failed—failed to eat properly, failed to be tranquil enough—as if a life properly lived would never end.

The source of our terror is attachment: the feeling that our bodies are the most precious possessions we have. It is within this attachment and all of its associated assumptions that we live most unquestioningly. The body: what is it really? Do we actually possess it? Is it really precious and beautiful?

The good news is that even the bodies of Arnold Schwarzenneger and Cindy Crawford are transitory. Besides, they require eight hour workouts on top of genetic endowment. After meditating even a little on the thirty-two parts of the body, we have a different feeling about seeing Cindy Crawford’s bone structure—we see bones, not a cultural value.

In contemplations of the loathsome, we are asked to examine carefully all parts of the body, their actual qualities, and to ask ourselves whether we should value it the way we do. What is a human face? It is a piece of skin full of holes, “like an insect’s nest,” the Visuddhimagga says. The brain “… is the lumps of marrow bound inside the skull. [I]t is the colour of the flesh of a toadstool; …the colour of turned milk…” All of the body parts are visualized specifically, in detail. The twenty nail plates. The skeleton, with many bones. Imagine, as you walk along, the movements of your tiny toe bones inside your shoes; take a few minutes to remember the skull behind every face.

Do you feel horror, or a kind of relieved and interested recognition, or both? If it’s horror, is it to the same degree as your denial?

It’s crucial to the success of foulness practices not to get sidetracked by psychological defense systems. Remember that the small mind pursues an ostrich strategy, as if not thinking about bad things would cause them to disappear. Death and decay are the worst things, so all resources will be deployed to forget about them. One defense can be humor. You might feel highly amused by the solemnity of the creepy language in the classic meditation texts, imagining them being read in the voice of Lon Chaney. “Just as duckweed and green scum on the surface of the water divided when a stick . . . is dropped into the water and then spread together again, so too, at the time of eating and drinking, etc., when the food, drink, etc. fall into the stomach, the phlegm divides and then spreads together again . . .” (Visuddhimagga, Nanamoli, p. 280). UUUGGHH!!! you say. Those guys could really dish it out!!!

The mind defends itself, too, by fascination and curiosity. A friend who went to the morgue in Bangkok reported that she could feel her mind developing a sense of fascination to cover up her fear. Eventually, however, nausea overtook her and she tried to escape through the back door—only to find a courtyard full of rotting body parts and pools of blood swarming with flies.

Yet another defense can be pride in what we see as our spiritual progress through contemplating the repulsive. During one three-month course at the Insight Meditation Society, yogis were passing around photographs of three corpses. “Wow,” we said, peering at the bloated face of a young woman who had drowned. It was kind of scary, kind of fun, like a game at a slumber party. Most of all, we felt we had in our hands a special means to meditational success—not an image of what we would surely, one day, become.

It’s easy to dismiss and denigrate these loathsomeness practices. With yet one more line of defense we protest: Why not deny the truth as long as we can? Why dwell on the horrible side of life when, after all, we can put the same amount of energy into distracting ourselves and pursuing pleasure? Do we want to become inhuman beings who don’t care whether we live or die?

But we might just as well ask if the result of loathsomeness practice might be a profound and subtle, wild, and fearless joy. Perhaps, through this practice, we will come to really love life without holding back from any part of it, including the infirmities and decay of sickness and old age. Perhaps we will even be able to develop a mind that laughs at death. Why not begin to free ourselves from attachment to the body, which is disappearing anyway? We don’t have to be so bound by these meat puppets that we drag around.

⧫

The title of this article was inspired by the band Meat Puppets.

From the Fall 1994 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 11, No. 1) Text © 1994-2020 by Kate Lila Wheeler and Inquiring Mind

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2501_6_rand/

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2501_w_sumedho-its-like-this/

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2801_41_stahl/

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In my native land waves of attachment to friends and kin
surge,
Hatred for enemies rages like fire,
The darkness of stupidity, not caring what to adopt or avoid,
thickens—
To abandon my native land is the practice of a bodhisattva.

This second verse [in The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, written in the fourteenth century C.E. by a monk named Gyalse Thogme Sangpo,] does not just refer to our outer native land. It doesn’t just mean that we all have to go across the world in order to practice, because we take our mind with us and it is our mind that has all this attachment and hatred and the darkness of our unknowing.

On the one hand, people get locked into habitual relationships. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche put it this way:

The meaning of leaving behind your native land is to leave behind the emotions of attachment, hatred, and the obscuring ignorance that permeates both. These three poisons, generally speaking, are most active in the relationships you establish with family and friends in your own homeland.

How often people react to each other out of old habits, without even really thinking about it anymore. So many negativities come up because of the way people habitually act and talk to others with whom they are familiar. Maybe the patterns started in childhood, and they continue on and on.

On the other hand, it is good to be able to get away and maybe get some new perspective through being in a different environment where we can try to incorporate better ways of dealing with people. But the problem really is that “native land” means our ordinary habitual responses; these are what we have to leave behind. And the way to leave them behind is first to be conscious of them.

The waves of attachment surge within and around us. We are lost floundering in this huge ocean caring about people and worrying about them and fearing they are going to leave us and then becoming happy again when they tell us that they love us. Parents with their children, couples in relationships, all of this; there’s so much going on that it is rare to be able to relax in calm quiet waters. Mostly the waves of our hopes and fears send us surging up and down. It is all our attachment. 

Attachment doesn’t mean love; there’s a huge difference between love and attachment. The Buddha said the cause of our suffering, of our dukkha (Skt. duhkha), is attachment, clinging, and grasping.

But love and compassion, which are essential qualities on the path, are quite different. They are actually the opposite of attachment and grasping. This is one of the most difficult distinctions for us as ordinary sentient beings to really understand because in our society we believe that the more we are attached, the more loving we are. But it is simply not true. Attachment is tricky, but basically it means “I want you to make me happy and to make me feel good. Conversely, love says, “I want you to be happy and to make you feel good.” It doesn’t say anything about me. If being with me makes you feel happy and good, wonderful; if not, then so be it. The important thing is that love allows us to hold things gently instead of grasping tightly. It is an important difference.

♦

From The Heroic Heart: Awakening Unbound Compassion by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo © 2022 by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

The post The Difference Between Attachment and Love appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There’s a huge difference between love and attachment. This is one of the most difficult distinctions for us as ordinary sentient beings to really understand because in our society we believe that the more we are attached, the more loving we are. But it is simply not true. Attachment is tricky, but basically it means “I want you to make me happy and to make me feel good.” Conversely, love says, “I want you to be happy and to make you feel good.” It doesn’t say anything about me. If being with me makes you feel happy and good, wonderful; if not, then so be it. The important thing is that love allows us to hold things gently instead of grasping tightly. It is an important difference.

♦

From The Heroic Heart: Awakening Unbound Compassion by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo ©2022 by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc.

The post A Most Difficult Distinction appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have too much stuff. That’s the bare truth. 

Anxiety and guilt morph into a low-grade, psychic nausea, until I finally can’t take it anymore. Then I pay the best $89 of my life on the minimalist Joshua Becker’s course, “Uncluttered,” and I have my kitchen to show for it. It’s clear and clean and by far the most beautiful room in the house. But soon the momentum disappears, and I don’t know why. So I take a good look at what I’m thinking, and a pattern emerges. My life is in gridlock because of this pattern. The tyranny of What if I need this later paralyzes all forward movement. 

As I work to unclutter my home, unconscious attachments come to light. For example, I have a Tricycle magazine collection going back ten years. These days everything’s online, so why do I still have these physical copies? Because what if the apocalypse comes and there’s no internet? Really? Sociopolitical upheaval has obliterated the grid and I’m going to be sitting on the couch reading a dharma magazine? Well, you could do worse, but in the daylight, this is just raw attachment. I’m just holding on to hold on.

I bought eye makeup that I don’t know how to apply, but it looked so awesome on the Instagram girl. I don’t wear eye makeup, but what if my novel gets published and I have to go to fancy events to promote it? This is embarrassing. I’m a reasonably intelligent woman, and facing these foibles is no fun. 

My long time teacher, Anam Thubten, has always said that the experience of meditation is not floaty bliss. It’s mostly heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious. We have to witness all the ways in which we scramble for solid ground, where there’s no solid ground. We have to identify when and how and why we struggle against spaciousness and presence. 

So, if I’m squirming on my cushion, then I’ve probably hit pay dirt. If I have the courage, I might go a little further. What are the less funny what ifs? What are the deeper anxieties that drive my day? Invariably, they’re about the (nonexistent) future. What if climate change eats my house? What if we never get on top of this virus? What if our country devolves into civil war because we actually, for real, can’t agree on what facts are? 

If I hang out in the lobby of this terrible future long enough, I’ll end up living in its penthouse—with a stunning view, in every direction, of everything that could go wrong. Is that what I want? 

If not, I have options. I don’t even have to go to that hotel, much less live there. My consciousness can be trained in other directions. Countless scientific studies have proven that we can create new neural pathways, enabling us to experience the exact same life in a completely different way. We can do this.

So the idea is, lose the what if. Be someone without a future. 

Let’s take a deep breath and look at our lives. Look at maybe just our things, our furniture, our clothes, our memorabilia. Let’s examine the nature of our attachment to them. Why do we have these things? What do we really think would happen if we let them go? Without the future we’ve been living in, what can we let go of? Without the future we’re so attached to, what lets go of us?

When we experience this moment as though it were the only one we’ll ever have—when we really get that—a spaciousness opens up, breathing room, clarity, relief. 

I have a shelf full of herbal ingredients that I’ve meant to learn about, so I can be my community’s makeshift medicine woman when the world ends. (It’s OK. You can laugh.) This is a fine aspiration, nothing wrong with it. But those ingredients have been there for many years. And I haven’t learned anything about herbs yet. I bought them and held on to them all that time because I was being driven by: What if the world ends and we can’t get medicine?

Enough already. The world is ending every day. It’s ending right now. 

Using pretend solutions to solve imaginary tragedies is ridiculous. There are no guarantees we’ll make it to breakfast. It takes courage to see all that — to know that this is it, right here, and there’s nothing else. But when we do, then letting go of the Tricycle magazines, the eye makeup, the herbal tinctures, is not such a problem. 

We can unclutter our lives. We can experience the blessing of a spacious now, right in the middle of our living rooms—rooms that feel ten times bigger now that we’ve let ourselves become the one in our family with “no future.” 

The post Unclutter Your Life by Erasing Your Future appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

After a police officer killed George Floyd last summer, large-scale protests and riots erupted through the city of Minneapolis, and violence, which was often instigated by white supremacists, spread throughout our neighborhoods. More than 1,300 properties were destroyed in the mayhem, and 100 buildings were burned to the ground entirely (including the police department’s third precinct station house). The total cost of the damage was estimated at $350 million. 

In the months that followed, community activists put together plans (such as The People’s Budget) to prevent such destruction from happening again, and many more took part in protests and other forms of direct action to make sure that the people with the power to enact change could not ignore these proposals. Yet, as the murder trial of former officer Derek Chauvin began, the City of Minneapolis, rather than investing in the community and addressing the cause of the problem, was spending public funds—with a projected price tag of more than $1 million—on fortifying government buildings and bringing in thousands of additional law enforcement officers. This plan does not protect the residents of Minneapolis; it protects the city officials who were widely criticized for their slow and ineffective response to the destruction at the time and now are seeking to avoid a similar situation during the trials. 

Those of us invested in community activism can become angry and impatient when we contemplate how much money and resources city leaders are funneling into property protections and police. We can lash out in our thoughts and actions because, despite numerous community conversations, those in positions of power still don’t seem to “get it.” But this reactive energy will not help us. Our rage keeps us focused on what could have been rather than on building the capacity to be wise, kind, and tenacious— all mind states that this work requires.

It’s not easy to let go of these afflictive emotions and move onto the next challenge. But we can begin by recognizing that our frustration is not entirely the fault of the city officials who ignored us. They bear full responsibility for the pain that they have caused and will continue to cause the community by refusing to listen to its needs. But they are only partly to blame for our frustration, which is fed by our attachments to the outcome that we had imagined. 

The Buddha taught us that attachment fuels samsara, an endless cycle of suffering. He also taught that lessening those attachments—letting go of our need to cling to things that make us feel good or push away the things that make us feel bad—allows us to develop equanimity and act skillfully to bring an end to suffering in an ever-changing world. 

You have to believe in what you are doing because of your conviction that it is the right thing to do, not because you are attached to any tangible result in the world.

We can see that getting attached to the dream of the City of Minneapolis investing in a more holistic, humane, and sustainable approach to community anger about Floyd’s death is neither a wise nor effective course of action. City leaders have known that this moment would come, that the trials would take place here and stir up trauma for Black Minnesotans and everyone else. Stakeholders have had multiple chances to pursue other courses of action besides protecting property and increasing police presence. Holding onto our hopes that city officials will take proper action when all evidence suggests otherwise only sets us up for further disappointment and frustration. But facing reality about our current situation does not mean giving up on our future. It means putting aside this particular version of what the future can be in order to begin to imagine countless other possibilities. 

We don’t have to be upset or disappointed by the City’s relentless commitment to upholding the racial and economic status quo. We just have to keep working to envision and create a more equitable—and therefore beautiful—world, while at the same time leaving room to acknowledge and honor our completely valid sadness and rage. We have to keep pressing for equity, both within and outside the courts, knowing full well that we may never get it. You have to believe in what you are doing because of your conviction that it is the right thing to do, not because you are attached to any tangible result in the world. That might sound delusional, but it is more grounded than the alternative of ignoring how the world really works or giving up hope that things can change—despite the fact that, for better or worse, things will always change.

I would argue that this is, in essence, what the Buddha taught: That by getting intimate with the way things are, by facing the truth of our existence, we can actually be more present with the vagaries of present moment experience without getting confused or attached to them. 

Any student of social movements knows that the victories are small and infrequent, the losses large and everyday. To keep going, we have to be resilient, and we have to be nimble enough to change course when the situation demands it. In this context, attachment—holding onto what could or should have been—becomes just another impediment to doing the work of social change. We see this when we can’t step away from our organizing work to relax. We may be tempted to power through, clinging to our idea of what we should be doing, but a burned-out activist is less effective than a healthy one. We also see this when we allow our egos to lead when strategizing with friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and let our attachments to what we think should happen blind us to new possibilities. 

Likewise, when we become so frustrated by the endless cycle of investing in police rather than community, we believe we have no other choice but to react in anger and violence. These are the aftereffects of an attachment that leads to more suffering, not less—an unfortunate characteristic that is endemic in activist and community circles. 

We know what we have to do, but following through is a separate challenge. How do we care deeply about something without getting caught up in it? How do we show up to fight for George Floyd and all the other Black and Brown citizens murdered by police without becoming overwrought, burned out, or bitter? And how do we begin to take responsibility for our own actions, and our own minds and hearts that have led us to them? 

The Buddha didn’t just teach about the cause of suffering (that is, attachments). He also taught us how to reduce and bring an end to that suffering—through a regular dharma practice that helps us to stop clinging to our thoughts and feelings. By locating feelings in the body, we can lessen our attachments and find equanimity. This teaching and practice can help us navigate the trials, as well as the responses to them from police and city officials. And we can also keep it in mind when it comes to positive change, too. 

The Buddha said that everything we need to guide us on this path to being fuller, more compassionate human beings is right here in the body. Right now. The tightness of the shoulder blades. The clench of the jaw. The eagerness of the fingers. The intelligence of the ears. There is so much we can learn from just being with the body in the present moment, but most of the time we are too distracted by our thoughts, stories, and obsessions to notice. 

We can begin to train ourselves to get interested in the body, our first and best teacher, by establishing a mindfulness practice. Sitting or walking meditation, for example, can help us see the loop of thoughts running through our minds that often stop us from experiencing everything the moment has to offer: the banality, the awe, the pain, and yes, the joy. These practices show us the futility and, ultimately, the pain of attachment. They also show us a way through and around suffering: letting go. Surrendering to what our senses are showing us now, in order to learn, be and do better for all beings. Even as the buildings are burning down the street, the white nationalists are terrorizing your neighborhood, and city leaders are calling for more barbed wire, I have discovered that one can still be whole, moment to moment. We can hold it all: anger, fear, doubt, anxiety—letting it move through us rather than move us. We can breathe in, breathe out, wherever we are, sensing the freedom of a gathered mind and heart. A heart held up, fortified not by soldiers or fences but an expansive commitment to justice.

The post Showing Up Without Burning Out  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When Bethany Saltman’s daughter, Azalea, was born fourteen years ago, she felt love—and impatience and anger and other strong emotions she knew were inside her that we don’t often associate with motherhood. 

Saltman, a writer and longtime Zen practitioner who spent several years living at Zen Mountain Monastery in New York State’s Catskill Mountains, decided to investigate these difficult feelings. Her curiosity about the connection between her and Azalea led her to attachment theory and the American-Canadian developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth (1913–1999). Attachment theory, first developed by the British psychologist John Bowlby and expanded by Ainsworth, posits that our future relationships and many other aspects of our lives are determined by the way that our parents tended to us in our early months, teaching us to regulate our emotions (or not) and to develop qualities such as empathy and insight.

Ainsworth is credited with developing the Strange Situation, a 20-minute laboratory procedure that ascertains the type of attachment shown by a one-year-old baby toward a caregiver (usually, but not always the mother). In the Strange Situation, the child toddles into a room that doesn’t look like a laboratory, making a beeline for the blocks, dolls, or poster on the wall. The parent and child play for a few moments. Then there’s a knock at the door and the parent leaves the child in the room, either alone or with a stranger who has entered and tries to keep the child entertained. Researchers believe that what happens next—tears, ambivalence, anger—determines so much about how we relate to others, not only at a year old, but throughout the rest of our lives.

Ainsworth’s procedure, based on her field research of attachment styles in mothers and their babies in Uganda, was a major development in attachment theory and remains the “gold standard in psych labs everywhere for assessing security between children and their caregivers,” according to Saltman. 

Saltman’s own “discovery” of attachment theory led to more than a decade of research into Ainsworth’s life and work, as well as to an examination of her own relationships and the intersections between attachment and karma. Her book about her findings, Strange Situation: A Mother’s Journey into the Science of Attachment, was published by Ballantine Books in April. Saltman joined Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar, Tricycle’s editor-at-large and resident new mother, to talk about the intersection of dharma and attachment.

***

So, some of my questions are more personal than I’m used to asking. But I have a 10-month-old baby, and it’s hard to ignore that while reading your book. I am totally into that.

I think we have to start with the basics. Can you start by telling me how you became interested in attachment theory? When my daughter, Azalea, was born, I noticed that I was confused by my feelings. In addition to love, I quickly noticed all these other parts of myself appearing—impatience, frustration, anger. I somehow thought that I would enter some other realm and that those edgier parts would be eclipsed by this love. I quickly discovered that this was not the case, and frankly, it scared me. I felt like there must be something wrong with me and I wanted to understand: Am I OK? Can I do this? Can I love this person?

Once a woman becomes a mother, every single thing she does, thinks, and feels is charged because our culture is very invested in the maternal experience.

So I started to read and investigate. I had heard about attachment, but I didn’t understand what it was, and I had become really worried that my so-called “attachment” with Azalea was going to be insecure. Then I heard about the Strange Situation and started to see pictures of Mary Ainsworth, and I just fell for her. I thought: “Who is this woman? She doesn’t have children, she’s very formal, but so friendly.” She’s from an era that I happen to love, and she reminds me of my grandma. And when I realized that in 20 minutes you could learn so much about a relationship between a mother and child I was like “Oh my God, count me in, I want to know everything there is to know about my relationship with my daughter.” For some reason, from the very beginning I really believed in it. 

Going back to all of these difficult emotions—we don’t have a lot of examples of the reality of motherhood. I had a baby last year, and I still feel, especially with social media and the way society is, that it’s supposed to be this wonderful and beautiful experience. And when you breastfeed, you’re supposed to have this amazing bond. Sometimes breastfeeding is amazing, but sometimes you’re hungry or tired and you have to pee and you’ve already tried to feed the baby like five times in an hour. And there’s no picture of that. One hundred percent, yes. As I wrote in one article, “People always tell me I’m brave for writing this book.” That comment alone tells me how afraid I should be. But I love my daughter so much, and I am willing to expose myself for her, I can make this an offering and say, “Look, I didn’t just get hungry or have to pee when I was nursing—I got mad.”

But if sitting on the cushion for however many years has taught me anything, it’s that if we can’t open the door to these difficult feelings, they will make themselves known somehow. And it might get ugly. Full stop. If we want to take care of this, there’s one way to do it: be all of our feelings. That’s all there is to it, and it’s very, very difficult.

I gave birth to my son via C-section, and it seemed that everything surrounding that decision seemed to be up for debate as to what was the best thing. I even had one woman in my mother’s group tell me she was so sorry that I didn’t have a “natural” birth. It’s these little things I never realized could be so charged. Well, once a woman becomes a mother, every single thing she does, thinks, and feels is charged because our culture is very invested in the maternal experience. This basically cancels out subtlety, nuance, and real feelings, because they’re very threatening. When, in fact, the bigger threat—as Mary Ainsworth discovered and as the Buddha discovered—is not having those feelings.

I think it’s important to note, like you write in the book, that up until the 1950s researchers believed that babies just needed parents for things like food. You write about the American behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, who kept his baby daughter in a climate-controlled “baby box.” The idea that babies need our love and attention was really a radical thing. Indeed. And I think today, as a culture, we are a little bit unclear about where we stand on that. Anybody would say “Of course babies need love.” But what does that mean for us? We almost treat the idea of needing love with a behaviorist slant—like love is a thing that you present with your breasts. It’s this belief that our children need us, because we don’t like love that’s messy. It’s the Instagram version of love, which is an awful lot like a baby box.

So you mean that love in our culture could mean doing something for your baby, like feeding them organic food, more than the actual feeling? That’s the checklist approach to love and attachment. This idea of doing things right is rigid and so deeply entrenched in our minds. It’s easy to say “Of course I love my baby, and of course they need me to love them. Look, I’m nursing, I’m feeding them organic stuff. I’m driving myself insane with effort, that must mean something. I’m smiling, I’m rejoicing, I’m doing all these things.”

But what Mary Ainsworth noticed in securely attached relationships was “mutual delight.” That is something that you can’t fake. We’re getting really good at almost faking it with our phones and pictures. We can look at someone’s Instagram feed and think they’re delighting in life. But we must know better, right?

How exactly do researchers determine attachment patterns based on 20 minutes of watching a child and mother in a room? During the Strange Situation, the researchers observe and take very particular notes about what’s going on during these reunions and separations—all the different types of attachment behavior. Ainsworth had a system of determining what kind of attachment relationship was being expressed during the 20 minutes, and they all flow from three types of behavior: secure, insecure/avoidant, and insecure/resistant [a fourth classification was later added for babies that were inconsistent, disorganized, or confused]. There are also subsets of these primary classifications. 

The Strange Situation is not an experiment; it’s a research tool. You get a baseline of the kind of relationship this parent and child have, and use that information for some kind of strategic solution—group therapy or video-based interventions, for example—that promotes reflective, functioning parents. You might use the Strange Situation at the end of the strategy to see whether it worked.

Researchers have also found that there’s a 75 percent correlation between a parent’s attachment and their child’s attachment at one year. Can you explain how the Strange Situation is used to come to that conclusion? In terms of our future this is a really important point, and one that dharma practitioners will be able to appreciate. What we see at one year is a flash, a snapshot of where that relationship between a caregiver and child stands, based on millions and trillions of minute interactions that have happened in that first year. Non-Buddhists often think of karma as some moral law or destination, as in you get what you deserve. Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t. What the Buddha meant by karma is the way every cause will have an effect. We can’t always know what that effect will be, but an accumulation of karmic seeds will affect us, for sure. This is true in culture, as we’re seeing now more clearly than ever, and in our families.

Karma works by developing power as it continues, and the only way to stop a karmic causation is to get in its way and give it a stronger dose of something else. Otherwise, our attachment tends to continue, not because there’s something magical about being one year old—it’s just karma; it’s just the way it goes. It’s incredible the way karmic seeds are sown and harvested. A strong positive event can certainly shift things. But if you’re avoidant at a year, you’ve got a good chance of being avoidant at 30.

I’ve felt a wide range of emotions since learning about this. It’s so amazing! But it’s also scary. What if I’m not securely attached, and then my son isn’t, either? There’s this opportunity and hope for change, and then this idea that things are just the way they are, that there’s no beginning and no end. Where do we go from there, in our practice, in our families? We practice. That’s all there is to do. It’s interesting information, but it doesn’t change the reality, which is that we’ve got one heart, one life to live.

I think the path of practice is the clearest thing in all of this. Everything else depends on so many different causes and conditions, but the path out seems to be clear. That’s what a securely attached adult does: they have mixed feelings. The avoidant baby at one year old is denying. It’s like that very fundamental dharmic understanding of heaven, hell, and other realms, jealous gods and all of that. Clinging takes many forms and so the avoidant baby is clinging to denial, to not feel what they’re feeling, by a year.

Well, and then there’s the other side, the resistant baby is also clinging to an idea of I’ll get it at some point, at some point this is going to feel good. Whereas the securely attached baby is able to actually experience their emotions to the point of extinguishing them, with the help of the parent. By the time we’re sitting on our cushions, we’re trying to learn how to do that on our own, extinguish our sensations by practicing them. By seeing through them, by experiencing them. A baby cannot do that, so that’s where we come in.

The avoidant baby in the Strange Situation is chilling. Their heart rate and stress levels are going up, but they sit there like a stone, while their parent is in the doorway, saying, “Daniel, I’m here, hi.” The avoidant babies ignore their own experience; they can’t tolerate the feeling of sadness, and by a year they’re repressing, they’re angry, they’re distancing themselves. They’re separating from their own experience because the parents, for whatever reason—and there are lots of good, understandable reasons—haven’t been able to be present with their child enough so that the child has fluency with their own sensations. And then the resistant child: they can feel for a second, then they have to step off, and then feel again, then step off.

What are some good reasons why a parent may not be able to be present with their child? They’re depressed, or had a traumatic childhood and never learned how to be attentive. Or they’re experiencing COVID-19, poverty, job loss. There are innumerable good reasons. A parent might have a hard time paying attention to a child because they’re having a hard time with their own experience and their internal life. And for those reasons, the result might be the same: a child won’t feel like they can trust that the parent will be there for them, which might lead to avoidance behavior at one year old.

One of my favorite concepts to come from the attachment literature was from Mary Main, a psychologist who had studied with Mary Ainsworth: she called it attentional flexibility. From a dharma perspective, that’s golden. When we’re sitting on our cushion and have thoughts passing through, our intention is to let go of them and return to the present. That’s developing attentional flexibility, and a secure baby in the Strange Situation has this. They are despairing, at the brink of death, their loved one is gone, and that is a seriously distressful situation. So they’re brought to the edge just a little bit and then when the parent returns they’re able to be, like, “Oh . . . that’s over,” and go back to playing. It’s like when we notice we’re thinking when we’re sitting. It takes so many of us a lifetime—at least—to learn how to do this, because we don’t have intentional flexibility—we get so stuck in our thoughts or lost in space. We’re rigid, we’re excessive, we’re avoidant, we’ll do anything but be present in the moment. And we can see that happening exactly in the Strange Situation with an insecure one-year-old. The insecure baby gets caught in their feelings of loss when the parent leaves, and they can’t return to playing when the parent returns because they don’t have a trusting relationship.

I’m definitely curious, and I’m sure other people will be, too. Do you have advice for people who want to learn more about their first year of life? Can this knowledge help us? As interesting as our patterns are, ultimately, I don’t think we have to know all the details of our early lives. If you’re really interested, then practice becoming more present. You’ll learn everything you need to know through rigorous self-study. By learning to work with yourself, you’ll become a more delighting person and parent, and your child will become more securely attached and just a happier person. It’s not like if you’re avoidant there’s one treatment and if you’re resistant there’s another.

Get right with yourself, get to know yourself, metabolize your feelings, and ask what is getting in your way. I could go on and on, but that’s our work as dharma practitioners and the work of anybody who wants to free themselves of their past. The past is fascinating and I totally support therapy and any kind of work you want to do. But ultimately, everything we need is right here, right now, in the present, on the cushion or wherever you are.

What haven’t I asked you that you’d like people to know about the book? This book is not just for parents; it’s for anybody who has a parent. Because it isn’t just about how we raise children—it’s how we raise ourselves to be reasonable, happy, delightful adults. And it’s never too late, or too early, to take a look at our minds. To me, a secure attachment is kind of a North Star: Some of us may never get there, but that doesn’t matter—it matters that we have intention and that we manifest that lovingkindness from wherever we begin.

Your book reminded me about something that Sharon Salzberg talks about in a podcast I listened to recently. She had a very difficult childhood, but she says that she was able to “re-parent” herself through her teachers by drawing upon qualities she saw in them. Exactly: the way that we talk is important, and we talk to our children the way we talk to ourselves. A friend of mine recently said, “The first person you talk to in the morning is you.” If we can put a microphone to that voice and hear it, we would learn a lot. And you don’t have to be a meditator, or a Buddhist—we’re just in a very fortunate position because we have the tools.

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Then John “Mayor” Lindsey, wearing the uniform of the New Jersey Jackals, rose and addressed the Blessed One. “Lord, I was drafted in the thirteenth round by the Rockies and played A Ball for seven years for the Portland Rockies, the Asheville Tourists, and the Salem Red Sox. Then I was signed by the Mariners and played A Ball for the San Bernardino Stampede before ascending to Double-A, where I played for the San Antonio Missions. Then I descended to the Single-A Jupiter Hammerheads and then to the independent league New Jersey Jackals. Then I signed with the Dodgers and played for the Triple-A Las Vegas 51s and then for their Double-A affiliate, the Jacksonville Suns. Lord, you may know them as the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. Then I signed with the Marlins and played for their Double-A New Orleans Zephyrs. Lord, you may know them as the New Orleans Baby Cakes. Then I signed with the Dodgers again and played for the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes of the Pacific Coast League. Lord, after sixteen years in the minors, I was called up by the Dodgers. I wore Dodger Blue for eleven games. I had one hit in twelve at bats before I was hit by a pitch and broke my hand. Later, I was signed by the Tigers and played for the Toledo Mud Hens. And then I was released.

“Blessed One, counting the Mexican League and winter ball, I played 2,277 games in the minors for twenty-five teams over twenty-one years. I drove for endless miles in old buses with bad air-conditioning. I ate countless bad meals of fried food with plastic forks. I loaded countless suitcases on and off buses. I slept in countless bad hotels with stained carpets, coin-operated Magic Fingers beds, and no Wi-Fi. I sat for endless hours on hard benches in concrete dugouts. I took countless showers in cinder-block clubhouses. I played on countless bad fields and played countless bad hops before tiny crowds. And yet my lifetime average in the majors was only .083.

“O Teacher of Players and Fans, taking off my first baseman’s mitt, I ask: Why did you make a game so filled with change?”

“O son of the A leagues, I made this game to teach the truth of impermanence, that all things are subject to change, that all things will one day fall apart. I teach that the hot streak leads to the slump, that .300 leads to the Mendoza Line, that the hundred-mile-per-hour heater leads to Tommy John surgery, that the perfect game through six leads to the loss after nine, that the big league contract leads to being designated for assignment.

“I teach the wandering between worlds, where the players in the heavens called the majors are blown by the winds of their statistics to the hells of the minors. I teach that the denizens of Triple A toil in game after game, meeting a god only when that god descends for a rehab assignment and pays for the spread. I teach that even for those who ascend, the time is short, able to wear the garments of the gods only in spring training before being returned to hell, the domain of demeaning team logos.

“I made this game not to make players suffer but to make players see that to be attached to luxury suites, private jets, and Gatorade commercials is only a source of suffering. I made this game to teach players to play without attachment.” Thus spoke the Buddha.

Commentary

We know from our own experience that our joys and sorrows, our physical sensations change constantly. What we don’t know is that those changes are the direct result of our past actions, seeds that can bear their fruit at any moment in a process that is completely beyond our control. This is the truth of impermanence, the first of what the Buddha called “the three marks.” The other two are suffering and no self. They are called marks because all things bear their imprint. We could also call them “the three strikes.” The Buddha invented the game called baseball to teach us about impermanence. As he said, “The end of fortune is decline. The end of rising is falling. The end of meeting is parting. The end of birth is death.”

The end of fortune is decline. The term translated as “fortune” here can mean wealth, but it can also mean fortune in a more metaphorical sense, that of being endowed with all manner of skills and powers. In baseball, one thinks immediately of the five-tool player, the position player with exceptional abilities to field, throw, run, hit, and hit with power. Even for the player of great natural ability, these skills are honed over thousands of hours of practice and in hundreds of games, beginning with playing catch with your father, to sandlot ball, to Little League, to high school baseball, and then to either college or the minors. And then, with much good fortune, to the majors, where the five-tool player is rewarded with riches, reaching his prime in his middle to late twenties, perhaps peaking around age twenty-nine, and remaining in his prime for a few more years. But the end of fortune is decline, and in the player’s thirties, the tools start to rust, beginning with speed, as the player “loses a step.” Bat speed will also decline, with the player no longer able to “catch up to the fastball.” Fielders begin to lose their range. Catchers’ knees start to go, so they are moved to first or to DH. Pitchers lose a few miles per hour off their fastball, having to learn to be “pitchers” rather than “throwers,” mastering and inventing all manner of novelty pitches. (One thinks of David Cone’s “Laredo slider.”) Eventually, the tools of the major league player will decline so much that he will be traded, or released if he wants to spare himself the indignity of being sent down. Unlike in other walks of life, when fortune ends in loss in baseball it is there for all to see, heartbreaking to the fan, as the decline of each skill is meticulously measured, charted, dissected, and discussed. It is a powerful lesson in impermanence.

The end of rising is falling. Every spring, after the Yankees lost their first game of the year, my father would call me and say, “There goes the undefeated season.” Given the length of the season and the remarkable range of variables in a given game—whether the pitcher has his “good stuff,” whether a batter is “seeing the ball well,” whether the manager calls in the right reliever at the right time—falling in the standings is an inevitable part of baseball, with players and fans alike carefully watching how far behind their team is, not in the win column but in the loss column, how many games out of the wild card they are. Almost every team goes on an inexplicable losing streak at some point every year, plummeting in the standings and often falling out of contention. Because bad teams beat good teams so regularly and because the season is so long, teams rise and fall in the standings more dramatically in baseball than in any other sport. It is a powerful lesson in impermanence.

♦

From Buddha Takes the Mound: Enlightenment in 9 Innings by Donald S. Lopez Jr. © 2020. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press.

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The whole question of why our lives seem so unsatisfying needs close examination. Why is it that our experiences or possessions never seem to bring us lasting happiness or completion? We always want something more, and it is always eluding us. Not only do we want to hold on to what we already have but we also want to acquire as much more as we can. I think of possessions as possessing me rather than vice-versa. If you own something, then you are responsible for taking care of it and are continually worrying that it might get harmed or you might lose it.

We try to fill the vacuum that we believe to be inside us, but we need to remember that we didn’t come into this life to shop, to chalk up experiences, to amass objects we can’t take with us when we go, or even to make a lot of money.

The freedom we are all seeking is freedom from the fear of losing what we believe we own.

In truth, it is not the number and diversity of our possessions that is the problem but our attachment to them. When the attachment grows thin and the filament breaks, then we discover that we do not really want so much anymore. What we need to relinquish, therefore, is our attachment to possessions and experiences, not the things themselves.

The freedom we are all seeking is freedom from the fear of losing what we believe we own. Among the notes I have kept over the years is a small scrap of paper on which I typed out a passage from a book by Robert Pilpel entitled Between Eternities. It speaks with extraordinary clarity on this whole matter:

You wonder about the next life because this life’s not enough for you. And this life’s not enough for you because you’re not living it but thinking about it.

I thought that there had to be more to life than being alive and I resolved never to be satisfied with my existence until that something more, whatever it was, had been savored to the full. I felt, moreover, that once my great goal had been achieved I would be prepared to die. . . .

Why are we afraid of death? Surely it is not because the process of dying is painful—because the process of living is infinitely more so. And we don’t fear living—at least, not as much as we fear dying. We are afraid to die because we are not ready. Does death stand for our final failure to achieve the unattainable? And if it does, what then does the unattainable stand for? Would I want it so much if I knew what it was?

When I think back to what I believed would be the most memorable moments in my life—confirmation, the first time I made love, my wedding ceremony, the birth of my son—I remember that each time I had expected to feel different in some way. I anticipated that something in me would be transformed forever. But nothing like that ever happened, and the next day it was always recognizably the same me who woke up in the morning. Why is it that we yearn to be more or other than we are? It so rarely occurs to us that what we are looking for may be—indeed, always is—already within us, simply undiscovered.

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A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love:
The folk who are buying and selling,
The clouds on their journey above,
The cold wet winds ever blowing,
And the shadowy hazel grove
Where the mouse-gray waters are flowing,
Threaten the head that I love.

—“The Pity of Love”
W. B. Yeats

1.

One night when he was perhaps eight months old, my son woke me, not by crying but by gurgling and laughing. He was in an extraordinary mood. Fully awake, his face broke into a wide smile as I came into his room, his eyes glistening in the glow of the moon above the Brooklyn rooftops. His movements, still uterine, as though he were weightless, were clearly giving him great physical pleasure. And the attention he was directing toward me, the central object of his massive happiness, was as powerful an experience of primal love as I had ever known. Basking in it, stroking my son’s hair, I found a nearly unbearable sensation of regret come over me.

What was it? I asked myself, standing in the moonlit room. Why was such pain attendant on such massive love? The koanic opening line of Yeats’s short poem had long haunted me as an enigma: “A pity beyond all telling/is hid in the heart of love—” koanic because I sensed its truth intuitively, enigmatic because the list of anodynes that followed—regular, everyday occurrences, from markets to clouds—did nothing to explain what that pity was. This night, the poem’s enigma seemed to me more urgent than ever. What is the pity that hides in the heart of love, and why was it overpowering even the magical immediacy of my child’s joy?

Already, I saw, my daughter had transformed from a wondrous baby into a curious, cheerful, intensely imaginative little girl. Already she had friends, interests, secrets. These moments with an infant in a crib—moments stolen from sleep—were likely the last such moments in my life.

I was more right than I knew. My son never again awoke laughing—at least not loud enough to wake me—and soon that eight-month-old face was two years old, then three, and the fat cheeks had smoothed to show my wife’s cheekbones, and the thin baby’s hair had grown into the thick bangs I once had as a boy. And from that night and for a long time after, my experience of my children came to be infused with this pity of love. So much so, in fact, that I thought it was something very like depression. But as I became more versed in this emotion—and particularly as I watched it in my practice of meditation—I became more and more convinced that this pity was not pathological but existential; that there was within it a dharmic insight.

That was not a surprise. Nothing in my practice of meditation has been more powerfully illuminated than my experience of my children. And yet, I had found little that helped me understand what had happened to me, that night with my son. On retreats, in dharma talks, children were mentioned sometimes, but usually as part of the array of generously tolerated, somewhat tangential elements of the lay practitioner’s life. But as I sat with the experience, I began to feel that the question posed by that night when my son was eight months old was not tangential to my practice but key—that it had, in fact, a very precise dharmic analogue. What was plaguing me was an insight into the irredeemable, nonnegotiable temporariness not of attachment—as I first thought—but of experience itself.

I had always associated the central Buddhist insight of impermanence, somewhat abstractly, with loss. In the context of children, that was an easy connection: from the moment of my daughter’s birth I understood that I would fear for her for the rest of my life. But the truth of impermanence that my son illustrated for me that night is that it is not by accident, or by biology, but by definition that love and loss are inextricable. To love children deeply is not only to risk a catastrophic loss; to love children is also to lose them over and over again, on a daily and momentary basis, not as they die, or move away, but as they, simply, grow. Moment to moment they become other than they were, and of their former identities nothing remains—nothing beyond photos and videos, gross approximations that capture the sadness of change every bit as much as they remind us of the happiness of our childrens’ former selves.

And yet, how to live with the shocking fact that loss is not accidental, but part of the very identity of love? How to love our children when each moment of doing so is by definition a moment of loss? How to live with the knowledge that a pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love?

The challenge of that question opens the radical heart of Buddhism: the key insight of the radical impermanence of all experience, the true nature of phenomena. I think that most who have confronted this truth—with or without children—will agree that after this insight, little remains quite the same. Yet it was not a meditation on a charnel ground that allowed that insight to come, experientially and directly, to me. It was a laughing baby in the middle of the night.

2.

Children, then, open the dharma for us, offering a massive challenge of loving without attachment, of bringing mindful attention to them, of fathoming the full meaning of impermanence. And from this comes the first of the two prevalent attitudes found in the Buddhist community toward dharmic parenting: the appealing reversal of hierarchies which says that in the investigation of the dharma, our children are our teachers. After all, even Yeats’s crowning poetic insight came to him through children; it was in a classroom that he achieved his transcendent experience of selflessness and the inseparability of process and identity:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
— from “Among School Children”

It’s a powerful concept that our children teach us about ourselves and our practice, but it is also a deceptively subtle one. Taken the wrong way, it turns the issues of raising children into a story about us rather than them. True, they are powerful agents of insight and powerful exemplars of Buddhist truths by their very existence. The problem is, that thought neatly avoids the defining uniqueness of children. For everything is the occasion for the dharma to unfold. It is a virtual truism that no circumstance is not apt, to the attentive mind, for spiritual growth, from abject poverty and tragedy to joy and surfeit. To consider children, therefore, just a privileged point on this continuum is fundamentally distasteful, for the simple reason that there is nothing on earth like them; it betrays their uniqueness and trivializes their preciousness. Perhaps it has to do with the infinite improbability, in a classical Buddhist cosmology, of birth into this realm, and how infinitely precious human children therefore are. Nothing, after all, is as precious in our whole spectrum of lived experience as children.

And then, there is the fact that the basis of our relationship with our children is our responsibility for them. That responsibility dictates that anything to do with children must be about them before it is about us. That responsibility, in dharmic terms, can be very complex, and confuses the possibility of their teaching us. And this, in turn, leads to the second prevalent attitude toward children in American Buddhism: that we practice in order to be better humans, and better parents, and so our children are the beneficiaries of our spiritual growth. This, too, is both true and inadequate. This, too, fails to reflect the fantastic complexity of practicing and parenting.

Often, for example, it seems to me that the truths I explore when I sit are diametrically opposed to those truths I build for my children. I sit in meditation and feel the components of self disentangle, one after the other; yet we constantly offer definition and identity to our children. When I sit, I try to summon the courage to face the psychic risk, spiritual challenge, and brute physical pain of the dharma; yet with our children we build a mythic world of safety. I sit and occasionally have precious insight into the law of karma with its complex interdependence of motivation and responsibility. With our children, however, we present a morality as banal as the bland blue sky. And while, thanks to my children, I am appreciating the fragility of the present, I am required to build around them a world in which the very opposite is true, a world of solidity, of surety, of safety. A world in which identity is solid and death is an abstraction. A world, in other words, in which they can be, for just the first dozen years of their lives, free from fear.

3.

Freedom from fear. To be in a Buddhist practice means to sit every day in faith that such freedom is possible. And yet the fact is that we know it is a life’s work, perhaps many lives’ work, to make even a beginning. Still, in schools across America, children are learning of Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion and Nelson Mandela, coming home with the idea that freedom is attainable and real, just around the corner, perhaps after junior high school, perhaps in college, perhaps when they go out and do victorious battle with the injustice of the world. So how do we raise children with the awareness that those few who actually do battle with injustice lose far more often than they win; that the vast majority of humanity lives and will probably always live in abject physical misery and political oppression; that anything like spiritual freedom may be hundreds of lifetimes away?

Anyone who has ever walked their child to school in the morning knows the answer to this one, it’s easy. What we do is, we lie. We conceal the basic truths of life from our children—the insatiability of desire, the radical truth of impermanence, the noble truths of the ubiquity of suffering. And while we lie we consistently teach them to rely on the very identity that later, if they are to be truly happy, they will struggle, for years and years—as we do—to dismantle: the self. I doubt that I am the only Buddhist parent who finds himself spending all day sedulously urging his children to construct a strong self, based precisely on the defining role of desire. You are a great reader, you are a fine defensive soccer player, you do not like spinach, you love tofu—if cooked just right. “Be kind to animals,” says a bumper sticker on a neighbor’s car—the mother of three sons—“Hug a hockey player.” Those sons, they did not choose to become aggressive little males, nor, really, did my children choose to become attentive little scholars. It was my friend and myself who made our children conform to identities incarnating our received values—in my case at least, identities determined by thousands of years of cultural programming. But no sooner are the kids to bed than I am in my chair, spending another of the thousands of hours that I spend in trying to see beyond my own sense of self—as a writer, as an intellectual, as a Jew, as a male—a self based on likes and dislikes, skills and inadequacies, biases and predilections, prejudices and inheritances—trying to allow to dissolve that constellation of delusions.

So we lie. What else can we do? As practicing parents follow their wish for freedom further into the transformations, philosophical and personal, of the dharma, they travel further and further not only from what they are teaching their children but also from what their children’s schools, their televisions, their books, the very reality around them—the folk who are buying and selling, the clouds on their journey above—are teaching them. Not only the commercial makers, the toy makers, the fast food makers, not only all those, but we ourselves are part of the vast conspiracy of reality that threatens the head that we love.

Related: The Dismay of Buddhist Motherhood

And yet the lie is inevitable. We protect our children from the truth, the truth of violence, the truth of money, the truth of death; but also the philosophical truth of life’s stubborn refusal to divulge its meaning, the ethical truth of the world’s implacable disinclination to be anything like what we think of as fair, and the existential truth of the pity of love. What we do is, we lie to them, and we leave the truth for later on. Perhaps we will live to see them struggle with the truth as adults and help them, perhaps it will not be until after our deaths that they come to that, and then we can only hope that our trace, our example, may help; that like Oedipus dying at Colonus, it is only “when we cease to be, [that] our worth begins.”

But it seems to me there is no lie as bad as when we whitewash the possibility of freedom, of happiness. On one hand, we tell them that happiness is not only possible, it’s fulfilling. On the other hand, we know that in fact the question of happiness is a complex one. That it’s tied inextricably to the practice of freedom, which is frightening and difficult. Life, we tell our children, will come to them bearing all its possibilities if they simply do what they’re told. But in fact we know that life itself is bearable only insofar as we can devote ourselves to a constant, time-consuming, and often enormously painful practice of awareness, presence, and do so with a lion’s heart for love and endless, ever-repeating loss.

4.

And so, what is dharmic parenting? Is mindfulness an R-rated activity, to be saved for when the kids are to bed or the babysitter is there? Over time, that thought has come to seem less and less adequate to me. Over time, in fact, to abandon my children to an education that is not informed by the dharma has come to strike me as unethical. Is it not possible that between the extremes of treating our children as the occasion for our own dharmic progression, and offering them only ourselves as models of mindfulness, that there is a middle path? This, I have come to think, is a challenge posed to the traditional Buddhist teaching by the particular circumstances of practice in the West.

The opportunities are hard to ignore: every time I turn to an exposition of the dharma or a guide to meditation, I find a map of my children’s minds in the very table of contents. Attachment and aversion: no one who has ever had their child spend months waiting for a birthday party, only to cry until the last guest is gone, can question the insatiability of desire and the impossibility of fulfilling it with a real event. No one who has been driven to tears by their child’s absolute hysteria at the thought of stepping into his first-grade classroom can doubt the complexity of aversion and the urgent necessity to distinguish pain from suffering. As for the remaining three hindrances, I don’t need, I don’t think, to look for illustrations of the specific relevance of sleepiness, restlessness, or doubt to the care and feeding of children. Nor do I need to illustrate the pragmatic and programmatic application of the five precepts—reverence for life, refraining from stealing, speaking from the heart, using sexual energy well, or avoiding intoxication—for a child of any age. Why, then, must the practice of mindfulness be kept from the practice of childhood?

This spring, driving home from a baseball game in which my son had lost his temper and cried, we talked about good sportsmanship. The event itself was far in the past, by now, and with hours of fun between his rage and the present, my son commented happily, “I was a bad sport today.” The statement was deceptively complex.

First, it acknowledged the possibility of change, of transformation, in a way that is incompatible with his younger sense of identity—”I was” instead of “I am.” Second, it affirmed that he could acknowledge fault without guilt, moving happily along a path of experience, learning and transforming. Where had he gotten it from? I like to think that perhaps I had created the circumstance in which insight could arise for my son. Certainly, in any case, I have consciously tried.

5.

What is love? I would not dare to say, beyond what Salinger told us: that hell is the inability to practice it. The radically transformative insight of meditation, to me, has been that whatever love may be, it is not what makes loss bearable—nothing makes loss bearable—but beautiful. I know there are yogis for whom that beauty is pure joy. I doubt that, for me, it will ever be. There will always be a pity beyond all telling hidden in love’s heart.

The best one can do as a parent, the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott taught us, is to be “good enough” —I don’t pretend even to that high status. I find, though, that as my practice has taught me to experience my children with less clinging and more acceptance of their constant change, many of the negative experiences of parenting—anger and rage, terror and worry—have withdrawn, at least a bit, and a greater patience with my daughter and son’s actuality has come. They can be good, and they can be bad: what they can’t do is stay themselves, for “themselves” is an identity that exists in constant flux, a continuum with which I am graced and tasked to share a portion my life.

An awareness of our children’s temporariness informs and enriches our every moment with them.

The truth is, no one will ever see my son’s face as I saw it that night in his eighth month. No one will ever see my son as I saw him that night, a laughing baby, less than a year old. No matter how deeply he may one day be loved, no matter how intimately he will one day be known, no one will ever see the face that I saw that night, because that face will never exist again. It is a vision that exists only in my memory, and when it dies with my memory it will cease to be, forever. Truth to tell, those years of having babies—years when our endless workdays were succeeded by endless nights, years of house renovation and mortgages and student loans and the bewilderment of the baby park—are all rather vague to me now. For years, my wife and I photographed and videotaped our children; then the video camera broke and for years, my failure to buy a new one could wake me in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. My children are being lost to me, I thought, staring into the night, and I have no record of them, indeed, I can barely remember them. I have never come to terms with that truth, and I doubt I ever will. But I believe I can say that sitting with it is transforming my life and my way of being a father.

What is dharmic parenting? I think of Freud’s essay “On Narcissism, an Introduction,” and Salinger’s “Seymour: An Introduction.” “Children and Dharma: An Introduction,” in the tutelage of those curious and suggestive explorations of unknown territory, might suggest that we can shed light on our children’s experience for them with the simple truths of the Buddhist insight. That we can show them the possibility of freedom from fear not by pretending the world is safe, but by showing, beyond the obvious, the illusoriness of both safety and danger. That an awareness of our children’s temporariness, of the pity beyond all telling that is hid in the heart of love, informs and enriches our every moment with them, and their every moment with us.

I never did buy a new video camera. Sometimes I think I never will. Instead, I think, I will endeavor to see the dwindling time I have left with them as Henry Miller saw the world in Black Spring: that for all of us together, them and me, when we can live each moment “through to the end there is no death and no beginning, nor is there a false springtime: each moment lived opens up a greater, wider horizon from which there is no escape save living.” ▼

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