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

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

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

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

“What are you doing?” asked his brother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,

nothing in the world can offend,

and when a thing can no longer offend,

it ceases to exist in the old way…

If you wish to move in the One Way

do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.

Indeed, to accept them fully

is identical with true Enlightenment.

 ⧫ 

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

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

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

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

Michael Easter is no stranger to discomfort. He explored the subject intimately in his first book, The Comfort Crisis, which detailed how the luxury and ease of modern amenities have shrunk both our comfort zones and capabilities. In his newest work, Scarcity Brain, Easter traveled from Iraq to the Amazon looking for clues about why we crave, including a week spent in a Benedictine monastery engaging in manual labor to get a better sense of how work, community, and reflection can stir us. 

Scarcity Brain is about the way we are wired to accrue far more food, information, stuff, influence, and pleasure than we need. It explores how the concept of “evolutionary mismatch”—in which traits that were advantageous thousands of years ago are destructive in a world of abundance—impacts our lives on a granular level. 

The upshot of Easter’s willingness to dive deeply into discomfort is what it reveals about how humans have survived and thrived, and the way we’re hardwired to crave. As Easter noted when we spoke, this knowledge can be the first step toward interrupting the habit loops that can cause us to feel helpless in the face of manifold desires. Call it a modern take on the four noble truths—suffering is mitigated when craving diminishes.

You write, “Decades of research have found that many of our biggest problems—at both the personal and societal levels—come from our modern ability to easily fulfill our ancient desire for more.” How can taking the long view and recognizing our biological context positively impact our everyday actions? We have drives that used to serve us in the past but oftentimes no longer do. Or, rather, they push us into “too much.” Understanding why we tend to overeat, overbuy, or overscroll can lift some guilt—you’re not a bad or lazy person. Rather, you’re doing what our species has always done. But we’re now on a different playing field. 

I think becoming aware of the evolutionary origins of most cravings and excesses can alleviate guilt and start to help you understand the issue. Even just developing awareness of a behavior often changes it (a phenomenon known as “the Hawthorne effect”). In other words, once you learn how the machine works, you can better decide how, and if, you want to use the machine. I now understand why I fall into scarcity loops of, say, checking social media and reading emails. Realizing that this is just my brain playing an ancient game that doesn’t make sense, applied to the current context, lifts some guilt and helps me spend my time elsewhere. 

This ancient game evolved to keep us alive. For example, finding food falls into the scarcity loop. Hunting and gathering is a random rewards game that we had to play to survive in the past. A psychological researcher I spoke with explained that this likely explains why unpredictable rewards are still today more attention-getting to us than predictable rewards. 

Your book details the many arenas in which our rampant desire has become destructive, from drug abuse to our relationship with food to consumerism. What is the most concerning example of scarcity brain in contemporary society, and is there any reason to be hopeful? It depends on how you want to measure it and how you calculate it. For example, if you went with what most shortens lives, it would likely be food. If you went with sheer emotional destructiveness (i.e., impact rather than range), it might be drug addiction. Really, I don’t think anyone knows. 

So my answer is the worst rampant desire is the rampant desire that’s hurting you, the person reading this. Most people have some habit that impacts them negatively. Beginning to get to the root of that can change your experience of life and lead you to live it better.

What would you say to those who would argue that progress, innovation, and affluence have all arisen thanks to our voracious appetites? It’s totally true. I consider the problems I’m pointing out in my book “good problems.” I’d prefer to have to think about not eating too much rather than not getting enough. 

But whether a voracious appetite is good or bad depends on context. For an underweight person: good! For a morbidly obese person: bad! So I think, in a way, we’ve hit a point where many of our advances clash with our evolutionary drives in a way that can lead us into trouble. This goes back to the mismatch theory. Abundance is great, but it has led to its own set of problems. 

You write, “Permanent and lasting satisfaction lies in finding enough.” But we seem to keep moving the goalposts on what “enough” entails. If we are wired to always want more, how can we accurately determine what is enough? I don’t think we can. I think it will always be shifting based on our experience. The book mostly asks people to understand where we are now and to do the tough work that will help them find what enough is for them—which could be constantly changing across a life span. I wish I had exactitudes, but life doesn’t work like that. 

In the context of today, most of what improves humans isn’t easy. It’s usually somewhat challenging, at least in the short term. But it gives us long-term rewards. So the tough work is unpacking why you have a certain behavior in the first place, then taking action to change it. I don’t believe humans do anything that doesn’t benefit them somehow, but our tendency is to choose short-term rewards over long-term growth. And, in fact, choosing short-term rewards can often hurt us in the long run. So getting out of that cycle is challenging.

For me, “enough” is simply feeling more engaged and focused on longer-term goals I deem more meaningful. I think that many of the times where we crave more—excess food, another purchase, checking and rechecking social media or email—we’re simply finding a quick relief from something else like frustration or boredom.

I’m not saying to avoid buying, snacking, or using social media. But I do think overdoing them is often a symptom. Getting more engaged in something big and meaningful transitions our attention to longer-term rewards and makes us less likely to crave and consume in ways we regret. It’s taking a “gear not stuff” mindset and applying it across the board. For example, I’ve found when I’m most engaged in writing, my social media usage goes down, I don’t snack just to snack, and I don’t buy crap I don’t need.

You write, “We seem to believe our internal and external conditions will be perfect and that we’ll be able to finally ‘arrive’ and rest once we fulfill our next want. This is a delusion.” Do you see the practice of mindfulness as a potentially useful tool for recognizing this delusion and responding to scarcity brain? Yes! I think mindfulness can absolutely help people recognize the nature of the beast. I don’t think it’s the only path, but it’s a time-tested one, with new research confirming some benefits. I do think we’re in a phase of discourse and research where mindfulness has become a sort of “answer for everything.” I don’t think it’s going to work for every person, for a variety of reasons that may be cultural, social, or biological. People should try mindfulness and whatever else they think might help them in order to find something that works.

Your time at the Benedictine monastery revealed the link between contemplation and contentment. Aside from donning robes and taking monk vows ourselves, how can we tap into that quietude on a daily basis? This readership, I’d imagine, would do well with meditation. In addition, time in nature is helpful (that’s what helps me most). For others, it might be traditional prayer. Or helping others. Effectively, asking the question, “How can I get out of myself?”

Meditation asks us to do that by contemplating what the “self” even is. Time in nature shows us that we’re part of something much larger—it inspires awe and helps us build perspective by making us realize how small our selves really are. Helping others gets us out of our own selves and leads to deeper rewards and satisfaction than, say, buying something on Amazon. Really, my message is just find whatever way of getting out of yourself gives you benefits. Try it all. Know that trying isn’t always going to be easy. As you see what works, continue with what resonates with you.

What have you found to be the most effective tool for fixing the craving mindset in your own life? Taking on experiences that build perspective and help others. My work forces me to travel into austere environments. Those are very perspective-giving. I then try to translate those travels and ensuing research around what they mean in the “big picture” into something that I hope can help others. I get a lot of great messages from readers that remind me why I do the things I do, which helps me keep my eye on the right ball. My experiences have made me really appreciative of what I have.

The post This Is Your Brain on Scarcity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the Pali Canon, the Buddha describes five hindrances, or mental obstacles, that arise during meditation and impede the cultivation of insight, as well as their accompanying antidotes. The first hindrance is sensual desire, which, as one sutra points out, misdirects our attention. Driven by greed or craving for pleasure, we forget what we should remember and focus on what we’d do well to forget—at least for the duration of our meditation—and the result is often unskillful action. Therefore, the antidote is to change our focus. A classic example is to reflect on the unattractiveness of the body (seeing it as a sack filled with blood and pus, or as a future corpse) as an antidote to lust. Another remedy is to guard the senses by focusing strongly on the meditation object: our breath, a mantra, or visualization on a deity, instead of the object we’re craving and think we must have. As the Maha-Assapura Sutta reminds us, being under the spell of sensual pleasure is like being perpetually in debt, which robs us of our peace of mind. But we pay that mental debt by recognizing that in each moment we have just the right amount of all that we need—neither too much nor too little of what nourishes our body and mind.

•  “There’s no such thing as a pure thought without desire. After all, the Buddha said, ‘All things—all dhammas—are rooted in desire.’… We have this mass of desires and thoughts and intentions that we’ve got to train, so we use the whole citta—the whole mind, the whole heart—to train the heart and the mind.” —Thanissaro Bhikkhu

•   Tip: First, pay close attention and notice when sensual desire comes up in your mind. Then ask yourself: “What is causing this desire?” When it fades, ask: “Where did it go?” What does this observation tell you about the nature of sensual desire? What is the result?

  

•   “Because they want to sell their products, advertisers water the seed of craving in you; they want you to consume so that you will have sensual pleasure. But sensual pleasures can destroy you. What we need is understanding: mutual understanding, trust, love, and emotional and spiritual intimacy.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

•   Tip: There’s nothing inherently wrong with sensual desire. It’s our addiction to that hit of pleasure that keeps us hooked—and imprisoned. Reflect on whether what you think you want is actually what you need. Ask yourself whether it will give you the happiness that you seek and whether it will last.

•   “If you have very strong sexual desire, or a craving, then look at the whole picture … reflect, take it all in, and ask, ‘Okay, do I really want to follow this? What am I actually looking for?’ Usually what we’re looking for is a sense of happiness, a sense of fullness, and a sense of peace.” —Ayya Anandabodhi

The post Working with the Five Hindrances: Sensual Desires appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Prince Siddhartha Gautama slipped out of his father’s palace in the ancient Indian capital of Kapilavastu. Twenty-nine years old and dissatisfied with his pleasure-seeking existence, he wanted to find the deeper meaning of life. He traveled the roads of India, living as an ascetic and studying with renowned spiritual teachers. After six years, he experienced an awakening and became the Buddha. His insights included the realization that all life is suffering and suffering is caused by desire.

When I first heard of Gautama’s quest and his epiphany, I felt confused. Hadn’t desire driven him from the palace, leading him not to sorrow but to enlightenment?

In any case, I didn’t need the Buddha to tell me desire caused suffering. There was so much I desired—I’d lived in a state of desire for as long as I could remember—and it only seemed to make me unhappy. At home and out in the world, I met with a Greek chorus of disapproval. I wanted to know a lot of things and was always asking why. “If you don’t stop asking so many questions,” my mother said, “no one will like you.” I wanted to be a kinder person, and I worried if I thought I had hurt someone’s feelings. “Don’t be grandiose,” my father said, cautioning me against overblown belief in my power. I wanted my own clothes instead of my sister’s hand-me-downs; I wanted second helpings. You’re a greedy girl. I wanted my parents to get back together after their divorce. You think it’s all about you. I wanted to be taller, to have blue eyes and blonde hair—instead of my Tibetan-American brown eyes and hair—to blend in better in white American suburbia. You’re never satisfied. I wanted to be heard and wanted my opinion to matter, so I didn’t hesitate to speak up. Who do you think you are?

In school, I wanted to excel and went all out to win the running race, the spelling bee, the poster contest. I spent long hours crafting shoebox dioramas to illustrate my book reports, laboring over cotton ball clouds, paper moons and tinfoil stars, Lilliputian clay chairs and beds, embroidered fabric people. Classmates called me Little Miss Perfect and Miss Goody-Goody (no boys were known as Little Mr. Perfect or Mr. Goody-Goody). I wasn’t one of the girls considered “foxy” or invited to play Kick the Can or asked to go steady by a cute guy who would give me his St. Christopher necklace.

In high school, boys finally started noticing me in a more positive light, and I began to feel sexual desire. “Don’t flaunt yourself!” my mother said if she caught me exchanging heated glances with a boy. I felt sullied by my desires and struggled to hide them. I loathed the differences between how society characterized girls’ and boys’ desire-driven behavior:

On a spring evening in London in 2020, I saw Nora: A Doll’s House, Scottish playwright Stef Smith’s stunning adaptation of Ibsen’s 19th-century play. Three wives and mothers—in 1918 (women’s suffrage in the UK), 1968 (legal abortion and the pill), and 2018 (#MeToo)—are choking on their alienation and rage, their desire for selfhood. Having devoted herself to pleasing her husband, to meeting his and society’s expectation that she fulfill her roles as wife and mother for the larger good of the institution of marriage, each woman realizes that she’s been living like a doll in a doll’s house and has cast aside her self. As she experiences this awakening, she tells her husband again and again, “My heart beats for me.” At one point the three women chant this in unison, over and over, their fury and passion mounting and reverberating in the dark theater. You can hear their hearts beating as their chant swells like the voices of so many women over time: my heart beats for me, my heart beats for me. Not for my husband, my children, my mother, my father. My heart beats to keep me alive.

Walking back to the hotel that night, I thought about the desire that’s always roared in my heart. Over the years, as I left home and made my own life, and as I learned about Buddhism while connecting with my Tibetan roots, I’d discovered there are different kinds of desire. I realized that what the Buddha meant is that craving causes suffering. Craving is represented by preta, the hungry ghosts that populate one of the Buddhist realms of existence, wretched beings with stomachs as big as the Grand Canyon and throats as thin as a piece of hair (“Never enough drinks or eats for them,” my Tibetan grandmother liked to say). Preta desire—tanha, or “thirst”—is a compulsive striving for objects, experiences, and traits that we think will bring us happiness (like being taller or whiter). We’re hamsters racing around in our wheels, trapped in an endless cycle of hungry-ghost longing that spirits us away from our authentic selves.

As a girl and a young woman, I felt I was performing a role on stage, waiting and praying for the curtain to come down.

The drive toward selfhood, on the other hand, is a healthy, mindful desire that leads us within. This isn’t a search for a fixed, coherent self but an embracing of who we are (rather than who others want us to be). Often girls are told this desire is selfish. We’re taught to please, to seek approval no matter what the cost. I learned to pretend I didn’t want another helping of dessert, didn’t know the answer to the teacher’s question, didn’t notice boys, didn’t have an opinion. Ignoring my inner voice—or better yet, extinguishing it—would make me happy because others would be happy with me.

If we stifle our desire for selfhood, it may in time disappear. Then we, too, may vanish, falling into the schism between who we are and the self we present to the world. Or we may be consumed by the tension between the force of our desire for selfhood and the force of our exertion to hide it. Growing up, I was constantly exhausted. For years, I dreamed that I was trapped in a basement where the pipes were leaking and bursting, that I was trying to squeeze through a trapdoor into an attic; I dreamed I was lifting off and flying free over towns and forests and oceans. As a girl and a young woman, I felt I was performing a role on stage, waiting and praying for the curtain to come down.

Girls’—and women’s—desire is dangerous because it threatens the status quo.

In A Doll’s House, Nora’s husband desperately wants to preserve the marriage that has worked so well for him and for society. Seeing that Nora is determined to leave, he attacks: “How unreasonable and how ungrateful you are, Nora!… To desert your home, your husband and your children! And you don’t consider what people will say!”

To his horror, Nora replies, “I cannot consider that at all. I only know that it is necessary for me…I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are—or, at all events, that I must try and become one.”

If we stifle our desire for selfhood, then we, too, may vanish, falling into the schism between who we are and the self we present to the world.

Ibsen said that when writing A Doll’s House he hadn’t “consciously worked for the women’s rights movement” but rather for “the description of humanity.” His view speaks to the larger issue: the longing for authentic selfhood as a yearning for full humanity. Nora doesn’t say, “I am a reasonable woman,” but “I am a reasonable human being.” Her desire to leave the doll’s house is like Gautama’s wish to go beyond the palace walls, to break free from the life he’s living and discover the potential of human existence. For me, “leaving the palace” was a going forth (from the United States to Japan, where I’ve now lived for over thirty years) that allowed me to leave the houses of family and society I’d grown up in. Tempting as staying in the palace can be, because of the force of habit or the fear that others will be angry with us, I understood somewhere along the way that staying wouldn’t lessen suffering, only deepen it.

Entwined with the desire for selfhood is the Buddhist principle of renunciation. At first, I found this paradoxical: isn’t desire about attaining and renunciation about relinquishing? But if, like Gautama, we are to succeed in realizing our full humanity, we have to let go of what lies between us and our authentic selves. Hard as it may be to undertake, this journey is the most essential and human of all, a fulfillment of our story as travelers on this earth.

The post Leaving the Palace appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s a misunderstanding to say that the Buddha’s teachings were trending in the direction of some “desireless” state as our existential end. . . . That is the fundamental confusion about Buddhism and desire in the West—that meditation is leading toward a flat-line life free of desire. No, desire will remain (because it’s wired into us). It’s the karma of craving that mindfulness can help us slip free of.

Meditation, if correctly wielded, is not about shoving desire to the side. It’s about learning to live with and learn from desire. Again, as brain science is increasingly clarifying, desire is part of our evolutionary emotional inheritance. Our karmic patterns rest not in the fact of desire in our brains, but instead in how we relate to desire when it arises. The Buddha would have us aim “higher” than what craving can deliver.

♦

From The Five Hurdles to Happiness: And the Mindful Path to Overcoming Them by Mitch Abblett, PhD © 2018 by Mitch Abblett. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications. 

The post Slip Free of Craving appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To have what we don’t want. To want what we don’t have. To have what we want but not be able to keep it. These three conditions, grouped under the rubric desire, form the root of our suffering, says Buddhism. Left to itself, desire runs like a perpetual-motion machine that never, ever wears down.

This is not a particularly revolutionary insight. Street peddlers and shopkeepers, advertising agencies and marketing executives have always known the power of desire. They have all sorts of ways of fulfilling our needs, or of creating them when they don’t exist. Advertising especially relies on the fact that much of the time we don’t even know what we crave. Oh, we may realize as the Zappos box arrives on our doorstep, what I really wanted was love, but by then it’s too late. What we have instead is a pair of shoes—and a growing hunger.

But what happens when we can no longer buy our way out of our discomfort, our loneliness, our fear? When another iPhone upgrade, another episode of Watchmen isn’t enough to buffer us from the stark truth that a human life is infinitely more fragile than we’re willing to admit? That the balance between illness and health—where health includes physical, psychological, and emotional well being—is so precarious, that a single virus, a thousand times smaller than a human hair, can tip it and within months radically changes the lives of eight billion people?

There’s no question that the coronavirus pandemic has caused untold amounts of pain and will continue to do so for some time. But we could also see its presence as the perfect opportunity to pause and ask ourselves what constitutes a fulfilling life.

Admittedly, this will not be the most pressing question on the minds of the hundreds of thousands of people in this country sick with the virus or the millions who are risking their lives to care for them. It won’t be on the minds of the bus drivers, grocery store clerks, mail carriers, and delivery people who are forced to continue going to work despite the risks because not doing so is financially untenable. Their focus is on surviving. So the onus is on those of us who have the space, time, and stability to consider the choices we make beyond those that ensure our survival. It’s on us to use this unprecedented moment to wonder, What do I really need and for what purpose?

In the Padotta Sutta, there’s a parable about four kinds of horses likened to four types of people with varying degrees of self-awareness. The first horse is so quick that it moves merely at the shadow of its trainer’s whip. This horse is like a person who, hearing of the pain and death of a distant villager, is compelled to find the meaning of her own life. The second horse moves when the whip touches its skin, just like someone who personally witnesses the pain or death of one of an acquaintance and is spurred to action. The third horse doesn’t move until the whip punctures its flesh, like a person who fails to react until she sees the pain or death of one of her close relatives. The fourth horse remains unmoving until the whip penetrates its marrow, like a person who must herself experience pain and the threat of death before waking up to the urgency of understanding her own existence.

The virus has brought death close. This is both its curse and its blessing. When life becomes very bare and fundamental, what do we turn toward to find true comfort? What will actually deliver on the promise of happiness that our societies have failed to produce?

At the end of his life, the Buddha gave another teaching on desire. He said, “Having few desires is the Way.” He was asking: What do you really need? How much of it? And are your wants actually meeting your needs? These are simple questions, yet as a society we’ve routinely ignored or actively avoided asking them. So it’s both ironic and fitting that our confinement has opened up much-needed space to consider whether we can do things differently.

Like the rest of us, I’m looking forward to a time when life can return to normal, when I can not only see but also hold my family and friends, resume my long walks, my visits to museums and theaters. But as the days go by, the more convinced I become that we’re neither going to return to normal nor that there is such a thing as “normal”—unless we consider normal the unbridled greed that’s causing our own and the planet’s destruction. We could call it corporate greed, except corporations don’t have desire. People do. The same people who think it’s normal to rank life below profit, normal to incite others to protest for their right to die or cause others to die—and who call that freedom.

Still, I’m not pessimistic. I don’t see this virus as punishment for our past wrongs, although I do believe in the law of karma (cause and effect), and accept our current circumstances as the result of an intricate web of both individual and collective choices. I don’t consider the pandemic another war to be won. Instead, I choose to take the virus as a call to rethink our living.

Perhaps we can use this time to begin to learn to want what we have. To not want so much of what we don’t have. And to willingly relinquish what we can’t hold on to. We don’t have to renounce every inessential thing, nor would we want to. Mint-chocolate ice-cream and mystery novels may not be essentials, but life would be bleaker without them. We don’t need to get rid of desire because without it we wouldn’t dream, we wouldn’t grow, we wouldn’t innovate. We don’t need to become Luddites or ascetics. What we need is the willingness to look honestly at our wants and our choices and ask ourselves, does this make sense—not just for me, not just for now, but for everyone and for our future?

While nothing we do will make up for the thousands of deaths the virus has caused—especially the unnecessary losses of health-care workers, black and brown people, and the abandoned elderly—we can at least do our part to ensure that they not be in vain.

For them and for all those who’ve suffered through illness and loss, let’s ask ourselves what sort of “normal” we want to return to when the worst of the pandemic is behind us. Stepping forward from this point, what kind of world will we co-create?

♦

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard is this month’s Dharma Talk teacher. 

The post What Sort of “Normal” Is Normal? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We may call it different names—peace, or awakening, or enlightenment, even love—but what most of us are looking for is happiness: deep, abiding fulfillment and completion. The problem is that we’re looking for it in the wrong place. We’re looking in the places where society or our conditioning tells us to look—in the fulfillment of our desires. But that is not where true happiness is found.

The Buddha was quite specific about the quality of mind that keeps us bound to the long journey of samsara, our endless pursuit of happiness: “I don’t envision even one other fetter—fettered by which beings go wandering and transmigrating for a long, long time—like the fetter of craving.” So what is the craving the Buddha says binds us to samsara—the cycle of birth and rebirth—and how do we experience it in our lives?

“Craving” is the word we use to translate the Pali word tanha, and the root meaning of tanha is “thirst.” Sometimes this is expressed as “the fever of unsatisfied longing.” When we think of thirst or the fever of unsatisfied longing, it gives us a very visceral sense of what craving is like. Often the words “craving” and “desire” are used interchangeably, as I will use them here. But “desire” has many meanings: it can be the motivation to do something, to accomplish something—a desire for enlightenment, perhaps, or to become more compassionate, or to serve. That is a very different mind state from the mind state of craving. The desire of craving—the thirst, the fever of unsatisfied longing—is rooted in greed and attachment.

If we want to free ourselves from the grip of this fever, we have to understand where to look, where to investigate. The Buddha pointed to particular kinds of craving that misdirect us in our search for true happiness, including the craving for sense pleasures and the craving for becoming.

The craving for sense pleasures is the most obvious form of craving and the most familiar. This is the desire to experience pleasant sights and sounds and smells and tastes, pleasant sensations in the body, and pleasant mind states. (In Buddhism, the mind is generally considered the sixth sense.) Our engagement with desire for sense pleasures is just our usual engagement with life, with the world—wanting and enjoying what’s pleasurable and trying to avoid what’s unpleasant or disagreeable.

To us, this seems so natural, so normal. But here is where the Buddha begins a very revealing analysis of our enmeshment with the world of sense pleasures. He didn’t condemn sense pleasures as sinful; rather, in a systematic way he asked basic questions about the kinds of experiences we find enjoyable. His first question was What is the gratification in the world? As a young prince, before he left home on his quest for enlightenment, the Buddha thoroughly enjoyed all the sense pleasures. Then at one point, the thought came to him that whatever pleasure and joy there is in the world, that is the gratification in the world. If there were no pleasure and joy in the world, human beings would not become enamored of samsara. It is precisely because there is joy and pleasure in this realm that we desire and crave sense pleasures. If they weren’t enjoyable, we wouldn’t crave them.

If you examine your own life, as the Buddha examined his, what is the gratification? What experiences of body and mind do you become enamored of? What do you desire? When we look within ourselves and at the world around us, it’s evident that cravings and gratifications vary widely in intensity and frequency. At one end of the spectrum are obsessive cravings that can become all-consuming: addiction to food or sex or alcohol or drugs or success or power or fame or wealth or possessions or comfort—even to love.

These are strong, universal, driving forces in our lives, and in many ways our culture feeds them. I once saw in a store window in New York a sign that said: “Don’t let desire pass you by.” And back in the day when magazines carried cigarette advertisements I saw an ad showing a handsome man and a beautiful woman with cigarettes in their hands. The slogan read: “I don’t let anything stand in the way of my pleasure.” We’ve been getting messages like these all our lives.

Many of our desires are not obsessive, but they still may be a driving force behind many of our actions. The object of craving or desire can be small, even insignificant, but the power of desire is deeply rooted in our minds, almost like a primal energy. Momentary or seemingly trivial desires can, through repetition, strengthen into habits. We go from “I want this” to “I need this” to “I must have this.”

I really look forward to my cup of coffee in the morning, to get the day going. When I was doing a self-retreat at home one time, I got up every morning and enjoyed the sense pleasure of a good cup of coffee. Then one morning the coffee grinder didn’t work. What was the first word that came to mind? Disaster! And I meant it. In the realm of human experience that certainly wasn’t a disaster, but to my craving mind it felt like one.

Instances of craving and desire like this are so familiar to us that they’re mostly invisible. They are so much a part of who we take ourselves to be that we don’t even notice these deeply conditioned patterns until we bring the power of awareness to them. That is why the Buddha said he didn’t see any fetter as strong as craving that binds us to the wheel of samsara.

The power of mindfulness is that we can begin to notice where craving arises in daily life. We can start by really paying attention to the gratification we feel in experiencing different sense pleasures. What experiences give you moments of delight? What do you become enamored of? For me it was that early morning coffee. For you it might be lunch or a cup of tea or a hot shower. When you finally stretch out in bed at night, and the body feels “Ahhhh,” that’s a sense delight, a sense pleasure.

Whenever you notice the pleasure associated with these experiences, explore further and see if there’s a subtle level of craving for them in your mind. I noticed this on retreat while I was doing walking meditation. I could be grounded in my body and fully aware of each movement, and then when the lunch bell rang, I might continue walking just as slowly, but I could feel my mind being pulled into the lunch room, anticipating the enjoyment of the meal.

We can investigate that same conditioning in noticing our enjoyment of pleasant fantasies. It’s so easy to be caught up in pleasant thoughts, to be carried away by enticing sexual fantasies or food desires or fantasies about relationships. But at some point in our exploration of this realm of craving and desire, we might resonate with the Buddha’s words: “Whatever gratification there is in the world, that I have found.”

We’ve all had innumerable pleasurable experiences in the body and the mind. Maybe you’re still looking for some new taste, new sensation, new thought. But the Buddha didn’t stop there. The desire for sense pleasures and the gratification we get from them is just the first step in becoming aware of what moves us in our lives. “I then set out seeking the dangers of the world,” he said. “Danger” here is a translation of the Pali word adinava, which can also mean a drawback or disadvantage or the downside of things.

So what is the downside of gratification in the world? What are the drawbacks? The Buddha said, “Whatever dangers or downsides there are in the world that I have also found, namely that the world is impermanent and because of that, ultimately unreliable, subject to change.” We all know this conceptually. But we’re not living this awareness. If we were, we wouldn’t get attached to things, because we would know that whatever we crave or desire and become attached to is impermanent and is going to change. But how many of us, when we’re in the midst of enjoying sense pleasures, have enough interest to ask ourselves, “What is the downside of this? What is the drawback?”

It’s good to reflect on the drawbacks of sense pleasures so we can integrate that understanding into the choices we make. But what are the drawbacks? For one thing, sense pleasures do not deliver on their promise. We’re enamored of them because we think they’re going to make us happy. And they do for a while. But the happiness we feel is short-term and comes not because of anything inherent in the sense objects but because of the pleasant feelings we associate with them.

Sense pleasures are continually changing, continually disappearing. So we go after another one, then another one, and then another, each time anticipating the next one until all too soon our lives are at an end. We chase after the illusory happiness of sense pleasures, but unless we start paying attention to the drawbacks, we’re just living in the forward momentum of craving without ever coming to a place of completion, of contentment, of real peace. How much of your life and energy do you want to spend in this endless pursuit?

So the first drawback of relying on the gratification of sense desires for our happiness is that it doesn’t actually accomplish our aims. The second danger or drawback is that when craving becomes a strong or excessive force, it often leads us to very unwholesome actions that create unwholesome karma, bringing suffering to ourselves and others. One time I went to a teaching on sense desires by Sayadaw U Pandita, one of my Burmese teachers. He went on and on for at least ten minutes in Burmese. Then the translator summed up what he had said: “Lust cracks the brain.”

Just four words, but absolutely true. Whether it’s sexual lust or lust for anything else, it really does crack the brain. Lust is a powerful force in the mind and in our lives. It takes a lot of interest and even courage to look deeply into your heart and mind to see these patterns so that you won’t have to go through life on the momentum of habitual conditioning. We’ve all been conditioned in so many ways, some of them wholesome, some of them not. The only way to become free is to become aware, to really see that This is leading to a good result, or This is not so skillful, not wholesome.

The second type of craving the Buddha identified is more subtle than the craving for sense pleasures and mostly goes unnoticed. He called it craving for becoming—the basic urge or desire to become this or that. One familiar manifestation of the craving for becoming is the obsessively planning mind. We get caught up in endless planning, in imagining ourselves in some future situation and then engaging in all the thoughts and actions that will get us there. Indeed, a good part of our mental activity is making mental creations of a future self: I’ll do this, I’ll go there, I’ll become that. I’m not suggesting that all planning is unskillful, but being lost in fantasies about our future is very different from mindfully planning for things that need to be done.

Another way to identify the craving for becoming is to notice the many times expectation arises in your mind. One of the biggest hindrances in both meditation practice and daily life is being caught up in expectation. In meditation, when you’re being with your moment-to-moment experience, notice when you’re leaning into the next moment energetically. You’re with this breath in order to get to the next breath, or with this sensation in order for it to become something else. It’s a very common pattern, thinking that the next moment somehow is going to resolve everything. We forget that the next moment is just as impermanent as this moment, so it’s not going to offer resolution of anything.

A big problem with expectation is that it inevitably brings agitation to the mind. Certain kinds of expectations are so seductive because they masquerade as dharma aspirations. But there’s a big difference between aspiration and expectation. Aspirations can inspire us. We might have an aspiration for awakening, for example, or an aspiration to become more compassionate. That sets a direction for us. Aspiration can be beautiful and ennobling. Expectation, however, leads us into the agitation of hope and fear. When there is expectation, we’re hoping that something we want will happen and we fear that it won’t. That’s a very different experience from aspiration.

Expectation also feeds the comparing mind. There’s a big difference between being inspired by someone else’s life or practice and getting caught up in comparing and self-judgment. Years ago, Sayadaw U Pandita came to the Insight Meditation Society to teach a three-month course. He was a very demanding teacher, and it was a high-pressure retreat. We had to report on how long we practiced: the aim was 14 hours of sitting and walking a day. A lot of stuff was coming up for me during the retreat, but when I looked around, it seemed clear that other meditators were doing well while I was struggling. Comparing myself with them brought more suffering and self-judgment. Then one day, I was walking outside and saw that the spring flowers were coming up. I noticed that some flowers were already blooming, while others had buds that hadn’t yet opened, and still others were just poking out of the earth. In that moment, I realized that like the flowers, we are all unfolding in our own way, in our own time. And one flower doesn’t compare itself to the others: “Oh, that one has bloomed already. Why haven’t I?” Nature can be a great teacher.

One of the easiest ways to notice the craving for becoming and leaning into the next moment is to become aware of the very common feeling of rushing. When we’re rushing, our mind is ahead of our body, energetically pushing us forward into whatever we think we should be doing. The phenomenon of rushing has nothing to do with speed. You can be rushing while moving very slowly. You can be leaning into the next moment while sitting. When we’re rushing, we’re forgetting the central understanding of practice—that liberation is not about getting anywhere, not about craving, not about holding on or clinging. It’s all about letting go, and we can let go in any moment. The Buddha gave very specific instructions for this; they are really instructions on how to live an awakened life: “Not reviving the past. Not hoping to be in the future. Instead, with insight, see each arising state, not craving after past experience, not setting one’s heart on the future ones, not bound up in desire and craving.”

There is a traditional meditation instruction: Notice when your mind is reviving the past or longing for something in the future; then, with each arising state come back to the present, even if just for short periods of time.

It is said that on the morning the Buddha experienced full enlightenment, he thought: “Realized is the unconditioned; achieved is the end of craving.” He is saying so clearly that the nature of the liberated mind is freedom from craving—from desire for sense pleasures and craving for becoming. And we can practice this in any moment and aspire to its complete fulfillment.

This is true happiness. It is not beyond reach.

♦

This article was adapted from a talk given at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, in February 2018.

The post Peeling Away the Promise of Desire appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In Buddhism, desire is viewed as a manifestation of craving. Many of us desire situations in our lives to be different, while others desire parts of our self to be different, feeling that we are not good enough just as we are. This sense of inner poverty and lack drives so much of consumer society: wanting this hairdo, or this latest designer brand of clothing, or even the latest cosmetic surgery. Even as mindfulness practitioners, many of us desire our experience of practice to be different—the present moment seldom comes up to scratch! These are all manifestations of desire and expressions of the craving mind that constantly wants more and more.

Another manifestation of craving is the desire to pursue constant entertainment—anything rather than being in touch with the present moment. This desire fuels our habit of distraction, which takes the form of perpetual thinking, daydreaming, and dwelling on issues, even though this thought activity unsettles the mind. We can notice the wanting mind the next time we reach for our phone when there is nothing else to do, or the next time we idly flick through the myriad TV channels on our flat-screen TV.

At a subtler level, this desire to escape our moment-by-moment experience is a desire not to feel—a yearning to be unconscious and numb. We can see this tendency pervading so much of modern life. It can lead to addictive habits that help us to numb out, such as alcohol, drugs, or the next TV box set.

In the practices that follow, we focus on learning how to recognize the wanting mind in ourselves. We will learn to pay attention to how craving and wanting play out in our experience and how this inflates our sense of self. We will see how lessening the power of craving enhances our capacity to enjoy life and increases our sensitivity to the richness and diversity of our experience. This is the discriminating wisdom that emerges from the energy of desire when craving and wanting decrease.

Noticing How Desire Feels

Start by bringing your attention to the flow of your breathing, slightly deepening your in-breath and lengthening your out-breath. Feel your feet on the floor and the weight of your body on your seat. Once you feel settled, pose a question to yourself in a slow and reflective way: “What do I want right now?” Your attention might go from desiring a cup of coffee, to surfing on the Internet, to lusting after someone you fancy, even to yearning for enlightenment! Desire is subtle, complex, and ever changing. Then notice how the energy of craving and wanting feel in your mind and body—perhaps there is a tightening of the throat, a tensing somewhere in the body, or a widening of the eyes. You can then pose a second question: “How do I want things to be different from how they are now?” Once again this may relate to your immediate state of mind, your financial situation, your relationships, or your life in general. See if you can tune into the feeling of dissatisfaction with the present moment and the craving for something better, and notice how this affects the way you think and feel. Simply acknowledge what the energy of wanting and craving feels like for you. Conclude the practice by bringing a brief gesture of kindness to yourself by placing your hand on your heart.

Being Aware of Desire in Daily Life

As you go about your daily activities, form the intention to become aware of your wanting mind. Then notice the varying ways that craving and wanting affect the way you think, feel, and act. You may want to feel more relaxed and spacious, yearn for a cappuccino, fixate on an item of clothing in a shop, fantasize about someone you are attracted to, or idly daydream about sunny, exotic holidays. See if you can tune into how wanting feels in your body, how it causes your mind to fixate, and how it feels uncomfortable until you get what you want. Every now and again, when you notice yourself wanting something, decide that you are not going to have it. Notice any emotions that come with thwarted desire, such as anger or fear, and any stories you tell yourself about why you should have what you want and should have it now! Conclude the practice by bringing a brief gesture of kindness to yourself by placing your hand on your heart or some other part of your body.

Related: Working With Desire

Through doing these practices we become familiar with how desire manifests in our lives and how it seeks to take control of our mind. We may all recognize times when we become aware of a desire only after we have satisfied it, such as when we eat the last cookie or click the “buy” button on our smartphone. If we don’t recognize desire as it is happening, we are ruled by it. If we can recognize our desires in the moment that they occur, there is a possibility of doing something different, such as having a glass of sparkling water rather than yet another glass of wine.

Having reflected on the power of desire and the intensity of the wanting mind, we may then find it useful to look back on our lives and acknowledge how desire can be a hugely destructive force—from burning ambition that consumes us, to lust that destroys marriages, to rampant desire for material things. This helps motivate us to work in a more mature way with desire, which involves cultivating its antidote as well as liberating the enormous potential for vitality and intelligence lying within this emotion.

♦

From From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom, by Rob Nairn, Choden, and Heather Regan-Addis © 2019. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications.

The post Overcoming the Vortex of Desire appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Once a month, Tricycle features an article from Inquiring Mind, a Buddhist journal that was in print from 1984–2015 and now has a growing number of back issues archived at inquiringmind.com.  For Valentine’s Day, we offer a Buddhist perspective on sexual energy, love, and romance. Dennis Crean’s interview with Ajahn Thaniya originally appeared as “Freeing Our Life Energy” in Inquiring Mind’s Spring 2007 issue on “The Tough Stuff: Money, Sex, and Power.” Be sure to check out the related articles, including Eric Kolvig’s “A Wedding Blessing” and Wes Nisker’s “Ode to Ms. Mindfulness.” And if you feel so inclined, consider making a donation to help Inquiring Mind continue adding articles to its archive!

♦

Originally from New Zealand, Willa Thaniya Reid (formerly Ajahn Thaniya) was ordained in 1993 as a siladhara (ten-precept nun) by Ajahn Sumedho, the senior Western disciple of Thai master Ajahn Chah. For 18 years, she was part of the monastic community in the Thai Forest tradition, and she was the senior nun at Cittaviveka Monastery in England for eight years. She left the monastery in 2008 and returned to New Zealand in 2015 to develop a meditation community with her partner. Inquiring Mind managing editor Dennis Crean interviewed Ajahn Thaniya in November 2006 while she was visiting Abhayagiri Monastery in Redwood Valley, California.

Ajahn Thaniya (AT): Waking up to what it means to experience energy in a sexual way helps free our life energy so that it’s not contorted—either through repression or denial. It also involves guarding against being captured by the power of sexual desire. One of the primary inquiries becomes exploring how the natural energy of existence can support true freedom and aliveness.

When undertaken consciously, sexual union can be an expression of deep love and commitment. Did the Buddha speak about that?

AT: I don’t recollect that the Buddha spoke of a union with the beloved or used the terms you mention, but in places in the Pali scriptures one can sense an appreciation for intimacy. In one passage, a very devoted husband and wife ask the Buddha, “We have such deep love for each other, can we not be together in the next life?” The Buddha teaches them how to generate the conditions for such a rebirth. In the Jataka stories [tales about the Buddha’s past lives], we read of the Buddha’s relationship with his own wife, which had manifested in many lifetimes. So I imagine that the Buddha knew that people understood the loveliness of being able to express their devotion physically, but he emphasized instead the suffering of desire because that’s what people really need to get a handle on.

So what advice does the Buddha offer for skillfully relating to one’s sexual energy?

AT: The Buddha suggests we look at what’s unwholesome and unhelpful. When speaking with those in the monastic community avowed to celibacy, he emphasized the danger in being swept away by desire and voluntarily engaging in sexual intercourse. Images such as hot coals and poisonous snakes were used as strong deterrents against following desire and recklessly abandoning the training. In relation to this he would say that the teachings are given for the sake of the waning of passion, for freedom from sense desire, not for their increase.

For laypeople, a basic teaching on practicing with sexual desire is the third of the five precepts—refraining from sexual misconduct. This precept is essentially about not using sexuality in a harmful or mindless way. The Buddha taught to refrain from incest; from involvement with somebody who’s already committed in another relationship, such as someone betrothed; and from coercive sexual relationships. Even when people might seem to be in complete agreement about engaging in sexual relations, that’s not always the case. I don’t know about you, but if you’ve ever been in a sexual situation that’s a bit murky or confusing, it can be very disturbing. This doesn’t support calming and opening the mind. It might even lead to blocking things out and not looking at what is happening. That’s the danger of unskillful actions. They breed ignorance.

In a world where sex has been so degraded, it’s helpful to have a practice that encourages us to reassess our relationship to it, to understand desire and sexual energy. We might ask, is casual sex really not hurting anybody? We have to check it out. On some level, does it hurt our heart to be relating to our self, let alone someone else, with such casualness? Have we been swept up by the power of desire and lost reference to the values of loving and cherishing and honoring? Are we with someone who cares about us, who isn’t relating to us simply as an object of desire? This is something to explore, so that we’re not selling ourselves out to a desire. It’s a powerful force.

The Buddha also encouraged householders to practice the eight precepts once a fortnight, which includes abstaining from any kind of sexual activity for that one day. In this way, he said, one can gladden the mind, thinking “I’m practicing the way the buddhas and their disciples practiced,” thereby entering a current of practice. This creates the opportunity to be present to, without acting on, sexual desire; to feel the energies—the tugging and wanting—and to gain a bit of freedom around them. When you compulsively act on something, you often don’t understand it very well. You don’t feel the edges. What is it like to be with someone you love deeply without engaging sexually? You have to find other ways, bring other possibilities into the relationship.

So when practicing with the precepts or, in your case, with a commitment to celibacy as a Buddhist nun, how can one work with the feelings of sexual desire that naturally arise?

AT: When I feel strong sexual energy arise, I just open and feel what the energy is asking for. It’s often a craving for oneness or unity. By being still, allowing the energy to move as energy rather than being shaped by desire, consciously being with it in that way, the energy resolves itself. Rather than needing an object for sexual expression, coming into presence is enough. Sometimes it’s very dramatic, saying, “Just one kiss, or I’ll die”—there’s an intensity, a desperation. The voices cry out, and if they’re not responded to, they’ll get so they crave even the tiniest fragment. But eventually they change. I’ve seen this same process with a teaspoon of honey. Desire can grasp hold and manipulate us, but if the energy is not followed, the desire changes. For me it’s strengthening to trust in the power of awareness. It is transformative to simply know the desire—that’s “the Buddha knowing the dhamma,” or awareness knowing the way things are—without needing to act.

Here’s another example. Some time ago, after an all-night meditation vigil, I was working away by myself in our workshop. Somebody came in. They smelled like someone who’d been asleep—smell can be very potent for me—and bang, my whole system illuminated. It was fascinating; I could hear my mind go crazy. It said, “Just touch their hand; it will be all right.” But actually, to touch somebody out of desire is a serious offense for a nun. So I said to myself, “I’d better get the heck out of here.” By the time I’d gotten down to my hut, the heavens had burst. There was a colossal electrical storm—raging winds and rain—and I realized I’d been affected by the elements. It was the middle of the summer, very hot with a big electrical buildup, and I’d been part of it. Sexual energy just flashed.

I think we all know that little voice of temptation that says, “It’s okay.” [Laughter.]

AT: So what I try to do is remove myself and reassess things. Once the mind has cooled down, such impulses may turn out to be suitable, but more often they won’t. Sexual energy can be very deluding because of the “chemistry” that’s happening. Desire to be close is so powerful that it’s hard not to act on it, so it’s often helpful to move out of range. Later, if we want to move back into the relationship, fine. We’re no longer reacting to the energy of the moment, which in this case is the very powerful energy of creating. As practitioners, we’re trying to move toward the uncreated, the unborn, the unoriginated, so we have to be especially awake around such a strong force of holding, having, creating.

What do you feel you’ve gained by choosing a celibate lifestyle?

AT: The first thing to say is that celibacy is a practice that must be deliberately picked up. It’s different from saying, “Well, right now I haven’t got a sexual partner.” At this time I’ve chosen celibacy. It simplifies my life. My primary commitment is to the spiritual path. When I was married, I had a commitment to my husband, so my relationship to practice had to be negotiated—consequently, going on retreat was difficult. Now I can make choices based on what’s most supportive for awakening. Choosing celibacy makes it clear what you’ve committed your life energy to. It’s something that you’ve really got to give yourself to, otherwise the whole thing’s unbearable.

There’s a revealing verse in the Dhammapada: “Having given up home and family, why not leave your anger behind?” So, if you’ve already given up this potential for sexual intimacy, which can have so much that is wholesome and precious connected to it, then it’s much easier to give up what is unwholesome.

Does choosing a celibate lifestyle mean you no longer have personal relationships?

AT: It certainly means giving up relating from a sexual basis. But I do have very deep personal relationships. I’ve lived in community with some people for 16 years. I meditate with them, I eat breakfast with them, I know the sound of their footsteps coming down the corridor. And with some people there is a natural affinity. It’s not that I’m not “related”; I’m just not related through the mechanisms of sexual desire or wanting. It opens up a really lovely space.

Living together with people in a way that really supports one another is a great blessing. Whereas in my experience of people in committed relationships, it’s the rare couple whose relationship is truly strengthening them in wholesome ways. More often, it’s conflicted. There’s pain from neediness and codependence. There can be desires within the relationship that haven’t been understood. Consequently, they reduce the quality of that relationship. It’s very hard to really understand desire. So one of the powerful things about being consciously celibate is getting to know sexual desire by letting it move through the whole system without acting on it. That’s very freeing.

You mentioned that you were previously married. How has your understanding of sexual desire changed since then?

AT: I got married quite young, and my understanding of sexuality was naive, shaped by our culture’s neuroses. I only had a vague sense of the difference between feminine and masculine sexuality. Now my understanding of feminine sexuality is much clearer in terms of the dynamic between love and sexual energy, where they meet and where they don’t meet. As most of us know, there are times when sex can generate tremendous closeness and a great depth of meeting. But that’s not always the case; sometimes it’s a way of hiding from intimacy. It’s become clearer to me that my feelings of sexual desire aren’t about physical appearance or sexual gratification; they’re about emotional connection. I think this is true for many people. To generalize, men seem to be more attracted by physical appearance. I sometimes hear the monks talk about the effect it has on them when beautiful women visit the monastery. But if you asked the sisters, they probably couldn’t remember a “beautiful man” visiting the monastery. Instead, beauty comes through relationship; physicality is secondary. Just knowing that more clearly I’ve found helpful.

Being celibate, I feel freer to relate to others without sexual expectations. I notice now that gender, shape, and sexual orientation aren’t determining factors in how intimacy develops in relationships for me. My sense of comradeship with women practitioners has strengthened in a way that wasn’t possible before because of my unexamined conditioning around relating. This is a benefit of contemplating sexual energy.

In a monastery, you may not have much energy arising in a sexual way as it’s not being deliberately stimulated through visual imagery and so forth. The energy can be shaping itself through devotional channels.

In my experience, devotional energy is a kind of life energy. Some people might call this sexual energy, but it is something more. It arises within the mind or heart itself, not in the sexual organs. It happens through the whole physicality. It is seeking to give itself to what is loved—awakening itself—rather than trying to get anything. So transmuting sexual energy in this way is essential if you are celibate, otherwise the life force can be blocked. Devotional practices are helpful with handling this energy, so they are worth cultivating.

What would you say to those who might think that choosing celibacy is denying what it means to be human or repressing one’s sexuality, or is simply a lonely and miserable lifestyle? [Laughter.]

AT: Well, those things can be true, can’t they? [Laughter.] It’s really a challenge. Am I giving up everything in order to live an experience of loneliness and depression? If that turned out to be true, I don’t think anyone would do it for very long! To really wake up the heart, you need the whole of yourself. If you cut off sections of yourself, you won’t have enough strength. It’s really important that sexuality doesn’t close down and distort the heart. You can’t wake up if your heart’s closed.

Through the practice, we can wake up to where the heart is closed. For instance, celibacy can be a rich exploration of loneliness and aloneness. What is it like when there’s no one beside you to share the beautiful moments in life? I found that very challenging in the beginning. There can certainly be a sense of loss. But I also remember His Holiness the Dalai Lama saying that as Tibet was being taken over by the Chinese, he would pour out his problems to whomever was there with him, including the sweepers in his room. We often censor ourselves, sharing our most intimate thoughts and feelings with those “special” to us. We’re only half available most of the time. Not that I have to reveal everything to everyone who comes along, but one of the questions for me is how to be more available to whomever I’m with. It’s an inquiry.

The danger is in crushing our life energy, sexual energy—to think those feelings are not all right—rather than acknowledging how natural they are. There’s also a danger in making sexuality wrong or bad, which, by the way, usually means women are also made bad. We see this around the world in many religious traditions.

Monasticism is a strong element in the Buddhist tradition. One might easily infer that sexual relationships are considered lesser and that serious seekers should be celibate.

AT: Certainly, renunciation is seen as one of the primary supports for spiritual cultivation, whether in lay or monastic life. Because sexual energy is so strong, the renunciation of sexual activity gives great strength to the practice. It also frees one from the complexities and responsibilities of sexual activity and relationships. When one’s heart is primarily set on fulfilling the teachings in this lifetime, then the monastic life can be a great support. Those of us engaged in it have to keep checking out if monasticism is still working for us—in terms of celibacy or, indeed, any of its other characteristics, such as the place of women within it.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible in some other context to develop deep insight in one’s practice. I have three sisters, and we’re all in different places along the spectrum of relationships. We’re all consciously making spiritual journeys. My twin sister’s raising two little kids right now and is deeply committed to practice. I can’t say that she’s working with any less diligence than I am.

There’s a fascinating sutta about two great friends who are “once-returners.” One lives a household life, rides around in a carriage, has a wife. The other is celibate and lives quite an austere life. When the daughter of the celibate disciple challenges the Buddha about whether her father’s friend who is married and lives the life of householder can truly be as far along the path as her renunciate father, the Buddha really tells her off. What I take from this is that one can’t simply look at somebody’s lifestyle to determine their level of cultivation.

What can be said is that if you don’t add fuel to a burning fire, it dies down. The renunciate precepts are about not putting more fuel on the fire of desire. Undertaken with compassion and self-love, renunciation supports clear seeing. As spiritual practice deepens, the life energy reorients itself away from habits rooted in desire that agitate and confuse, and toward simplicity and a life that calms and settles the mind. The teachings are offered out of compassion and should be picked up in that way.

♦

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