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

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

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

Buddhist Halloween Horrors

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

Fear

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

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This article was originally published on October 31, 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Forgetting the Self at a Party Full of Strangers appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The origins of the practice of loving-kindness and the Metta Sutta are recorded in the commentaries to the Suttanipata. As the story goes, a group of monks went off to meditate in a forest. There the “tree spirits” or devas resented the monks’ intrusion into their space and set about spooking them. These devas managed to terrify the monks and completely disrupt their concentration, sending them running back to the Buddha for help. I’m not sure that I believe in tree spirits (though I think trees themselves are spirits), but I can relate to how scary it can be to sleep out in the woods.

This is when the Buddha taught the monks the Metta Sutta, telling them that it would both help them to concentrate and protect them from any demons. When the monks took the sutta and its practice back to the forest, the devas were so moved by the love radiating from the monks, that they not only accepted them sitting among their trees, but actively took care of them while they meditated. 

Whether taken literally or as myth, the story has the same meaning: love is the antidote to fear. It protects us. When we are able to respond with love, fear is conquered.

How does metta address our fear? 

Metta is the practice of openness and non-separation. It asks us to risk letting down the walls, thinking of the welfare of others instead of ourselves. In short, it tells us that protecting the illusory self is not the way to freedom. Metta is not only a practice to cultivate fearlessness, but an expression of the wisdom of fearlessness. Understanding metta means understanding the truth of interdependence and the insubstantiality of self.

How, then, to practice fearless metta? As with all Buddhist practice, the starting point is mindfulness, in this case, mindfulness of fear. Our tendency is often to avoid feeling difficult emotions or addressing them head-on. Instead of being with our feelings, we tend to either react to them or try to suppress or overcome them—fight or flight. 

Buddhism offers a third way: awareness, openness, investigation, and acceptance. These are the key components of mindfulness. With fear, this means a willingness to first and foremost feel the uncomfortable quality of this emotion. In practical terms, this means allowing the fear to arise and flow through our body and mind without resistance. The breath anchors us in the present moment and helps the fearful energy move through the body. As we become more intimate with this feeling, we bring an attitude of caring and kindness—metta—to the feeling itself. We try to soothe our own fear with this attitude. Soon we may find that we are able to let go of many of the common manifestations of fear in a natural, effortless way. 

If it’s true, as the title of the seventies self-help book proclaims, that Love Is Letting Go of Fear, then that must mean hate is clinging to fear. As simplistic as this formula may appear, it holds a basic truth.

I learned this lesson many years ago when I worked for a delivery service in LA. The days were long and stressful driving my beat-up Subaru down crowded boulevards and highways shuttling documents and packages to law offices, banks, and other businesses around the city. One late afternoon coming down the Hollywood Freeway after my last delivery, traffic tight but still moving fast, a car weaving across lanes suddenly cut in front of me, forcing me to slam on the brakes and swerve to avoid an accident. The driver kept right on going, while I felt a rush of anger grab hold. Exhausted, caffeinated, and edgy I jumped on the gas and went after him. Caught in the grip of my rage, I came up on him and did the same thing he did to me, swerving in front of him and narrowly avoiding an accident. He leaned on his horn and cut across lanes again, disappearing amid the mass of cars approaching downtown LA.

My heart pounding, my head swimming now, I pulled off the highway onto the shoulder, still holding fast to the steering wheel. I sat there taking deep breaths and trying to calm down. What was I thinking? I could have gotten killed? What if that guy had a gun? I knew I’d been terribly foolish, but I didn’t really understand why I’d reacted that way.

When someone cuts us off on the highway, they are endangering our lives. Even though we may not think of it that way consciously, our body and our nervous system know it. That danger triggers fear. What our bodies and minds often do with that fear is turn it into anger. Our survival instinct tells us that if we are in danger, we need to protect ourselves, and that very often means we need to fight. As though we were being attacked, we go into an aggressive mode. We are operating a large machine that can be a violent weapon, and we are in a sense trapped on the road. In the logic of fight or flight, there’s no real room for flight, so fight it is.

This process plays out in many ways that have broader implications than a dangerous moment in our cars.

Fear of change, fear of “the other,” fear of losing power or wealth or land, these are all drivers of hatred, the motors behind war, oppression, and exploitation. Human history is littered with the rubble of these fears, and our own era continues this tragic pattern. The roots of these horrors lie in the fear and hatred that live in the human mind. As we as individuals hate, so too do our communities and nations. No amount of treaties or international agreements can eliminate the roots of war.

Only the transformation of human consciousness will change the larger human culture. It is this transformation that Buddhism seeks.

Practice: Breathing With Fear

To practice with fear we need a strong willingness. Our instinct is to avoid, so we need to be committed to the process. The practice focuses on body sensations and experiences, avoiding entanglements of the mind. Try applying it next time you are anxious or afraid. 

Start with several deeper breaths and relaxing the body.

Feel the fear as sensation and energy in the body.

Give space for those sensations, releasing any tendency to suppress or hold back

Keep breathing and releasing.

Relax the facial muscles, jaw, forehead, eyes. 

Relax the shoulders.

Relax the belly.

Continue to feel the energy, noticing any tendency to tighten or resist.

Continue to relax and breathe.

If anxiety starts to get stronger, take more deep breaths and slowly exhale, releasing tension.

Notice the thoughts behind the fear and recognize their emptiness.

You are alive; you are breathing; trust that you can hold these feelings with kindness and wisdom.

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From Living Kindness: Metta Practice for the Whole of Our Lives by Kevin Griffin © 2022. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

The post Practicing Fearless Metta appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I imagine the mind of the Buddha, I think of a mind without boundaries, a mind without limits and therefore without fear. I see our own path to awakening in this light. On our journey of opening, we come to the boundaries of what is familiar or what is comfortable. It’s precisely at these boundaries that the deeply conditioned pattern of fear begins to emerge. We find ourselves being afraid of what in any particular moment is the truth of that moment. We need to learn how to work with this fear. Otherwise, our lives become fragmented; we split off from parts of ourselves, from parts of what is true in experience.

In our meditation, when we reach the boundary where fear begins to arise, we can slowly train ourselves to relax and open. Through this practice, we develop a great strength and equanimity of mind. The first step is learning to see what it is that we’re afraid of. In this way, we come to recognize it clearly, to see what limits us and then to explore the possibilities of going beyond those limits.

The most obvious experience where fear may arise—and the one we can work with the most simply—is of physical pain. We’ve been very conditioned in our lives to avoid unpleasant sensations. We can see how this manifests in meditation practice; if we’re not really mindful, we automatically shift our position simply to alleviate discomfort. There’s a teaching in Buddhism that says: “Movement masks suffering.” Usually, we think we move because we really want something. But it’s interesting to see it from the other side, that we’re often moving simply to avoid dealing with what’s present. It’s an instructive exercise to watch throughout the day, to investigate why we move. Seeing this begins to change our relationship to pain.

To work skillfully with pain and discomfort, and to slowly decondition the response of fear, we need to recognize different kinds of pain. First, there is pain as a danger signal. We put our hand in fire; it hurts; we take it out. The Dalai Lama calls this response “wholesome fear,” which is really another word for wisdom.

We also can experience pain when we feel accumulated tensions or old traumas stored in the body. Often, in meditation, it’s the discomfort of that untangling that we’re feeling. Understanding discomfort as an unwinding can create a sense of interest and a certain quality of ease.

There are also stages in our practice, stages of insight, where unpleasant sensation is just what’s characteristic of that stage. It’s very useful to know this, because our common interpretation is that pleasant is good and painful is bad. A painful sitting may well be a deeper place of practice than a comfortable one.

So the first area where we can see fear arising is with physical pain. We come to the edge, the boundary, of what is acceptable, and right there is the place to practice. It also can be helpful to turn our attention to the knowing of the pain, to the awareness itself. We might think of awareness as an open window; everything that’s known is simply appearances, things arising in the openness of the window. But the openness of the window is not affected by anything that appears in it. To the degree that we are recognizing, or abiding in, the openness, we stay in a place of equanimity.

We also come to our boundary of comfort with certain memories or images which arise in the mind. They may come as memories of specific things that happened in our past. Or they may be archetypal images of cruelty, of rage. If we’re not mindful just in the moment when these images arise, they may be the cause of great fear.

When my teacher Munindra first came to this country, he asked me to rent him videos of violent movies, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He kept saying, “Show me the worst!” He was showing me that no matter how frightening, it was really just an image, just a movie. It’s exactly the same for whatever is arising in our minds. When we remember that, we can see through the images that come up so we don’t get caught in fear.

There’s a Zen story of a monk who lived in a cave in the mountains. He spent years making a painting of a tiger on the wall of the cave. It was so realistic that when he finally finished it and looked at it, he got frightened. We do that a lot. We paint pictures in our minds, look at them, and get frightened. When we see this happening, it may be useful to note, “Painted tiger.” We don’t need to buy into the fear.

Fear also may arise when we are not accepting of difficult and painful emotions, such as unworthiness, jealousy, abandonment, rage or hatred. Fear and non-acceptance of emotions leads to insecurity and fragmentation within us. It’s as if some part of us is split off. Through the inner pressure not to feel these emotions, not to acknowledge them, we construct a self-image that we then present to the world. We start looking to others for validation because we have not opened to and accepted the full range of what’s within us.

It’s essential in our practice that we open to these emotions in just the same way we learned to open to physical pain. This does not mean searching for great emotional catharsis. But when such painful feelings do arise, we need to see that they are often bringing us to the boundary of what we’re comfortable with. That’s exactly the place we want to be, a place of further acceptance and opening.

The great power of meditation practice in this realm is that we slowly begin to see the empty, transparent, insubstantial nature even of powerful emotions. Whenever intense emotions such as rage or unworthiness arise, we might try to see them all as kids dressed up in Halloween costumes—ghosts and pirates and witches. When trick-or-treaters come to our doors, usually we’re not frightened. We could see all of the emotions that are arising in the mind in the same way—just little kids in costumes.

Just as with physical pain, certain images or powerful emotions, we also come to an edge in our deepening experience of change or loss. The Buddha would often say, “Whatever has the nature to arise will also pass away.” (In truly hearing this, the listener would often become awakened.) Although the truth of this is obvious, we don’t usually plumb the depth of what it means. Decay and falling apart—impermanence—is inherent in all conditioned, constructed things. It’s not that something goes wrong or that something’s a mistake. Change is the nature of every single aspect of our experience. Not opening to the truth of change and impermanence often becomes a fear of death. As a way of freeing our minds from this fear, the Buddha recommended that we reflect on the inevitability of death every day.

There’s a teaching story of somebody jumping out of an airplane. The first reaction to the freefall is tremendous enthusiasm and exhilaration. But when the jumper realizes that she doesn’t have a parachute, there’s tremendous fear. Then, at a certain point, she realizes there’s no ground; so she relaxes and enjoys the ride. We go through similar stages in our meditation as we see the truth of change; we move from exhilaration, to fear, to a place of equanimity and ease where we understand the empty nature of it all.

Here are a few last thoughts on ways to work with fear. First, we need to recognize it when it appears. It can be helpful to note, “Fear, fear, fear,” watching that the tone of voice is friendly. This noting is a shorthand for that quality of mind which is open and accepting. Relating to fear itself with the quality of lovingkindness and of interest in what’s happening gives us the courage to be with things just as they are.

In our meditation practice, we might experiment with playing at the edge of our comfort zone. Maybe it means sitting a little longer; maybe it means what Goenka-ji, one of my teachers, called “vow hours.” We might take some period of time in a sitting when we make a determination not to move. This may bring us right to the edge of what we’re willing to be with, and at that edge fear may arise. In this way, we learn how to relax, to accept that “It’s okay; let me feel it.” Of course, we need the wisdom and courage to know when the suffering or the pain is too much. We may need to back off from it until we again find some balance.

The Dalai Lama, with his usual wisdom, has given some simple advice on working with fear: “If you have some fear of pain or suffering, you should examine whether you can do anything about it. If you can, there is no need to worry. If you cannot, then there’s also no need to worry.”

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Related Inquiring Mind articles: 

• “On Fear & Fearlessness: A Conversation with Tenzin Palmo, Yvonne Rand, Ajahn Sundara & Ajahn Jitindriya”
  
• “The Terror Within”
  
• “Awakening From the Trance of Unworthiness”
  

The post Practicing on the Edge appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As editors, we love to listen when an article sparks a spirited debate, as long as the conversation remains informed and civil. But we are equally pleased to hear an outpouring of gratitude, as we did following our Fall 2021 issue, which invited readers to join us in celebrating Tricycle’s 30th anniversary.

What Kurt Spellmeyer (“Helpless, Not Hopeless”) calls “helplessness” I’ve experienced in the past year as “smallness”—the reality that my individual life and impact are negligible (but not exactly zero) in a vast universe. Far from depressing me, this smallness has driven me, metaphorically, into the arms of our deepest interconnection. This is new to me, so I haven’t tried to articulate it much. But I certainly couldn’t do any better than Spellmeyer has here. What an excellent and important essay.

—John Backman

Mindy Newman’s article about Tibetan Buddhist practices for engaging with the goddess Tara (“Embodying the Healing Mother”) has been very helpful to me. I am having a flare-up of shingles, which I know is related to accumulated stress and anxiety. After reading the article, I have come to almost welcome that sickness; I must first welcome it if I am to do all I can to get rid of that sickness. I send all my discomfort to Tara, asking her to heal the sick part of my little self. Thank you so much for this deep understanding.

—Betty Dunlop

I very much enjoyed reading the conversation between two artistic stars who are fluent in the dharma, the composer Philip Glass and the painter Fredericka Foster (“Music, Meditation, Painting—and Dreaming”). The idea that you have to accept some panic, to be lost in the uncertainty of the creative expression, is counterintuitive but seems to explain creative insight. Turning off the observer-mind to increase creative energy in the artistic process may be the way of genius. Thank you! Great minds, great piece.

—Jeff

Thanks for everything you do. Particularly for those of us outside large urban areas, the Tricycle team is an important part of our sangha. And from this former magazine editor who knows how precarious a business it can be, big congratulations on making 30 years (“The 2,500-Year Argument” by James Shaheen).

—Jack

I admire the Zen teacher and author Norman Fischer and have deep appreciation for his selfless work over the years. But his article (“No Beginning, No Ending, No Fear”) feels very out of touch with the lived experience of so many people in this world who suffer from trauma, daily fear, and the constraints of poverty, violence, disease, and oppression.

Even for those of us fortunate enough to live in materially comfortable, safe environments, the approach Fischer seems to be taking here of rationalizing fear away by looking closely into experience and seeing that There is really nothing but change, so why should we feel afraid? feels hollow. Fischer writes, “Fear is always fantastic, always fake. What we fear never happens in the way we fear it.” That may be true in the narrow sense that we can never accurately imagine all the actual circumstances and minute details of an event we are afraid may happen. But what about people who live their whole lives under oppression, see generations of their families torn apart by systemic violence, and are afraid it will happen to them as well? Maybe they can’t know how actual events will unfold, but they can have a pretty good idea. And do the specific details really matter when the reality is that countless people live lives ruled by fear and under limitations imposed on them by others?

Fear is not fake. It is real. It can have very real causes. And it can arise viscerally, as Fischer says, without apparent cause. Fear is one of the great energies of life, and it can indeed offer a gateway to freedom, as Fischer writes here. But my experience has been that it is a gateway to be entered not by dismissing fear as baseless in the way a logician would dismiss a flawed argument but by moving into my fear and befriending it even when I wake up at night in sweating terror for no reason I can see—in other words, accepting that the fear is real, finding out how it feels to let it be there, and trusting that, yes, whatever happens, it will be OK because—and maybe this is his point after all—this “me” that feels fear is really just part of experience unfolding, not someone who has something to be afraid of.

If we analyze fear as a conceptual misunderstanding, we are just using another, more sophisticated escape route that can cut us off from the freedom that comes from embracing and truly knowing in our bones the insubstantiality of all existence.

—Andy Hinson

The Question

What is your favorite work of Buddhist-inspired fiction, and why?

The Buddha, Geoff and Me by Edward Canfor-Dumas. Love, loss, fear, doubt, skepticism, relief, hope, grief— it’s all in there and neatly wrapped up in some decent lay terms. It’s one of the books I read in the early days of my practice and it changed my life. I still go back to it when I need a pick-me-up.
—Kelly Day

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being for its characters, humor, and reflections on coincidence—in time and of self.
—Elizabeth Angowski

Life of Pi. Its theme is the search for the answer to the question “Is there a god?” I think it’s a story about a journey through hardships and delights in the search for enlightenment. The movie does not do it justice. I recommend this novel for one’s reading bucket list.
—Leslie

I always thought The Big Lebowski had dipped a toe or two in dharma waters, but recently I saw an interview with Jeff Bridges where he says it actually never had Buddhism as a reference; he only discovered the similarities decades later when talking to Bernie Glassman for another movie.
—@mariana_aurelio

For the next issue:

How does your Buddhist practice inform your relationship with the environment?

Email your brief responses to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or tweet us at @tricyclemag.

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In his book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh tells us: 

We may think our agitation is ours alone, but if we look carefully, we’ll see that it is our inheritance from our whole society and many generations of our ancestors. Individual consciousness is made of the collective consciousness, and the collective consciousness is made of individual consciousness.

Like much of his work, this reminder is prescient, especially as we continue to navigate ever-changing coronavirus protocols, the escalating climate emergency, and deadlocks in American politics that halt the possibility of true progressive, human-centered policy. In juxtaposition to these extremes, we might feel that we are standing still, not making progress on our path, or that we have been left without a choice on how we get to exist. 

These times don’t have to be a disruption. They are an opportunity to acknowledge impermanence and recognize the roots of our suffering.

From the small moment of testing a new recipe to the larger moment of asking a love interest whether they’d like to be exclusive, states of not-knowing live on the same plane of existence. Herein lies that danger that Thich Nhat Hanh warns us about regarding the collective consciousness. When we’re bombarded with the public discourse of our “unprecedented times,” no matter how big or small the issue, we are susceptible to getting lost in the narrative of what we believe about our suffering. We allow external influences to drop us deeper into the worldly truth of our thoughts and feelings instead of recognizing that in these liminal waters of uncertainty, fear and helplessness will be intensified.  

Recognition isn’t an easy task. 

This past summer I built an intimate relationship with fear and helplessness. I’ve struggled with depression since I was a teenager, and this particular season of heaviness had me contemplating the fact that I might never “get better.” The fear of looking down the road and finding myself consistently in the grip of depression was present. So too was the helplessness of my mind’s storytelling that “this is everything, this is all-encompassing, this is all that will ever be and you have no choice.”

These thoughts are mental formations, or chitta samskara. Anything that is made of something else—be it a plant or our fear and helplessness—is a mental formation, and, much like unpredictability itself, these formations are present at all times. They are aspects of our consciousness that come from wholesome and unwholesome seeds (kleshas), which will be watered and fertilized differently, depending on our current state of affairs and our individual life experience. Outward triggers will “water” these seeds and allow them to take root. Our current societal conditions, for example, have “watered” and fortified our fear, helplessness, and uncertainty to the enhanced states so many of us feel today. I suffered from these effects during this summer’s episode of depression, but the feeling has always been there. The not-knowing of this time amplified the feelings. I would venture to guess that whatever your particular seed of suffering is, the same has happened to you. What gets left out of the conversation is that this is actually a dynamic space to be in.   

The dharma invites us to embrace these often painful energies as teachers. When a feeling from an unwholesome seed rises to the surface, we have to witness it with gentleness. That alone takes strength. Allowing yourself to be a person experiencing fill-in-the-blank feeling may require a certain degree of release. When our suffering is running deep, this invitation may feel even more difficult to navigate, the heaviness too burdensome to bear. Whatever the feeling is, however, allowing yourself to go to its depths can help you touch the emptiness of the emotion. 

If we can recognize and accept our pain without pushing it away or clinging to it, we’ll be better able to see that joys and sorrows are truly the same. Through letting go and touching emptiness, we can then choose a compassionate response.

Consider the uncertainty, fear, and helplessness seeds that have taken root and sprouted to the surface in yourself. With gentle curiosity, you can ask: What does this seedling look like? How does it move in your body? Can you give it a sound? If you could touch it, how would it feel? This intimacy can lead you to see what actions you take in response to these seeds, and to know your habitual responses. With creative wisdom, you can investigate your unwholesome seeds and note: “This one drags me to the bottom, but here is bodhicitta too.” 

Once spotted and identified, the seedling needs to be properly tended to. This is calling in right diligence. With diligence, you can regain your agency. Instead of this unwholesome seed being an unwanted suffering or vulnerability where we might collapse in on ourselves, we can recognize what this pain looks and feels like and how we can move toward a skillful and compassionate response. 

This is the joy of being amidst and leaning into disruption. It is from this place that we can choose to take the next steps that anchor us along our uncertain paths. 

The post The Not-Knowing of Our Time appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Buddha has many epithets. He’s called the Enlightened One, the One Who Thus Comes and Goes, the Conqueror, the Noblest of All Humans Who Walk on Two Legs. He is also called the Fearless One because he has seen through all the causes of fear. His awakening moment, coming suddenly after six years of intense meditation, shows him that there is actually nothing to fear. Fear—convincing as it may seem—is actually a conceptual mistake.

What is there to be afraid of anyway? Fear is always future-based. We fear what might happen later. The past is gone, so there’s no point in being afraid of it. If past traumas cause fear in us, it is only because we fear that the traumatic event will reoccur. That’s what trauma is—wounding caused by a past event that makes us chronically fearful about the future and so queasy in the present. But the future doesn’t exist now, in the present, the only moment in which we are ever alive. So though our fear may be visceral, it is based on a misconception, that the future is somehow now. It’s not. The present might be unpleasant and even dangerous, but it is never fearful. In the full intensity of the present moment there is never anything to fear—there is only something to deal with. It is a subtle point but it is absolutely true: the fear I experience now is not really present-moment based: I am afraid of what is going to happen. This is what the Buddha realized. If you could be in the radical present moment, not lost in the past, not anxious about the future, you could be fearless.

If you are suddenly threatened by an intense-looking guy pointing a gun at your head, you will likely be frozen with fear. But even then, it isn’t the appearance of the man and the gun that you are afraid of. It’s what is going to happen next. It is true, though, that in that moment you are not thinking about the future. Your experience is immediate, body-altering fear. Your reaction is biological; you can’t help it. As an animal, you have survival instinct, so when your life is threatened your reaction is automatic and strong. But you are a human animal with human consciousness—a problematic condition, but one with possibilities. It is possible that you could overcome your animal fear.

There are many recorded instances in the scriptures of the Buddha’s life being threatened. In all such cases the Buddha remains calm and subdues the threat. Though the stories may or may not be mythical, they certainly intend to tell us that we are capable of overcoming the survival instinct and remaining calm even in the face of grave danger. The truth is, in many dangerous situations the ability to stay calm will keep you safer than your gut reaction of fight or flight.

But what if your life weren’t actually being threatened? What if the only thing actually happening to you was insult, disrespect, frustration, or betrayal, but you reacted with the alarm and urgency of someone whose life was at stake? And continued, long after the event, to harbor feelings of anger and revenge? In that case, your reaction would be out of scale with the event, your animal instinct for survival quite misplaced. You would have taken a relatively small matter and made it into something much more unpleasant, and even more harmful, than it needed to be.

Impermanence is the basic Buddhist concept. Nothing lasts. Our life begins, it ends, and every moment that occurs between this beginning and ending is another beginning and ending. In other words, every moment we are disappearing a little. Life doesn’t end suddenly at death. It is ending all the time. Impermanence is constant.

Although we all understand this when we think about it, we seem not to be capable of really taking it in. Buddhism teaches that behind all our fears is our inability to actually appreciate, on a visceral level, this truth of impermanence. Unable to accept that we are fading away all the time, we are fearful about the future, as if somehow if everything went exactly right we could be preserved for all time. To put this another way, all our fears are actually displacements of the one great fear, the fear of death.

These days we have fears that seem to go beyond our personal fear of death. Climate change is a catastrophe. In the fall of 2018 we had terrible forest fires in California. Even as far away from the fires as the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, you could smell the smoke. You couldn’t go outside, the air was so bad. But even worse than the experience was the thought that this is the future, this is how it is going to be from now on. There are going to be more and more fires, hurricanes, typhoons; the ice caps are melting, sea levels and summer temperatures are rising, the planet is slowly becoming uninhabitable. This may or may not be true, but there are good reasons to fear that it is true. So we feel afraid not for our own death but also for our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren. What will happen to them in the future?

I have a friend who is a great outdoorsman and environmental activist. Some years ago, when the US government was just beginning to become active in denying climate change, my friend got really upset. He was upset about climate change realities but even more upset that people weren’t paying attention to them, were denying or ignoring climate change, because the government was casting doubt. Here we were in a desperate situation, something needed to be done right away, and people were going on with their ordinary business as though everything were fine.

My friend was in despair over this, and he would tell me about it. As the years went on his despair and upset grew and grew.

One day when he was telling me about it, I thought, It isn’t climate change he’s upset about. I said this to him, and he got really mad at me. I didn’t really know what he was upset about. But it seemed to me that although he believed it was climate change he was upset about, actually it was something else. He stayed for a while and eventually he said, You were right. So, what is it you are upset about? I asked him. He said, Yes, I am upset about climate change, but I didn’t realize until you brought it up that there is something else I am upset about: I am getting old, I can’t climb mountains like I used to. Who knows how long I will be able to ride my bike for hundreds of miles or do all the things I love to do. I am upset about the climate, but what makes me feel this anguish is that I am scared of my aging and dying. The planet really is under threat. And so am I.

So it may be true that the power of our fear always comes from our fear of endings—our own ending being the closest and most immediate of all endings. When we think of the world of the future, we can feel sorrow, grief, and disappointment that we human beings cannot reverse course and do better, that we seem to be unable to solve a problem we ourselves have caused.

But fear is different, fear is desolation, desperation, anguish, despair, and sometimes anger. Grief, sorrow, disappointment are quiet feelings we can live with. They can be peaceful and poignant, they can be motivating. When we feel these feelings, we can be more compassionate, kinder to one another, we can be patiently active in promoting solutions.

When we understand the real basis of our fear, we can see through it. Will our lives end, will the world end? Yes. But this was always going to be the case. All difficult moments occur in the present, and the present moment, no matter what it brings, is always completely different from our projections about the future. Even if what we fear about the future actually comes to pass, the present moment in which it occurs won’t be anything like the moment we projected in the past. Fear is always fantastic, always fake. What we fear never happens in the way we fear it.

There’s a traditional Buddhist practice to contemplate beginnings and endings, called the five reflections. The reflections gently guide the practitioner in meditating on the fact that old age, sickness, and death are built-in features of the human body and mind, that no one can avoid them. Life begins, therefore it has to end. And being subject to beginning and ending, life is inherently vulnerable.

The point of this meditation isn’t to frighten; quite the opposite: the way to overcome fear is to face it and become familiar with it. Since fear is always fear about the future, to face the present fear, and see that it is misplaced, is to reduce it. When I give myself over, for a period of time, or perhaps on a regular basis, to the contemplation of the realities of my aging and dying, I become used to them. I begin to see them differently. Little by little I come to see that I am living and dying all the time, changing all the time, and that this is what makes life possible and precious. In fact, a life without impermanence is not only impossible, it is entirely undesirable. Everything we prize in living comes from the fact of impermanence. Beauty. Love. My fear of the ending of my life is a future projection that doesn’t take into account what my life actually is and has always been. The integration of impermanence into my sense of identity little by little makes me less fearful.

The reflection on beginnings and endings is taken still further in Buddhist teachings. The closer you contemplate beginnings and endings, the more you begin to see that they are impossible. They can’t exist. There are no beginnings and endings. The Heart Sutra, chanted every day in Zen temples around the world, says that there is no birth and so there is no death either.

What does this mean? We are actually not born. We know this from science, there is nothing that is created out of nothing—everything comes from something, is a continuation and a transformation of something that already exists. When a woman gives birth, she does not really give birth, she simply opens her body to a continuation of herself and the father of the child, to their parents and their parents before them, to the whole human and nonhuman family of life and nonlife that has contributed to the coming together of preexisting elements that we will see as a newborn child. So there really is no birth. This is not a metaphorical truth.

If no beginning, then no ending. There is no death. In what we call death the body does not disappear. It continues its journey forth. Not a single element is lost. The body simply transforms into air and water and earth and sky. Our mind travels on too, its passions, fears, loves, and energies continue on throughout this universe. Because we have lived, the world is otherwise than it would have been, and the energy of our life’s activity travels onward, circulates, joins and rejoins others to make the world of the future. There is no death, there is only continuation. There is nothing to be afraid of.

♦

Excerpted from When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer © 2021. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications.

The post No Beginning, No Ending, No Fear appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Threats to our health and wellbeing, like the coronavirus pandemic, increasingly frequent natural disasters, and social injustice, can instill deep-seated feelings of anxiety and concern for our safety and that of those around us. In this Dharma Talk series, Bön Buddhist master Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche teaches meditation practices that help us act from a place of calm awareness instead of fear.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche led a live meditation session, dharma talk, and Q&A session on Tuesday, October 13th. View the recording here.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is the founder and spiritual director of Ligmincha International. Recognized as one of the few Bön masters now living in the West, he is known for his clear, engaging style and his ability to bring the ancient Tibetan teachings into a contemporary format that is relevant for Westerners.

The post Concern without Panic appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Bears swish when they walk. Their legs are chubby, with thick fur rubbing smoothly as they amble along. I didn’t know bears made this particular sound until one happened upon me at a meditation retreat as I sat on a bench atop a mountain knoll in North Carolina. My memory of this encounter is based almost entirely on sound alone. I saw the bear for only a moment when I turned my head at the noise, expecting to see a fellow retreat attendee emerging from the woods to join me. Instead I saw her (I am not sure, but I think of the bear as her), head heavy, sunlight flowing down the soft slope of her forehead to the bridge of her nose as she bowed towards the earth. 

*** 

Earlier that morning I lay with my back against the wood of the meditation hall, eyes closed as our instructor Cindy led us through a visualization meditation. She’s a spritely, slight woman, with a cheerful Southern accent and a ready smile. Cindy began in a familiar manner. We were discussing compassion that day, and I expected Cindy to follow the natural course of a metta, or lovingkindness, meditation. 

“Bring to mind someone you care deeply for,” she said.

I imagined my mother.

“As we follow this person, pay close attention to how you feel physically in your body,” she continued.

I looked forward to that warm feeling metta provides—the comfort in sending good thoughts towards others.

“Now, imagine you see this person surrounded by fire. Hot flames all around a hell realm, if you will.”

Not quite the comforting visualization I was expecting.

“Imagine they are burning and there’s nothing you can do,” she continued as I struggled to imagine my mother in hell, a concept foreign to me, having been raised in an agnostic household.

“This person who you care so much about is now in an ice realm. They are freezing to death…”

Jesus!, I thought.

The rounds of the visualization continued in this way, without relief. Hell realm, ice realm, my mom going blind and wandering close to a steep cliff-edge. Behind me I heard a woman begin to sob. Distracted, I wondered why I did not have tears as well. I love my mother, so why couldn’t I feel much while envisioning these horrible situations?

Cindy’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Now, imagine this person in the human realm. But they are weak, diseased, and dying. You must watch them suffer and know there is nothing you can do to help them.”

My mother has joked before that when she gets old, too old to stand or to be trusted on her own, that my sister and I just have to park her wheelchair in the woods and she’ll be happy the whole day long. Watching rabbits jump over one another, ruby-throated hummingbirds suspended in the air, feeling a warm breeze on her papery palms. Though I was meant to imagine her struggling, this peaceful scene came to mind instead. It’s what she wanted, what would happen. I felt calm. The woman behind me shook quietly.

***

Since childhood I have looked for bears on those rare occasions when I was in a place where they actually exist, and during the retreat, as I was in bear country, thoughts of these primal, shaggy creatures had crossed my mind several times already. So perhaps it was not a true premonition when I walked up to the bench on the grassy knoll that afternoon and thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to see a bear? I almost felt like, at 22 years of age, I should have seen one already. Memories of missed chances floated across my consciousness as I walked: hoisting a cloth bag of beef jerky and oats high into a tree in the Sierras while backpacking; gazing out the car window on annual trips to Maryland when I was a girl, searching between flashes of pine for a stubby snout. On the first day of the retreat the staff had gone over the local natural hazards, black widow spiders and cottonmouths and black bears. They advised us to write down where we were headed and at what time on a white sheet of paper pinned to the communal cork board, and before heading out I almost didn’t put my name down. The map indicated the knoll was only a 15 minute walk—what could happen? I unlaced my hiking boots outside the sala and went in at the last minute to scribble my name on the list.

I had thought about seeing a bear the same way anyone thinks of seeing something dangerous and awesome—abstractly, almost as fantasy. In my imagination I would perhaps be up on the crest of a snowy hill, peering down to a creek or river and see a bear approach the flowing water and bend down for a drink. Or maybe I would be on a wooded trail like ones I walked so often in Ohio, and spot a bear far down the path in front of me, both of us staring at one another for a moment before darting off. I tried to remember what I had read about what to do in a grizzly bear or black bear encounter—for which species did you back away, make yourself bigger, or curl into a ball? The only bear tip I was certain of was to make noise as you walk, but it would seem overly precautious for me to follow that rule on this silent retreat, as I walked past the quiet wooden cabins of the dharma community.

A clearing on the hill opened as I left the woods, like a painting being created all at once. The grass spread wide, the sky unpeeled overhead. In the center of the knoll a bench overlooked far away mountains that rippled, slate-blue, as if freshly risen from the Earth’s core. I sat almost giddy in the silence and hot sun. I was there for some time before I heard the footsteps approaching behind me, quite close. I turned with a smile, expecting a fellow retreatant, and then I was standing and I couldn’t tell you what emotion my face was showing. For a split second I thought the bear was a dog. It was less than ten feet away and walking through the tall grass straight towards me.

“No, no, no!” I heard myself saying, almost as if I was mistaken. It couldn’t be.

Without thinking I grabbed my backpack from the bench and ran across the field, diagonally opposite the bear, in a dash to get off the knoll and back to the trail. I glanced over my shoulder in pure prayer that I wouldn’t see her chasing me, and I saw in a moment that she had also run from me in the other direction, both of us rustling into the woods at the same time. My entire body felt like stone as I shakily sought to calm my breathing, without success. I remembered the tip to make noise to avoid startling bears, and though I knew it was a little too late for that I started to sing, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember a single song. I assigned a small melody to a strange yodel that popped into my head, too afraid, apparently, to recall lyrics. A “Yodel-lay-hoo-hoo!” emerged awkwardly as I hurried down the path and back to the retreat grounds. On the way I saw another retreatant heading up the path and broke the silence to warn her about the bear up ahead, and to my embarrassment I found it a struggle to hold back tears while issuing my warning.

For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, I could not calm down. Even at the evening meditation I had to fight the urge to open my eyes and turn around. In my mind, she was still behind me. As I lay in my small bed at the end of the day, I noticed my shoulders and back ached from being clenched. I closed the cloth curtain to my room, finally finding the privacy to cry. I didn’t want anyone to see a reaction that I barely understood myself. I was ashamed. Black bears aren’t even particularly dangerous, and I was safe, so why did I still feel afraid hours later? All the times I had thought about seeing bears seemed to mock me. I had always envisioned myself feeling gracious, awe-inspired, invigorated by a bear sighting. I had never felt fear in my fantasies.

***

This retreat was new for me, a yoga retreat connecting movement and poses (asanas) to the Four Immeasurables, a Buddhist conceptual framework I knew nothing about before signing up. Cindy, our trusty guide, described the Four Immeasurables as boundless qualities that exist without end both within us and in the world around us. These qualities are equanimity, joy, love, and compassion.

At first, I doubted these qualities related in any real sense to yoga, which I had practiced mainly as a form of exercise. The connection became clear, however, as the days passed. Cindy led us to notice how it specifically felt, physically, to embody the Immeasurables through meditation and movement. Was there a similar buoyancy in your chest after a meditation on joy as when you arched your low-back in a crescent lunge? Did the same constriction in your throat you experienced during an unpleasant visualization also appear when you became frustrated by failing to force your body to fit an idealized yoga shape?

During the brief session at the end of the day for discussion and dharma talks, several of my fellow retreatants recalled how painful the visualizations of suffering had been. How, they asked, was envisioning loved ones in the hell realm or the ice realm connected to compassion?

In response Cindy referred us to the slips of paper she had handed out that listed the Four Immeasurables in a table form, with categories for “close” and “far” enemies of each Immeasurable. Compassion’s far enemy, which I interpreted as its opposite, was listed as “fear.” Cindy described how the far enemies of the Immeasurables act as blockages that prevent the flow of the immeasurable quality from being felt.

Cindy, perched before all of us on our cushions peering at her with eager eyes, explained that the fear blocking compassion could take many forms. You could fear that a person you love who is suffering could come to depend on you for care, or you might fear the attachment awakened in you by watching someone suffer—but generally, the fear comes from identifying yourself in their pain. Imagining yourself in their situation, fearing pain, prevents you from empathizing fully with the other person and feeling true compassion. The point of meditating on painful visualizations, Cindy explained, is to observe what the fear of suffering feels like in the body. 

I realized that all of what I was unable to feel during our meditations came pouring out of me after my encounter with the bear. Because of her, I recognized how much I fear suffering, and the possibility of suffering. Perhaps it was natural for me to shut my negative feelings off during the meditation. Who wants those sensations in their body? But my avoidance prevented me from reckoning with even the hypothetical possibility of my mother’s suffering. What would happen when direct physical suffering afflicted my mother? Would I be prepared?

*** 

This past Thanksgiving, months after the bear sighting, I stood on the front porch of my aunt Jenny’s house, my parents and I saying our goodbyes after dinner. My grandpa Mickey was leaving as well, escorted by my uncle Todd who lived just one house over. Frail but still chipper, even in his 90s, Mickey leaned onto Todd’s bent elbow as they slowly approached the stairs before pausing.

“Chris, help him down,” my aunt told my dad.

My dad tried to go to Mickey’s other side, but Jenny, whose career has been devoted to elderly care, stopped him.

“No, no, you have to go behind him and hold his belt up.”

As the words left her lips, I saw that what she meant related both to Mickey’s center of gravity and his dignity. Leaning tremblingly over the top stair onto my uncle’s arm, Mickey’s pants had sunk down a few inches, exposing the naked flesh of the top part of his rear end. I looked to my dad and saw, if only for a moment, something that resembled fear flash across his face before he stepped forward and looped his fingers through Mickey’s back belt-loop and the three of them carefully descended the stairs.

As my parents and I walked to the car, I felt ashamed that I had felt ashamed. My first instinct had not been compassion, but rather a recoiling, a burning embarrassment at what I perceived as pathetic. Though we didn’t discuss it, I wondered if my father had been embarrassed as well before stepping in to hoist up the pants. My dad does not work with the elderly as his sister does, and he will sometimes express relief that his more knowledgeable siblings live close to Mickey.  My dad will admit he does not feel prepared to care for an aging man.

I understood that my reaction on the porch stairs served a clear but obstructive purpose—my embarrassment masked my fear. My fear that eventually the elderly man would be my father, and I will be the one expected to not feel shame, but to step up and help him, even, or especially, in situations that our culture construes as demeaning. My fear that I wouldn’t know what to do, or how to help him. And the fear that eventually, I may be the one relying on someone else to lift my pants up and help me down the stairs.

I rarely imagined seeing my parents age, and when called to do so, I clung to the fantasy my mother gave me, of her happily parked in a wheelchair in the woods, reading a good book. With luck, maybe it will all be just like that. But now I remember the bear. Our encounter on the knoll was not at all what I had for years imagined. The reality was terrifying, my response confusing. 

Perhaps we can’t really be prepared for suffering, but we can approach fear of the suffering in a different way. Fear, with its shoulders of stone and pounding heart, deserves to be met with kindness. And, with kindness, it might yet show us a path toward unending love and compassion should we choose to look for it. There’s an awe in living with bears, an awe of sunlight cascading down the soft slope of her forehead and the bridge of her nose as this creature of such power bows, humbled, to the earth.

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We’d all like certainty in our lives. If you’re like me, the desire to know what’s going to happen to you would sit near the top of your wish list. But none of us can know.

One of the conditions of being alive is that you’re subject to constant change and all it implies, including uncertainty, unpredictability, and a lack of control over much that happens to you.

Here are some strategies and practices to help you find a measure of peace and contentment in the midst of life’s uncertainty.

Use Three-Breath Practice to bring your attention to your present-moment experience, instead of dwelling on a future you can’t possibly know. When you become aware that you’re lost in worrisome thoughts about the future, pause, and switch your attention to the physical sensation of three in-breaths and three out-breaths in a row. Take your time.

Three-Breath Practice offers relief from distressing thoughts and emotions because it shifts your attention to what’s going on in your immediate experience.

It also helps you find things to enjoy that are available to you right now. Repeat as necessary!

When thoughts about the future give rise to anxiety or other painful emotions, turn to self-compassion to ease your suffering. The way you treat yourself is one of the few things you control in life. There’s no reason to be anything but kind to yourself, in both your speech and your actions. Compassionate action includes taking care of your needs and looking for ways to enjoy yourself despite your limitations.

To engage in compassionate self-talk, think of words that speak directly to how hard it is to long for certainty in an uncertain world. Then recite them to yourself in a soothing voice, words such as “It’s scary not to know what the future holds for me” or “My ongoing worry about the future is so emotionally draining.”

When you give voice to your feelings in this way, you’re letting yourself know that you care about your suffering. This alone will ease your emotional pain.

Keep a Don’t-Know Mind about the future. You don’t know what the future holds for you, long-term. You don’t even know for sure what tomorrow will bring.

The Korean Zen master Seung Sahn’s instruction to keep a Don’t- Know Mind is an invitation to lay down the burden of constantly striving to know the unknowable.

It’s remarkably liberating to be able to say, “I don’t know.” Those words free you to let your life unfold as it may without the futile effort on your part to control everything.

Keeping a Don’t-Know Mind is also an invaluable way to stop yourself from believing distressing assumptions, such as “The future holds only pain and heartbreak for me.” You can’t know this. Better days may be just around the corner. Keep your heart and mind open to all possibilities.

Cultivate equanimity to alleviate any fear or other painful emotions that are present when you think about the future. Equanimity is characterized by an even-tempered contentment that arises when you feel okay about your life even though you don’t know what the future has in store.

A student once asked the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti what his secret to peace and contentment was. He leaned over and whispered to the student: “I don’t mind what happens.”

To cultivate equanimity in this way, start by gently acknowledging any worry or fear you’re experiencing at the moment. Then try to imagine what it would be like to not mind what was going to happen next in your life.

This can be a challenge, so if it was too hard to imagine, wait a bit and try again.

Alleviating the Pain of Loneliness

A dramatic change in lifestyle—such as being isolated during a pandemic—can lead to painful feelings of loneliness. Previously, you may have been in the company of others every day; suddenly, you’re by yourself most of the time.

I find it helpful to distinguish between being alone and feeling lonely.

Being alone, in itself, is a neutral state, neither positive nor negative. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich said this about being alone: “Language . . . has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”

May what follows help you take the first steps toward turning the pain of loneliness into the glory of solitude.

Take comfort in knowing you are not alone in your loneliness. Millions of people understand how you feel. Roy Orbison expressed it this way: “Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight.”

Bringing to mind others who are lonely and evoking compassion for them and for yourself over your shared circumstances can make you feel deeply connected to them. This can ease your own loneliness.

Think of words that capture the pain of loneliness and repeat them to yourself in a gentle and soothing manner. Here’s an example attributed to the Talmud: “The highest form of wisdom is kindness.” Find those kind words—ones that resonate with you personally—and bring them to mind with a gentle and soothing voice. Your words might be similar to these: “It’s dispiriting to feel so lonely” or “I’m incredibly sad that friends and family aren’t here.”

Expressing compassion for yourself in this way lets you know that you care about your suffering. This makes loneliness easier to bear and also makes it easier to patiently wait for it to pass out of your mind.

If you find yourself focusing on loneliness, examine whether it’s for a constructive purpose or whether it’s only making you feel worse. When you’re feeling lonely, there’s a tendency to focus on it exclusively. This is beneficial if your intention is to shed light on what gives rise to loneliness. For instance, if you know that it’s triggered by certain interactions or activities on your part, you can try to avoid them.

However, if your focus is on how bad loneliness feels, this can increase its intensity. If this is what you’re doing, a pleasing distraction can help by shifting your attention from loneliness to what the world around you has to offer right at this moment. You could put on some music or go outside for a while. Come up with what you think would be enjoyable to do and then do it, even if you have to apply what I call “gentle force” to get yourself going. This is self-compassion in action.

Recognize that feelings of loneliness are as changeable as the weather. You may feel as if you’ll always be lonely, but emotions are in constant flux, arising and passing, just like weather patterns. In the words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “No feeling is final.”

Without trying to force any sadness to go away, be patient with your loneliness. It’s likely that by tomorrow, it will have eased a bit—and perhaps the next day, a bit more.

♦

Excerpted from How to Be Sick: Your Pocket Companion, by Toni Bernhard © 2020. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications.

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