I first met God when I entered grade one at Holy Rosary, a Catholic elementary school, where the classes were so packed we had to crawl over one another to get to our seats. Towering black-robed nuns patrolled the aisles with rulers ready to smack naughty hands, and priests, who were known to be next to God, bestowed their blessings upon our little bowed heads. Obsequiousness was paid off in holy cards. 

It was in that environment, edged with fear and awe, that I learned I was marked with original sin from birth, and my vocabulary expanded to include words like sin, devil, penance, judgment, hell, virgin birth, and fallen from grace. These ideas, plus a whole raft of dichotomies like “good and evil’ and “blessed and condemned,” were presented as a guide for my future development, which was understandably erratic as a result.

While training to receive our First Holy Communion, we were all given our own copy of a small, moss-green handbook called a catechism to memorize. We were told it was filled with all the questions and answers we would ever need to know about God, starting with:

Q. Who is God?

A. God is the Supreme Being.

You have to realize that at this point I am just a tiny little girl fascinated by the color yellow. 

God, on the other hand, is an enormous concept that has confounded the best of the world’s thinkers. Socrates, Hume, Nietzsche, Foucault… all would have rolled over at such an easy assumption! But at Holy Rosary, it was not open to discussion. Some of my friends seemed to latch onto the God-thing right away, but I didn’t. And I spent the next 30 years of my life asking the same question over and over again: Who is God?

I want to make clear to those whose belief in God is incontrovertible, and this includes many dear friends: I tried. I went to Mass, I took Communion, I mastered the art of folding my hands and looking holy, but the rapture just never came.

The real fault line appeared with the budding of my female consciousness. Why did my brothers get to be altar boys and I didn’t? Why did the nuns teach us girls how to clean furniture while the boys did secret sacrament stuff in the sacristy? Was this really God’s plan? These glaring omissions in His apparent “guardianship of all beings” created even more bewilderment in me. But I finally drew the line at confession. One day I was on my way to church to admit to my paltry list of 13-year-old sins when suddenly it dawned on me: Why do I need to confess through a priest? 

I needed a personal relationship with my budding spirituality, and from that moment on I decided to talk to God directly. But it never became a two-way street. After a while, my end of it started to sound distinctly whiny. I always seemed to be asking God for things. Could God get me a boyfriend? Give me a sign that I was doing ok? Or at least make my hair better? Apparently not… 

So, as I got older I gradually stopped trying. But my habit of God continued. After all, I had been trained from a very impressionable age to believe that the answer to all my spiritual and existential questions was somewhere “out there.” I spent the next years of my life trying to attach myself to some savior-substitute: therapy, gurus, success, money, politics, sex, drugs…whatever. The list goes on. I wasn’t even sure what the questions were. I just had a perpetual and profound sense that I was living in the dark and it made me anxious. But no matter how hard I tried, I never found “it.” Nothing ever came down, landed on my head, and saved me from my confusion.

And then something happened.

After several adventurous moves I found myself as far away from home as I could possibly get and still be on the same planet; at the junction between two great deserts deep inside the Western Australian Outback. I was working for the government teaching art workshops to the Aboriginal people of the area who, I discovered, had their own spiritual and artistic traditions honed over approximately 30,000 years. I was a bit out of my depth. 

One day I walked out into the bush and sat on the edge of a cliff. My mind was jumping from one thing to the next like a grasshopper on speed. However, as I raised my eyes and looked out, the sharp contrast between what was happening internally and what I saw before me hit me like a blow. I had never in my life seen such an empty landscape. In front of me was a seemingly endless expanse of pure flat desert. I could see for miles and miles and miles. There was not a tree, a road, a rise, or speck to catch the eye. Below was a haze of milky beige and above a cloudless opalescent sky, the two melding together ad infinitum.

I thought, “What would it be like to have all that space in my head?” 

And suddenly my mind stopped. Boom.
Everything went still.
The air moved. The dry grass rustled.
The sun beat on my skin. 
And I was quiet.
My mind was quiet… and wide open.

This lasted for an incalculable moment. When it passed, thoughts began to arise again, but this time they were crystal clear: 

1. I wanted to learn how to extend this experience.
2. This must be what meditation is about. 
3. And I needed a teacher. Not just any teacher. An authentic teacher.

This realization moved me deeply and became a tsunami that swept me along until I found that teacher. But the first thing I had to do when I set foot on the Buddhist path was check my old habits at the door, and that included any notion of being saved. Instead of getting raised up toward some happy union with perfection, I got set down on my bottom and instructed to experience my own psychological mess. I found so much anger, jealousy, pride, unsolved hurts, and revengeful black goop that it’s no wonder I was loath to give up on being saved. God help me! 

This early stage of meditation was tough and lonely. It involved unraveling all the sticky threads of my thought processes strand by strand, including the big knot that had hope written on it. The hope I had carried with me from first grade that some all-powerful being or thing was magically going to relieve me of my existential angst. I discovered a finely honed, philosophically rich spiritual path that relies solely on direct personal experience. Through progressive stages of meditation practice and study, I began to realize that underneath all the confusion is a natural, inherent, and intuitive wisdom. No one is bestowing anything on anyone. It is already there. 

As Chögyam Trungpa explains in Crazy Wisdom, “There is a certain kind of intelligence that is connected with totality, and is very precise. It is not verbal; it is not conceptualized at all; it is not thinking in the ordinary sense. It is thinking without scheming. And it is something more than that. It is a self-existing intelligence of its own.” This is what the Buddha, who was definitely not a god, taught: that the fundamental nature of our mind is peace. But even he could only point the way. Uncovering the full depth of this truth is a completely personal process.

No one is bestowing anything on anyone. It is already there.

Discovering Buddhism brought my spiritual journey into focus. It is nontheistic, which means that a belief in God is not part of the teachings. However, God can be a habit, as it was in my case. It took me many years of meditation to actually stop sitting with my face tilted ever so slightly toward heaven, subconsciously waiting for an external, superior, and all-knowing being to land. I even tried to deify my teacher, but he refused to fit any mold. Eventually, I began to understand that reliance on a deity of any kind is an impediment to experiencing my own life directly. And then one day I realized that my habit of God was gone. Poof! And a new lighthearted confidence has taken its place. 

God had been in my life for a long time, but I never knew him, or her, or them. Not even close. But I can know my mind, and the more deeply I look, the more remarkable the journey is. The confusion that dogged me throughout my life has gradually lessened under the gentle touch of meditative awareness. It’s been a path full of pitfalls and ego trips, but I now know the absolute honesty of the practice. No tricks. No shortcuts. No escape. No savior. Just the experience of innate, intelligent awareness and an overwhelming compassion for all of us who suffer. It is the kind of hands-on spirituality that I yearned for, and will continue to practice for the rest of my life.

The post Goodbye God appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This excerpt has been adapted from Tricycle’s online course, “Dependent Arising” with Christina Feldman, Akincano Weber, Stephen Batchelor, and John Peacock. Learn more about the course and enroll at learn.tricycle.org.

Christina Feldman: A perspective on dependent arising that we’ve all shared and is important to draw out is that we’re not talking about future births or another lifetime. We’re talking about what’s happening right now for us and how to get out of cycles of repetition. 

Think of times when you return to your family home as an adult for a holiday dinner, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas. And you find yourself suddenly acting through the lens of being a child again and repeating the same patterns of reactivity that are so familiar to you. This is situational patterning, how our world has been shaped in certain ways historically and then how that world is repeated in the present. 

I’ve seen it while teaching at Gaia House, a center in the UK that I helped to found. It was an old convent—one of these very gray, English, huge buildings. I’ve seen students come in for retreats and they’re enthusiastic, willing, and sincere. And then they see the building and they’re thrown back into memories of boarding school. They find themselves acting in fearful, contracted ways again from the past being brought into the present, and almost reborn in the present. It’s not just the past being repeated, but also the sense of self shaped by those conditions in the past that’s being repeated. 

But we can step out of this. We can walk a different pathway if there’s sufficient awareness and understanding of what is actually happening.

John Peacock: But how much can we step out of this situational patterning? It seems to me that we can never completely evade our conditions, but we can start to liberate ourselves from the destructive conditions that we find ourselves having, such as experiencing emotions you had as a 12-year-old when you’re placed back in a boarding school. That experience comes not only with that recognition but also with a whole load of emotional baggage that perhaps isn’t helpful anymore. It seems that it’s not about evading the totality of conditions in which we find ourselves, but it’s about evading those destructive conditions that we enact and play out with others. 

Akincano Weber: I think it’s clear we’re not getting out of conditionality. We’re getting out of specific patterns of conditionality. I don’t have the boarding school experience, but I have monastic experience where you start off with a business discussion and suddenly something switches in the room and you have three elder siblings enacting family dynamics. How did this happen? This is a specific incidence of familial patterning, familial dependent arising suddenly constellating itself in the psychic realm of three people talking with each other, constellating histories that they may not even be conscious of.

Christina Feldman: In many of these repetitive patterns that we can find ourselves in, it can feel as if there is no choice. We’re not quite sure how we ended up there, reacting in this particular way—we just ended up there. But the teachings of sati, or mindfulness, highlight the gift of being able to choose what we feed, what we attend to, and how we attend to it. This brings the teaching of dependent arising into a much greater sense of immediacy. In this moment, I can choose to feed those habitual familiar patterns, and if I choose to feed them, I can be pretty certain they’re going to return. Or, I can choose to walk a different pathway. And in that sense, it’s a kind of fasting, which opens a door to a new way of responding rather than the kind of repetition that often leads to a sense of weariness or despair. 

Akincano Weber: What’s most alive for me in the teaching of dependent arising is the word “respond” juxtaposed with “react.” The possibility for responsiveness implies that there is something asked of me outside of my self-construct. I can actually respond to something that is put forth to me as a possibility, injunction, or need. I can meet this and engage with it in a way that isn’t determined by my own narrative or opinions. 

John Peacock: Life is calling for a response. And the question is, how much do we listen to that call to be able to respond to things? Because otherwise we’re locked within the narratives of the past, so we continue to do the same things again and again. Where does that sense of choice come from? Is it from the awareness that I’m being called upon by something greater than myself to respond? Or is it coming from understanding patterns of mind that can lead to some sort of volitional activity? 

Stephen Batchelor: There’s a quotation from philosopher George Santayana, who said, “Those who do not learn the lessons of history, are bound to repeat its mistakes.” The framework of dependent arising gives us a greater awareness of how we have acted and lived in the past, both personally and as a member of the society. Without that mindful attention to those patterns that are already within us, it’s very difficult to have a clear sense of when a volition is coming out of a pattern or when it’s coming out of a space that is not determined by a pattern. The volitional choice is somehow emerging in that free space. And reactivity is problematic not only because it causes distress, but also because it blocks us, it becomes a hindrance that prevents us from acting from that free space. 

John Peacock: That sounds like you’re making a creative space. 

Stephen Batchelor: A creative space, exactly. I would say an ethical space, too. 

Christina Feldman: But isn’t that free space also arising out of conditions? 

Stephen Batchelor: Yes. 

Christina Feldman: I’m not quite sure that the word free sits comfortably with me because it’s also arising out of other conditions. It’s also, initially, at least for people on this path, about cultivating wholesome patterns of ethics, kindness, and compassion. It’s about cultivating wholesome patterns that allow for responsiveness rather than reactivity. 

I’ve appreciated placing this teaching of dependent arising in the context of ethics. That makes this teaching not only about my personal wakefulness, happiness, and freedom, but it becomes relational because my patterns impact inwardly and outwardly.

Akincano Weber: In any case, there is a freedom from.

Stephen Batchelor: One image that I found helpful is thinking of a prisoner in a cell. They are very limited in what they can do because they’ve got bars on the windows and there’s not much space. But that doesn’t mean they can’t do anything. Rather, their freedom is extremely limited. Then if you find yourself in an open prison where you don’t have the walls and the bars, you’re still constrained, but there’s greater freedom to act. 

The reactivity and the patternings that we get trapped in can be extremely confining. In my own experience, I can be totally trapped in anger about something, and I also have moments when I’m not so tightly constrained by a particular emotion. I think the practice of mindfulness and the dharma in general is about opening up that space. 

♦

Watch the full conversation here.

The post Stepping Out of Situational Patterning  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Sometimes we do things to release ourselves from suffering that aren’t actually liberating. . . and that have the effect of prolonging our suffering.

For example, let’s say you have a job that’s very demanding, and you have a high-stress environment, and your day is long. Pressure, pressure, pressure. . . and then around 3:00 pm, you find yourself really tired, and you know you have hours to go.

It occurs to you that you could do something during the day that would help you get through those last hours, and you decide, “Maybe I’ll try smoking a cigarette.”

If you’ve ever smoked, you know that there’s something profoundly enticing about it. You may be under a lot of stress, but when you have your cigarette, it’s like a timeout. 

It’s like everything disappears, and now it’s just you and the cigarette. You feel elated, you feel optimistic, you feel powerful.

Of course, we know that if you make that decision, you’re not actually releasing yourself from suffering. Suffering persists even when you’re smoking the cigarette. It’s just muffled, or it has become more subtle. 

You’ve concealed it from yourself, but it’s still there.

***

Many people actually approach meditation in a way that’s not so different from what I just talked about.

Just as you may reach for a cigarette to deal with your stress, you may decide to learn to meditate to deal with your stress.

You may have a stressful day, you may have lots of problems. You come home, you sit down on the cushion. You begin to watch your breath, and if you practice regularly, it doesn’t take long to feel a big difference.

If you do this multiple times during a week, in a month you’re going to begin to enter a very calm, centered place during meditation.

You think, “This is wonderful. I love meditation.” You’ve created a little island of calm in a sea of stress and fear and anger. You get up the next day, and the office is still stressful, but this has helped you a little bit.

It may be a bit shocking to hear, but if used in this way, meditation could actually be doing you an injury.

When we cordon off our moment of serenity, our moment of calm, we use it to protect ourselves from looking at our own circumstances in a critical way. We miss the opportunity to change not just these circumstances but who we are as people.

You may be better served to quit your job, to look for a new job, maybe to go back to school, and so on. But it’s possible that you don’t quit your job because you’re afraid of certain kinds of uncertainty or certain kinds of insecurity, even though your job makes you miserable.

And through meditating, you’re actually making it more possible for you to live the way you’ve been living all along.

Your meditation practice, which looks so liberating, can be destructive. . . which is not so different from smoking.  When we cordon off our moment of serenity, our moment of calm, we use it to protect ourselves from looking at our own circumstances in a critical way. We miss the opportunity to change not just these circumstances but who we are as people.

So how do we avoid that?

How do we avoid using our practice as a way of actually reinforcing our mental habits that, in the long term, will cause us more suffering?

***

We make decisions that are shaped by our prior assumptions. Over time, that’s going to produce deeply ingrained patterns of suffering.

We create a structure of reality, and a world around ourselves based on our prior actions. Those actions often have sources that we’re unaware of.

The Buddhist word for this is vasana, energy habits or habit energies.

Things happen to us, and we respond in the best way we can. We don’t always choose how we respond. Consciously or unconsciously, we repeat, and we keep repeating even when it stops working, because it’s become a deeply ingrained habit. This is samsara.

If we choose to do meditation, it’s a good step, but not if we don’t begin to undo those habit energies.

It’s very important to meditate regularly, and it’s very important to be able to get into that wonderful state of centeredness and balance of calm, or samadhi. But if you stay in samadhi—which some traditions see as the end of the road—you never overcome many of your destructive mental habits. 

And so in that way, meditation, even in samadhi, can operate like smoking a cigarette.

So the strategy that Zen has developed is to use the experience of emptiness as a way of stepping outside our familiar habit energies.

Emptiness really is the door. It’s the way we step out of our familiar mental habits, our patterned behaviors. Once we’ve stepped out, we can begin to re-enter the world of form, the world of our assumptions and behaviors and self-understanding, with a kind of unbiased mind.

So when you meditate, as you’re watching the breath, try following the breath out to the end of the breath.

At the end of the breath, you may notice that there’s an interval where the breath ends, and then you start to breathe again. There’s an interval where there’s nothing. 

So focus on that—that little gap or space.

If you focus your attention there, you may begin to notice that there’s this blankness.

Zen practice involves finding this emptiness and dwelling in this emptiness.

It’s a little bit like a person who goes into a dark room from a lighted hallway. When you look around at first, it’s absolutely black, but if you stay in that room, you begin to be able to operate. 

You begin to be able to see.

♦

Adapted from Kurt Spellmeyer’s Dharma Talk, “Meditating With Emptiness.”

The post Seeing in the Dark appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Often, we carry the impression that things are exactly the same. We may even feel that we are exactly the same. But we are not—we’re actually constantly changing. Our bodies and moods change all the time, even if we are not aware of it. Through meditation and practice, we want to understand change as liberation and see how it can make a difference in our lives. 

Imagine that you’re sitting in meditation, and suddenly you feel an itch on your face. It’s so itchy that it feels like the sensation will last forever. But then it stops, and you think, “It was so there, and now it’s so gone.” To me, this is liberation from itching. You were going to scratch at that spot a lot when, actually, you just needed to let it go. Another example is if there is pain somewhere in the body. If I have a pain somewhere, I go to the pain and I notice that it’s not actually fixed or solid, and generally the pain changes within itself. 

So how is change a liberating factor? 

If we know change, if we experience change, then we can make the decision to do something different. In life, we have reactive habits and patterns, which can often be painful for ourselves and others. You may notice mental patterns during meditation—how our thoughts are relatively repetitive. We also have emotional patterns. You may say to yourself, “I’m always angry, I’m always anxious, I’m always jealous,” or whatever it may be. While you may have a tendency toward these things, you’re not experiencing them all the time to the same degree. For me, knowing that there is change within these patterns is liberating. 

We also have relational patterns—the way we are with others. When COVID-19 and stay-at-home measures began in March 2020, I saw how the practice of noticing change could help me, and also how I could choose to behave differently, especially in relationships. One of the things I decided to do was to not nitpick. I was not going to nag. If somebody made a mistake, a little error, I wouldn’t say anything about it. I just let it be. Everybody makes mistakes, but we often go on and on, asking “Why did you do this?” I decided not to do this, and so now I no longer nitpick. When I notice that someone makes a mistake, I’ll catch myself thinking, “You could have gone on and picked it up, but actually, what would be the point?” I changed! 

In this way, when you recognize a pattern, you can realize, “I don’t need to do this. Although I seem to have a repetitive, automatic reaction, I am not like that all the time.” Meditation gives us the courage to change, to transform. It helps open us to our creative potential and we can be liberated from our fixed habits. 

There are also different types of change, and understanding that can help us. I think of change as light, repetitive, or intense. Change on a light level might be somebody making a mistake—something that can happen often. But if we grasp at this and think that the person makes mistakes all the time, then the change feels intense. With the help of meditation, we can see, “Oh, this is light. I don’t need to do anything about it.” So one of the questions I bring to any situation, feeling, thought, or sensation is, “Is this light?” I ask, “How long is this going to last?” If it just lasts a few minutes, then I don’t need to do anything, and change actually happens by itself—because things change. That’s the way life goes. 

Then we can notice if there is repetitive change, in which you don’t always react, but there is a tendency to react in a certain way within certain conditions. So you may have a tendency to feel anger, but you’re not angry 24/7. Meditation helps us look at the condition and the change. When is it that you are angry? When is it that you are not? What are the factors that seem to make your anger worse? Maybe it’s worse if you don’t sleep well, if you’re busy or stressed. How would change invite us to explore, recognize, and transform conditions, so that we are not so reactive? By understanding what triggers us, we can find a creative way to engage. 

What I call intense change is when we’re fine in one moment, and then the next moment something shocking occurs. We may lose someone, or we may have an accident. Something happens that is shocking to our entire system, so we need to ask, “How can we be with intensity without amplifying it?” Practicing meditation can help. You don’t meditate to stop the intensity. You meditate to bring a little change into the intensity, to bring a little space. You come back to the breath, back to the sound,  and back to the body as a means of bringing a little space. And when the intensity comes back, you accept this is what’s going on now. Even within that intensity, there is change. And then again, we can come back to the breath, to the body, and to the sound as a means of bringing a little space so that we don’t amplify that new intensity. Then, over time, it will pass. 

This is the gift of change, to know that although it is difficult right now, this too shall pass. 

The post The Gift of Change appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Habit is the greatest tyrant,” an elder once told me. By the time we reach adulthood, we’re each carrying decades of habits. We’ve become accustomed to the routines and patterns that we’ve cobbled together to get by.

In spite of our best intentions, without an initial spark of change and a clear path to sustain it, we can remain paralyzed by fear or despair, locked in by numbness, or strung out by our addiction to comfort. Whether for individual or collective change, the vehicle to transformation remains stalled if we are unable to break the spell of unhealthy habits.

Related: Meditation, Mental Habits, and Creative Imagination

When seeking change it’s tempting to reach for the dramatic catharsis. We long to break the mold in a burst of sudden enlightenment. The reality is often far more humble and mundane. Things change slowly, over time, through incremental shifts. Human beings are complex, living systems where a small change can have far-reaching effects.

I liken the process of transforming habits to turning a cargo ship at sea. A large vessel with that much momentum can’t make sharp turns. However, a one- or two-degree course correction of the rudder, if held steady, will take that ship in a very different direction over time.

This process of change often occurs in two stages. First, we gain an insight or new understanding into some aspect of ourselves or our world. This is the initial spark that sets the cycle of transformation going. Insight turns the angle of the ship’s rudder.

Related: Dropping Distraction

Insight can feel great. Clarity dawns, and a weight has been lifted. Seeing things in a new light often comes with a rush of inspiration, a sense of freedom or spaciousness. (A lot of energy in both meditation and communication training is aimed at facilitating such shifts in awareness or understanding.)

Many practitioners make the mistake of stopping there. Insight is the beginning of transformation, not the end. It opens us to a new possibility, but as quickly as we change the angle of the rudder, the currents of our life come rushing in. The tyranny of habit exerts its force, pushing us back toward our old ways.

This is the second stage: holding the angle. It’s what turns a moment of insight into lasting change. We work in a patient and steady way, applying effort to integrate this insight. Each day, we recollect the new perspective and practice this new way of being. Inevitably, we lose our grip and the rudder slips back into its old position. We course correct, readjust, and work to hold the angle.

The second stage of change isn’t glamorous or exciting, yet it’s where real transformation takes place. It takes dedication, patience, and genuine interest to sustain. It’s the meditator showing up at their mat each morning, come what may; the artisan diligently throwing another pot on the wheel.

Related: The Best Possible Habit

Over time, the steadiness of that effort takes root, and a new way is forged. The old habit is replaced with a healthy one that supports well-being. The transition often occurs so slowly that we only notice it in retrospect. One day we turn around and realize something is different.

⧫

Oren Jay Sofer’s first book, Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication (Shambhala Publications, December 2018) is out now.  

This article was originally published on September 25, 2018.

The post Turning a Ship appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Many of us begin a spiritual path with gusto and determination—be it out of necessity, inspiration, or curiosity. We hold steady for weeks, months, or more. Inevitably, something changes, and we lose steam. The meditation practice to which we were once so devoted begins to feel like a chore as life gets busy, and we find we can’t bring ourselves to practice.

Making any time to sit is better than nothing, but the practice offers the greatest benefits when we meditate consistently. When we regularly take time to be still and listen carefully, we strengthen innumerable wholesome qualities in the heart and mind, lay a foundation for living wisely, and cultivate powerful seeds of insight and compassion.

Many of us are aware of this and still find it difficult to regularly get to the cushion. Even after an intensive seven- or ten-day retreat, we may return home with renewed commitment and energy, only to find the momentum dwindles, our energy fades, and we fall back into our old habit of sitting only when it suits us in the moment.

Why does this happen? There are a lot of reasons. Many conditions can affect our meditation habits, and each calls for a different response. The first step is to investigate what’s happening.

Wisely Reflect on Your Life

Sometimes a change in outer circumstances shifts our ability to meditate formally on a daily basis. Take a step back from the various threads of your life and consider what’s happening with the kind eye of a friend. Have you just ended a relationship, started a new job, or moved? Are you under a lot of pressure at work or dealing with the illness of a loved one? When in the midst of such turmoil we can overlook the immense challenge we are facing, with its concomitant demands on our time and energy.

Simply recognizing the impact of such a change can create more internal space, compassion, and relief. With a clearer view of what’s happening, we can reevaluate what support we might need and how formal meditation practice could be a part of that.

More often, though, it’s something within that is keeping our body away from the cushion or mat, like the opposing force between two magnets. Careful, patient investigation can help to reveal what’s moving under the surface and give us important clues about how to respond.

One of the most common reasons I find my own daily practice waning is if I lose my keel in the busyness of life. The to-do lists are endless and everything takes at least twice as long as we anticipate. When I allow the crazed, harried pace of modern society to replace the clarity of my intentions about how I want to live, everything suffers, including my daily practice. If we spend the day relentlessly jumping from one task to another, driving ourselves to get as much done in as little time as possible, what do we expect the quality of our minds to be when we sit down to meditate (if we even get there)? Instead, bringing as much patience and intention as we can to our daily activities has endless benefits, including finding it easier and generally more pleasant to meditate

Check Your Assumptions

One of the most common reasons practitioners lose steam is when our meditative experience doesn’t match our expectations. We come seeking peace, clarity, and ease, but we find the opposite: agitation, petty grudges, confusion, and utter nonsense.

Peace and clarity arrive through understanding these patterns and the underlying nature of our minds, rather than through stopping our thoughts, achieving some special state, or having a particular experience. When we remember and trust this, letting go of our expectations and ideas, we can find more space to refocus and recommit to our daily practice.

There also can be core beliefs operating at a deeper level that prevent us from realizing our aspirations. What are you telling yourself about your meditation? Is there a belief that if you really try you will fail—or that you are not good enough, smart enough, patient enough, or deficient in some other way? When unseen, these ideas have tremendous power: not only do they keep us from meditating but also can direct the course of our lives. Uncovering these beliefs can be hard work. Doing so generally takes time and can be facilitated with the support of skilled counselor or wise friend. (In the Pali Canon, the Buddha refers to such spiritual friends [kaliyana mitta] as “the whole of the spiritual life.”) Yet when we put forth the effort to identify and transform our self-limiting beliefs, we find enormous energy and potential

Turn Towards What’s Difficult

Intimately connected with our unmet expectations and beliefs is our distaste for unpleasant experiences. Why sit still for 30 minutes with unpleasant thoughts, sensations, and emotions when one can get some easy respite from the insanity of life by disappearing into a screen or a bag of chips? While there is a time and place for conscious, skillful distraction, there is much to be learned (and healing to be had) from voluntarily engaging with the range of dark, sticky, sharp, frantic, dull, or generally disagreeable corners of our minds.

Much of this rocky terrain is comprised of what are known as the five hindrances in the Buddhist tradition. These are deeply embedded mental energies that the Buddha noticed obscure the clarity of the mind and hinder our development along a spiritual path. Whether you identify as a Buddhist or not, after committing to a regular meditation practice you’ll become familiar with these visitors: craving, aversion, sleepiness or apathy, restless agitation or worry, and doubt.

Learning to recognize these forces when they arise and having a range of skillful means to set them aside is indispensable for any meditation practice. If your daily practice is waning, there’s a good chance that the unpleasant nature of one (or more) of these hindrances may be what’s driving you away. Call to mind the list of these five “foes” and have a look if any of them are taking over your meditations and making it less appealing to practice. 

Finding Our Way Back

So if you find yourself avoiding the cushion or mat, first have a look inside and out to see what’s going on. Once you uncover some of the conditions that are preventing you from practicing or creating the resistance, think creatively about what to do differently. At times, just this can be enough to muster up the courage and persistence to stick with our practice. At other times, we may need the input of a skilled guide, mentor, or spiritual friend to help us navigate the rough waters. 

One approach that works for me is a three-step process I call reconnect, recommit, and reevaluate.

Reconnect

Reconnecting with our motivation can provide renewed energy to keep going. It’s important to learn how to contact your sincere, heartfelt motivation for meditation. What drew you to your spiritual practice initially?

One of the most powerful gifts I’ve received is the question posed to me by my teachers, “What do you want?” In Buddhism, we hear a lot about desire as the cause of suffering. This is often misunderstood to mean that we should let go of all desire. Rather, it is specifically the energies of craving and grasping that are problematic: the often unconscious, sometimes obsessive reflex to want something to fill us up or satisfy us.

The Buddha also spoke about something called dhamma chanda, zeal and enthusiasm for the truth. This is the wholesome impulse in the heart toward the higher potentials of human existence. It is the healthy longing we feel for things like peace, goodness, clarity, wisdom, and care. Reconnect with this aspiration. Remind yourself of life’s great mysteries; recollect your wish to cultivate the heart/mind to its full potential.

Another tack is to reflect on any benefits of practice you’ve experienced. Perhaps you aren’t a paragon of wisdom, radiating light wherever you go, but maybe you’re a little more patient or more careful with your actions and words. Seeing the fruits of our meditation can bring energy for practice.

If none of the above suggestions spark this connection, get creative: try journaling, pick up a good dharma book, or listen to a talk by a favorite teacher.

Recommit

Once you’ve reconnected with why you practice, take stock and see what concrete steps will support you to stay connected with it on a daily basis. Commit to put forth time and energy to move in that direction. I recommend setting aside at least a few minutes each morning to remember your aspiration in a heartfelt way, recalling the deeper values and motivations by which you choose to live. Using a short gatha, or verse, can be helpful for this. Here is one from Thich Nhat Hanh that I used every morning when I first began practicing:

Waking up this morning, I smile. Today is a new day, with 24 brand
new hours before me. I vow to live each moment fully, 
And to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

You can write your own, something that feels authentic and gives voice to what is most true for you. This isn’t exactly prayer (although it shares certain features and may serve similar ends); it is a practice of realigning our hearts and minds with our deepest intentions for living. If we do nothing else, taking a few quiet moments at the beginning of each day can have a powerful orienting effect on our lives.

Next, set some minimums. What specific actions can you commit to doing on a daily basis to live your intentions? Consider what is reasonable given your current life circumstances. If you work a full time job and are raising a family, meditating for two hours every day may be a stretch. Be honest, but don’t be afraid to challenge yourself a little. 

Consistency, quality, and continuity are more important than quantity: 10-20 minutes of sincere practice every day for a week will probably serve you better than an hour over the weekend. Setting a time each day for formal meditation will help create, or recreate, the rhythm of daily practice.

There’s no need, however, to limit your spiritual practice to formal periods of meditation. When people used to come to the renowned Thai Forest meditation master Ajahn Chah complaining that they did not have time to meditate, he is said to have responded, “Do you have time to breathe? Then you have time to meditate.” Start by picking an activity that you do every day, like brushing your teeth, washing the dishes, or commuting to work, and commit to doing this activity as mindfully as possible for one week. Make a continual and gentle effort to bring steady attention to such daily activities. As we do this over time, our formal practice and our daily life begin to support each other until there is less and less separation between the two.

Reevaluate

This last step is crucial. After you’ve reconnected with your intentions, created a plan and committed to following it for a period, take some time to reevaluate. How did it go? What worked? If you lost the plot along the way, see if you can discern what diverted your intention. Was the goal you set not as doable as you expected? Did you hit an internal block you didn’t know how to work with? Perhaps you simply forgot until the reminder to “reevaluate” popped up in your calendar.

It is essential to do this kind of inquiry with an attitude of curiosity and love rather than one of self-judgment. Remember that our energies here are focused toward living a full and meaningful life that is connected with the beautiful, uplifting qualities of the human heart. Try to pick up that tone, so that you are coming from a place of kindness and loving support when you reevaluate. You might liken it to helping a good friend on a project or aiding a child with their homework. How would you relate to their difficulties?

Now comes the creative part: once you’ve reevaluated how it went, you get to tweak the recipe for the next week. If something got in the way, what can you do differently? If you got tripped up peeking at your email before meditating (and never made it to the cushion), set a firm determination to restrain the impulse to turn on the phone/computer until after your morning practice. If the goal was too ambitious, dial it back. If you more or less hit the mark, you might re-up for another week to strengthen your momentum before adding something new.

The benefits of having a regular meditation practice and integrating it into our lives are immense. I hope these reflections have been helpful, and that they support you in developing or deepening your daily practice to discover these benefits for yourself.

♦

This article was originally published in 2019.

The post Why Can’t I Get to the Cushion? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I’ve always been bad at meditating.

We generally understand being “bad” at something as meaning that a task is beyond our ability: our drawings come out sloppy or our computer programs don’t work. But for me, “bad” didn’t even get as far as questions of skill—because I couldn’t even get it together to consistently show up at the cushion.

At least, that was until I applied behavioral science to my practice.

Now, despite being a travel journalist and a serial expat whose lifestyle generally wreaks havoc on long-term personal progress, I’ve found myself in a surprisingly hopeful position: I have close to three years of daily meditation practice under my belt.

How did I do it?

While conventional wisdom says that all you need to form a habit is the right amount of motivation, modern-day behavioral science views the issue as a mechanistic interplay of specific variables with techniques for manipulating them. My journey to a consistent practice began with a decision to use my life as a laboratory to test out these new approaches.

Gamification and a Quest for Consistency
I’m the son of a longtime meditator; my earliest memory is of my father teaching me concentration practices. I grew up reading tales from ancient India in which noble warriors meditated on mountains to gain supernatural abilities and sages plumbed the depths of the mind to unlock the secrets of existence. In my youth, I obsessively watched documentaries explaining how meditating monks could control their blood pressure and body temperature. I wanted to do these things, too. The only thing standing in my way was discipline: I didn’t have any.

In 2010 I learned about gamification, which replicates the addictive properties of video games in other Web and mobile applications. Like any child of the 80s, I had always been drawn to games, but the thought of blending them with self-improvement never occurred to me. Suddenly, gamification was all the rage. I used Duolingo to learn Spanish and Fitocracy to meet my exercise goals, and my digital achievements were praised by green lights, pleasing dings, and virtual awards.

The first game I applied to meditation was based on the 10,000-hour rule for mastery popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. Level Me Up is a mobile phone app that rewards you for progressively longer amounts of time that you spend on an activity. When applied to meditation, the app’s portable nature had me excited and practicing during every free moment—sitting on a bus or during a work break. I practiced daily for nearly 60 days, doubling my previous streak. But ultimately, the excitement of positive reinforcement wasn’t enough, and I gave up soon after.

So something was working; I just had to pinpoint what was going wrong. One solution came from social psychologist Dr. Roy Baumeister, whose research suggests that willpower is a depletable resource. Do too much at once and there’s literally no gas left in your tank for any sort of self-discipline. It is a state ripe for ah, screw it moments—like when you order a burger instead of a salad or watch TV instead of working out. And sure enough, I realized that I had gone overboard on gamification, using apps to work on language learning, fitness, writing, and eating healthy in addition to my meditation practice. It was too much. My willpower tank was empty.

I decided to start tracking how successful—or not—my meditation habit was by using the the Verplanken-Orbell Self Report Habit Index (SRHI), a self-administered quiz that consists of 12 questions. Every day, I answered questions on how frequent or automatic my behavior was. Did I consider the behavior a part of my identity? Had I been doing it a long time? Each question yielded a number, which was tabulated with the others to form an overall score between 12 (not a habit) and 84 (definitely a habit). The idea was that the SRHI would reinforce the building of a new habit and help me pinpoint where and why the habit was falling off.

This worked for several months, but eventually I ran into a problem that many other behavioral psychologists encountered in their research: I kept forgetting to take the SRHI. When I forgot to record, my daily meditation often slipped through the cracks. Eventually, my practice sputtered to a halt. The act of tracking my habit, it turned out, was a habit in and of itself. Keeping conservation of self-discipline in mind, I focused exclusively on taking the questionnaire and dropped the meditation.

This was emotionally exhausting. My old view of self-help, with its emphasis on motivation and doing as much as possible all at once made me impatient. Limiting myself to one action, especially something as nebulous as taking a psychological quiz over and over again, seemed foolish. But it became a lynchpin routine, and when I eventually started meditating again, the habit lasted.

My SRHI scores still got shaky in times of emotional turbulence. When I was on deadline or had to travel, I’d find myself struggling to get to the mat or skipping meditation altogether. What stabilized my score was what BJ Fogg, a behavioral scientist at Stanford, calls a “Tiny Habit.”

For Fogg, the efficient race to a solid habit is everything. He advocates ludicrously small habits, such as doing two pushups a day or flossing a single tooth, to fix the race and ensure that you cross the finish line.

This makes particular sense with regard to meditation. A friend once described the aftermath of a Vipassana retreat, during which the instructor encouraged attendees to continue the practice. “One hour in the morning” the instructor said, “and one in the evening!” My friend hadn’t meditated since.

Instead of trying to get in a half an hour per session, I dropped my practice down to a few minutes. It was easier to meditate, even when life got chaotic. If I was traveling, as I often was, I could still find the time for a short practice.

Some days weren’t as good as others. But I was on a quest for consistency, and while previously I would have blamed myself for being lazy, now I saw that the entire process worked like an engine. When a car stalls, you don’t blame the car—you pop the hood and figure out what went wrong.

Identifying the Problems (and What Worked)
Poring through my own data and digging into research by other behavioral scientists helped me identify two problems in the construction of my meditation habit.

The first was a lack of a clear trigger for the behavior. Implementation Intention, a behavior modification strategy coined by psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer, suggests that the more specific the trigger, the more stable the habit. Once I formalized a particular moment to meditate —as soon as I woke up in the morning—my practice became more consistent.

The second problem involved realistic goal setting. Mental Contrasting, psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen’s research into goal achievement, is a strategy that counters the negative effect that purely positive fantasies have on our future progression. The technique involves visualizing what exactly you want to accomplish and contrasting that with the obstacles that might prevent you from achieving your goal.

This made sense of my early attempts at meditation, when my procrastination mechanisms would go into overdrive imagining what if scenarios. As a result I’d get carried away with imagining being a good meditator rather than practically planning how to get there.

Mental Contrasting made me question exactly what I’d do if I were traveling. It forced me to work out the small minute details, like locating my timer and finding a cushion, that would make the difference between engaging or putting it off for later (which, as we know, really means never).

After four months of tweaking, I finally got a perfect score on the SRHI. I’d successfully formed a meditation habit! But even though I was meditating every day, my short practice wasn’t getting any longer than a few minutes.  

Going Beyond Habits
After a year of meditation, I encountered a new pattern that took me beyond habits. Every time I increased the load of my routines—either by upping the number of minutes spent in meditation or by adding additional behaviors such exercising or stretching—there would be a leak in the system that disrupted the stability of my practice.

If I jumped to 30 or 45 minutes, I’d almost inevitably suffer the consequences of lower energy and emotional turbulence the following week. But when I increased by just a few minutes a week, everything stabilized. It appeared that pushing automatic routines was a totally different vector of behavioral change.

And that’s how gamification came back into my life. My favorite method of pushing skills are gamified 30-day challenges. My previous failures with games convinced me that the place for such challenges is in ratcheting already established habits into higher gear rather than simply kickstarting a new behavior. The short-term novelty may quickly fade, but not before you’ve leveraged it to increase intensity in your stable, long-term routines.

In completing several challenges in other skills, I noticed that although I never maintained the high levels of exertion—such as writing thousands of words a day in a writing challenge—my base level small habits would naturally increase when I returned to them after the 30 days were up.

To get to competency (much less mastery) in meditation will require several similar pushes—perhaps a gamified practice, a 30-day challenge, or more likely attending my very first intensive retreat. It is my hope that upon returning from such an immersive experience involving hours of meditation a day my home practice will have grown a little bit longer and stronger.

At some point repeated actions become bone deep. You see this in gym rats who work out no matter if they’re traveling or at home or with morning risers who always get up before dawn. After three years, I’m just now getting to the point where a day without meditation is simply a day unfinished.

[This story was first published in 2017.]

The post Hacking My Way to Consistent Meditation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Digital distractions plague all of us to varying extents, preventing us—myself included—from doing the things we want to do. This is a guide for anyone who wants to devote time to practice . . . but ends up fooling around online or playing iPhone trivia games (is that just me?) instead.

Recognize When it Happens.

One of the insidious things about the distraction habit is that we often don’t even realize it’s happening. It sneaks up on us, like old age, and before we know it we’re addicted and powerless.

But we’re not really. The power we have is our awareness, and you can develop it right now. Start paying attention to what sites you visit, how often you’re looking at your phone, how long you’re spending in front of a screen all day.

When I wanted to quit smoking, for instance, I developed an awareness of my smoking urges. I carried around a pencil and a small scrap of paper, and put a tally mark on it each time I had the urge to smoke. I could still smoke, but I’d have to put a tally mark first.

This built my awareness muscle, and it allowed me to insert a small space between the urge and my subsequent action. Into that space, however small, I could eventually fit a choice. That was where the power came in.

See What’s Going On.

Once you’re aware of the distractions and urges, you can start to examine their causes. After hours of following temptations online the other day (I was learning about two new interests, programming and cycling), I stopped and asked myself, “What’s this all about?”

It was about fear—the fear that I didn’t know what I was doing and was going to screw it all up. But it actually doesn’t matter even if I do screw it up. My value as a person isn’t tied to my successes or failures.

On the flip side of fear, my distractions are also often about fantasies: I really hope that I’ll be a great programmer or start doing century bike rides or Ironman triathlons. In reality, I don’t have time to do any of that. So I have to let the fantasies go, because they can’t come true unless I’m willing to devote my entire life to one of them for a year or two.

Take Action.

So you’re building awareness and you’ve examined your causes. If you haven’t yet, take a few minutes to walk around your office or house—or better yet, get outside—and contemplate these things for a few minutes. This article can wait.

Now there are further, concrete steps you can take to rid yourself of digital distractions and focus on what you want or need to do. Consider taking one or more of these actions:

1. Close as many browser tabs as you can. Bookmark some if you like, or save them with a “read later” service like Instapaper or Pocket. Let the others go.
2. Block your favorite distractions for a few hours. Games, social media, news sites. You don’t really need to go to them that often.
3. Write down the times you’re going to check email and other messages. Want to process email for 20 minutes at 10 a.m., 1 p.m., and 4 p.m.? Write that down. Stick to it.
4. Get away. Go outside for a walk. Ride your bike. Go for a run. Take the kids to the park.
5. Find a place with no WiFi, or turn off your router.
6. Delete social media accounts and any distracting apps on your phone—whatever you tend to turn to when you want a bump of distraction.

Of course, there are other things you can do. Go on a retreat. Practice mindfulness in bits throughout the day. Take a day off from looking at any screens. The possibilities are endless.

Related: Why You’re Addicted to Your Phone 

Consider What’s Important.

We try to do everything, but then we’re not really focusing on anything. We’re not going to make any of our little fantasies come true if we pursue all of them at the same time. Decide: What is the one thing you want to pursue right now? Can you focus on that for at least a month? If not, maybe it’s not that important to you.

In the big picture, what’s truly most important to you? Pick three to four of the most important things in your life. How much of your time is devoted to these things? Can you cut out other things to focus on them? Can you give your most important things your full attention?

In my life, my writing, my family, my health, and my learning are my four most important things. And no, I don’t always devote my full attention to them. I often need to step back and remind myself what’s important.

Fall In Love All Over Again.

In Pico Iyer’s book The Art of Stillness, he says that “sitting still is a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it.” This is absolutely true, and it makes clear why distractions can be so harmful: they’re turning us away from the miracle of life all around us.

Sit still for a few minutes and pay attention to what’s around you. Notice the quality of the light. Appreciate any people who might be nearby. Notice the quality of your thoughts, the sensations of various parts of your body, the loveliness of your breath as it comes in and out.

Fall in love with life all over again. And then devote yourself to it completely.

Related: Hacking My Way to a Consistent Meditation Practice 

How to Form the Meditation Habit

Meditation is perhaps the most important habit to maintain if you want to change other habits. It’s a pretty simple habit to form, but the doing is everything:

Commit to just two minutes a day. If you want the habit to stick, start simply. All you’re committing to is two minutes each day. You can go up to five minutes if you’re feeling good about it, and increase it over time—slowly.

Pick a time and trigger. Not an exact time of day, but a general time, like right after you wake up or during your lunch hour. The trigger should be something you already do regularly, like drink your first cup of coffee, brush your teeth, have lunch, or arrive home from work.

Find a quiet spot. Sometimes early morning at home is best, before others in your house are awake and making noise. Or it could be a spot in a park or on the beach or some other soothing setting. It really doesn’t matter where as long as you can sit without being bothered for a few minutes.

Sit comfortably. Don’t fuss too much about how you sit, what you wear, what you sit on, and so on. I like to sit on a pillow on the floor with my back leaning against a wall, because I’m very inflexible. Others use a meditation cushion or bench, but my opinion is that any cushion or pillow will do, and some people can sit on a bare floor comfortably. Don’t go out and buy things you don’t already have.

Focus on your breath. As you breathe in, follow your breath in through your nostrils, then into your throat, then into your lungs and belly. As you breathe out, follow your breath out back into the world. If it helps, count: one breath in, two breath out, three breath in, four breath out. When you get to ten, start over. If you lose track, start over. If you find your mind wandering (and you will), bring it gently back to your breath. Repeat this process for the few minutes of your meditation.

That’s it. Practice for two minutes, every day, after the same trigger each day, and after a month you’ll have a daily meditation habit.

♦

Originally published on “Zen Habits,” a blog by Leo Babauta. This work is uncopyrighted. www.zenhabits.net.

The post Dropping Distraction appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Karma is basically habit. It’s the momentum of repeated actions that become habitual. It’s in our best interest to develop as many positive habits as we can. In the Mahanama Sutta, the Buddha said, “Just as oil rises to the top of a pot submerged in water, your virtue, your goodness, your faith, or generosity will rise to the top, and that is what will carry you to your next destination.”

Practicing the good heart, or bodhicitta, is the essence of a good life and the best possible habit. Bodhicitta, which is a heart filled with love and compassion, is also the essence of a Buddha. It purifies negative karma and accumulates positive karma. Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, “The main thing is to practice bodhicitta. Dying with bodhicitta is the best way to die.”

Try to get to the point where your emotional default is into bodhicitta. In other words, what is your automatic reflex to life situations, especially difficult ones? Do you think about yourself and how you might profit or escape from a situation? Or do you think about others and how you can help? Progress on the path, and a sign that you’re well prepared for death, occurs when the former changes into the latter, when you default not into selfishness but into selflessness. If you’re uncertain about what to do in a situation, just open your heart and love. This is training in bodhicitta.

Being a good person and helping others creates the momentum that will carry you gracefully through the bardos. . . . Buddhists aren’t the only ones who can have a good death or prepare properly. Anyone who lives with genuine goodness will be taken care of by the force of that goodness. Tenga Rinpoche says, “Even though it may appear to be a worldly activity, if you have the attitude of bodhicitta, then it is the practice of dharma.” And it will prepare you for death. Bodhicitta lays down a red carpet for you in the bardos.

♦

From Preparing to Die, by Andrew Holecek © 2013. Reprinted with permission of Snow Lion, an imprint of Shambhala Publications. www.shambhala.com.

The post The Best Possible Habit appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Knowing how much is enough when eating.”

It sounds so simple. Yet how often the matter of “enough” trips us up. For much of the world, getting enough to eat is the problem. Here in America we eat too much. Two-thirds of the population is overweight, nearly a third clinically obese; meanwhile, our ideal of physical beauty keeps getting thinner and thinner.

Increasingly, we exist in a love-hate relationship with our bodies and in a state of conflict over food. Denying the body with one hand, we stuff it with the other—then second-guess every morsel we consume. Whether we are ordering a five-course dinner at the Four Seasons or eyeing a plate of Krispy Kremes, our hunger seems to have far less to do with nourishment than with the gratification of desire.

We weigh ourselves against impossible standards, and when reality falls short of our expectations, self-doubt—even self-hatred—is quick to follow. Judgment for dietary indiscretions is swift and harsh: a recent print ad for Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain health bars suggests how culturally ingrained this view has become. A bikini-clad model is shown reclining pinup-style, an enormous, icing-covered croissant balanced on her hip. The tag line says it all: “Respect yourself in the morning.” Food—the primordial form of nurture—is becoming a primordial source of suffering.

Ironically, the more we focus on the body, the more alienated from it we become. Increasingly, we resemble Mr. Duffy, the protagonist of James Joyce’s short story “A Painful Case”: “He lived at a little distance from his body . . .”

From a Buddhist perspective, however, the body is not the problem. Rather, it is our thoughts about it that undermine our sense of well-being. What is required is a shift in perspective that allows us to understand the nature of craving and to welcome the body, whatever state it is in. When we can relate to the body and our appetites with compassion and acceptance, we will no longer have to live at such a distance from ourselves.

Why do we eat, anyway? Clearly, physical hunger is not the only drive. Eating soothes emotional discomfort and offers escape from unpleasant feelings of anger, disappointment, agitation, fear, pain, sorrow, loneliness, or simply boredom. In times of stress, nearly everyone turns to food. CNN reported that in the days after September 11, consumption of ice cream and sweets rose dramatically in New York City.

Often we associate eating with happy times and try to recapture good feelings by consuming certain foods. We eat out of habit: “What’s a movie without a bucket of popcorn?” We eat to be polite: “I don’t want to insult my hostess.” Sometimes, we eat in response to a vague feeling of lack, or a fear that there won’t be enough in the future: “I’d better take one before they’re all gone,” we reason. “It’s just a cookie, after all.”

For many people a cookie is just a cookie. Eating it brings a moment of enjoyment—or, at worst, guilty pleasure—then they give it no more thought. For compulsive overeaters, however, a cookie is the culinary equivalent of a loaded gun: one bite can send them spiraling into a hell realm of insatiable desire.

The Buddha identified three poisons that constitute suffering: craving, aversion, and ignorance. Overeating is among the most insidious of cravings, a form of suffering that carries much shame. In a society that worships svelte bodies and self-control, we are merciless toward those who appear to have neither. The overeater, faced with desire that seems difficult, if not impossible to extinguish, sees no recourse but denial. However, retreating behind ignorance of the consequences only perpetuates the cycle of mindless eating, yo-yo dieting, and morning-after recriminations—and deepens its hold. Like a drunk suffering a hangover, a compulsive eater fresh off a binge has one overriding thought: Help! How can I stop this self-defeating behavior?

Food—the primordial form of nurture—is becoming a primordial source of suffering.

This is the very issue the Buddha addressed in his teachings on the nature of human suffering. We all want happiness, he observed, but we chase after it in ways that are sure to bring us pain. One of the Buddha’s most profound teachings is the law of dependent origination, which expresses in exquisite detail the twelve interdependent links in the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, spelling out how suffering arises and escalates. The principle of dependent origination (paticca samuppada in Pali, the language of the early Buddhist texts) sheds light on repetitive and compulsive behavior, showing why—and how—the stranglehold of conditioning makes it so difficult to change. Through this teaching we see that in the presence of certain causes and conditions, certain effects are inevitable:

When there is this, that is.
With the arising of this, that arises.
When this is not, neither is that.
With the cessation of this, that ceases.
–The Buddha, from the Samyutta Nikaya

In Tibetan Buddhism, the cycle of dependent origination is depicted graphically in traditional thangkas, or symbolic paintings, by the Bhava-Chakra—the Wheel of Life, or Wheel of Samsara. The iconography of the Wheel of Life illuminates the truth that compulsive behavior doesn’t arise spontaneously; the seeds are planted long before the moment of acting out. In the language of addiction and recovery, it is said that the “slip”—the lapse into compulsive behavior—happens long before the person takes the first bite of food or sip of liquor.

The twelve images on the outer circle of the thangka depict the coexisting conditions that entangle us in the endless cycle of human suffering. In examining these factors we see not only how suffering arises but also—this is critical—where we can intervene and make an inner shift to arrest the cycle.

The first link is ignorance—avijja in Pali. Ignorance is represented, appropriately, by a blind man walking with a staff. If we are deluded—if we fail to see our thoughts and actions clearly—we are bound to repeat our behavior. A key symptom of uncontrolled or unhealthy eating is denial that it is causing any problems. We ignore the reality that eating to get rid of discomfort only leads to more discomfort.

Related: If You Give a Buddhist a Cupcake

The literature of Overeaters Anonymous, a program of recovery from compulsive eating that follows the Twelve Step model, sums up this process: First we were smitten by an insane urge that condemned us to go on eating and then by an allergy of the body that insured we would ultimately destroy ourselves in the process. This is the same principle set out in an ancient Chinese proverb: Man takes a drink, drink takes a drink, then drink takes the man. Until we can awaken from delusion and acknowledge the consequences of our actions, the pattern of self-destructive behavior will continue and even escalate.

The next link in the cycle of dependent origination is characterized by volitional formations (sankhara), also known as karmic impulses. This stage refers to the mental conditioning—habitual thinking—and karmic patterns that inevitably lead to certain actions. When we are in denial, we make up stories to rationalize our behavior. Each time we act on one of those stories, we strengthen our belief in it, thereby reinforcing the behavior. The thangka image for this link is a man fashioning clay pots.

I once had a client who weighed over three hundred pounds and had had numerous operations on her knees. She persisted in believing that her ongoing knee problems came from having no time to do yoga, not from being vastly overweight. This is an extreme example, but how often we make excuses for overindulging: “Well, there’s no point in starting a diet now; it’s the holidays!” “I know I shouldn’t eat this, but you only live once”; “Just one couldn’t hurt”; “Things have been so tough, I deserve a treat.” Rationalizations like these lash us to the wheel of samsara.

The third link in the cycle is consciousness (vinnana), the faculty of knowing, depicted by a monkey swinging through the trees. (Here, the monkey is a symbol of the ever-changing mind.) This link refers to our perception and awareness of sensations as they arise, as well as to our mind state—angry, dull, or yearning, for example—which influences how we interpret sensory information. What gets our attention in the present is colored by our impulses and innate disposition—our habits of thought developed in the past.

Consciousness co-arises with the fourth link, mind and body (namarupa), pictured in the thangka as people in a rowboat. Consciousness shapes how the mind and body function, as in this familiar example: A woman who was dieting and feeling good about her progress got on the scale one morning, expecting a weight loss. Instead, the scale registered a two-pound gain. Frustrated and angry, she thought, “I’ll never lose weight, so why bother?” Her intention to stick to her diet dissolved, and she went out and bought a pastry for breakfast.

The state of the mind and body influences the fifth link, the six senses (salayatana), represented on the thangka by a deserted town (also commonly depicted as a monkey in a house with six windows). Here we encounter an important distinction between Buddha-dharma and Western psychology. In the West, perception is associated with the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching) and their corresponding sense organs. In Buddhism, mind is considered a sixth sense organ, or “sense door,” because it continually interprets the moment-to-moment input of the other senses. Our thoughts and opinions about our sensory experience influence our perceptions and responses, as the Dhammapadaso eloquently explains:

The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings . . .
As the shadow follows the body,
As we think, so we become.

When a stimulus meets a functioning sense organ, there is contact (phassa), the sixth interdependent link, symbolized by a man and woman lying together in an embrace. Stimuli are constantly moving through us and around us, without our conscious awareness or volition. Contact brings awareness of a particular sense impression to the foreground. For example, let’s say a man has just come out of his boss’s office after a particularly trying meeting that extended well past lunchtime. As he passes the receptionist’s desk, he suddenly sees a basket of candies sitting there that he has never noticed before, and reflexively scoops up a handful.

Whenever there is contact, the seventh link–feeling (vedana)–arises concurrently. (The image for this link is a man with an arrow piercing his eye.) Feeling, according to Buddhist thought, is associated with one of three possible sensations: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. There is a deeply conditioned reflex in all organisms to move toward what is pleasant and away from the unpleasant. Some people eat to avoid bad feelings. Some continue eating even when they’re full, either because the food tastes so good or because the process of eating is so pleasurable. A client of mine who was going through a difficult period bemoaned, “There’s so much I can’t do right now, but I need some kind of gratification. The chocolate looks so good. Even though I know I’ll regret it later, I’ll eat it anyway.”

Links three through seven–consciousness, mind and body, the six sense bases, contact, and feeling–are intricately interconnected, arising automatically without our conscious control. Unpleasant feelings naturally lead us to look outside ourselves for a way to feel better; pleasant feelings lead us to look for a way to continue feeling good. That search sets the conditions for the eighth link, craving (tanha), to arise.

Here’s a simple example of how this process unfolds: One person walks by a bakery without even noticing it. Another walks by and notices the smell of fresh bread, but continues on without stopping. A third person smells the bread and feels a rush of well-being: the scent triggers the memory of a delicious dessert she ate the previous week. Though late for work, she stops in front of the bakery window and debates whether or not to go inside and buy something to eat.

Here we stand at a critical crossroads, where there is still room for conscious choice. The split second between having a feeling (vedana) and giving in to craving (tanha) is the optimal moment to intervene and break the cycle of samsara. This is our opportunity to awaken and move away from self-destructive behavior. With strong intention and the proper tools, we can develop the strength and concentration to withstand temptation.

But what happens if we ignore this opportunity and give in to desire? In recovery circles one often hears the warning: Stay away from people, places, and things that trigger the urge to eat. This is skillful advice, but hard to follow. Unlike alcohol, or drugs, or tobacco, food is not a substance we can avoid altogether; it is essential for our survival. One frustrated dieter summed up the problem when he snapped: “You have to eat and not eat at the same time!” Daily life is filled with constant reminders of food, including our own thoughts about eating.

Related: Food for Enlightenment

Any powerful association can set off a desire to eat. It may be the smell or sight of a favorite food, or even the sound of someone chewing. A description of a gourmet meal can elicit euphoric recall and intense craving. For a food addict, the most mundane event can be a trigger: one young woman has only to see someone snacking from a brown paper bag and she is off on an eating binge.

The Buddha called craving the root of suffering. Tanha literally means “thirst”; the thangka symbol for this link is a man taking a drink, but it could just as easily be someone eating. At this stage on the wheel of life, the attachment to feeling good and avoiding discomfort begins to trap us in an endless cycle of painful behavior.

Once we give in to craving, we are catapulted immediately into clinging (upadana), the ninth link Here, the mind becomes fixated on the object of desire. It grasps. The image on the thangka is of a monkey in a tree, grabbing for fruit. All possibility of choice fades. As one overeater described it, “Even though my mind is aware, the body seems to have made up its own mind.”

The trance of grasping sweeps us into the tenth link, becoming (bhava), depicted in the thangka as a pregnant woman. Now, with the first bite, the overeater’s thoughts constrict, hardening into identification with the drive to eat. All other aspects of one’s being gradually become engulfed in a fog of “more.”

With the eleventh link, birth (jati)–pictured as a woman giving birth–the compulsion to eat is firmly entrenched. Having lost the will to try to break the cycle, the overeater surrenders to every impulse; the first bite inevitably gives rise to the next. Yesterday’s relationship with food has set the karmic template for tomorrow’s. The twelfth link–aging and death (jara-marana)–is assured. This is the death of possibility, of options. The image for this stage is an old man carrying a corpse on his back. Now the urge to eat is conditioned, and suffering is guaranteed, as the wheel of samsara turns once more. The overeater’s feelings of physical discomfort are accompanied by tortured self-recrimination: I can’t believe I did it again.

The Buddha, of course, did not leave us caught in the cycle of suffering with no way out. Just as suffering arises moment to moment, so too does the possibility of freedom from suffering, he said. The Buddha taught from his own experience how to be free of unhealthy attachments: though we cannot escape painful feelings, we can choose how to react to them. Centuries later, Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, echoed that theme in the Twelve Step program of recovery. To break the cycle of craving, we must see the truth as it is, however uncomfortable that may be.

For anyone watching their food intake, life seems to involve an ongoing internal debate: Should I eat this or not? But the real question, according to the Buddha, is not Should I? It is What is happening right now? Looking deeply into our experience, without judgment, we can explore the sensations, thoughts, and feelings that lie behind our desire to retreat into the ready comfort of food.

Through mindfulness training, we can ease the grasp of delusion, allowing us to experience the truth of impermanence, the workings of karma, and the power of intention. Desire narrows our awareness till we see only what we crave; mindfulness helps us see other possibilities. As we observe that our cravings–no matter how strong–eventually pass, we no longer feel compelled to act on them. We discover where in the cycle of craving we can effectively intervene. When mindfulness is strong enough to create space between stimulus and reaction, the karmic attachment that leads to automatic behavior is weakened, giving us a chance to make wiser choices. Even our most intractable habits can be changed.

But even with a strong mindfulness practice, there may be times when it is difficult to break a conditioned response without additional support. The Buddha spoke of the importance ofsangha–like-minded people with the same aspiration. To change harmful patterns, it is helpful to be around others who understand the pull of craving and are doing their best not to give in to it. For an overeater, “sangha” could mean a sympathetic friend, or a professional counselor, or a group of people with a shared intention, such as Weight Watchers or Overeaters Anonymous.

The message of the Buddha is that we are no longer doomed to be prisoners of our compulsions. When we take refuge in the Triple Gem–the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha–we find a safe haven from the false promise of food, and open ourselves to wisdom, compassion, and the promise of liberation. We take refuge in the Buddha both as an historical figure who found true freedom and as the seed of possibility that exists within us all. We take refuge in the Dharma–the universal truth, the Way. And we take refuge in the Sangha, the community of spiritual companions who support our efforts to be free.

May all beings be at peace with their bodies.
May all beings be at peace in their bodies.

How To Say No
The Buddha gave many teachings on what to do about distracting thoughts. Certain practices can be adapted to help us when food cravings arise. What is important to remember is that in any moment, we have options; the practice is to find the skillful means for each situation.

Intention is the key; everything else rests on this. We all have different triggers for overeating; know yours. Also keep in mind what your goals are—not to eat, not to go off your diet—and which foods are important for you to avoid. Consider which emotions make you feel the most vulnerable, and when you feel that way, turn to meditation, affirmation, or visualization for support. Then, set and hold the intention not to pick up a trigger food.

Substitute the thought of food with the thought of something more important. For example, visualize the face of someone you love, or feel gratitude for all the gifts you have in your life. Imagine yourself engaged in some pleasurable activity; see yourself on that vacation you’re looking forward to, for example. The Buddha taught, “As we think, so we become.”

Mentally follow the entire process of giving in to the desire to eat. See the whole cycle from beginning to end. If you take the first bite, where will that lead? What has happened in the past? How will you feel the next day? If, instead, you refrain from eating, how might you feel?

Ask yourself: What do I really want right now? What is the feeling behind the urge for food?

Stop whatever you are doing at the moment you feel the urge to eat, and do something entirely different: stretch, yawn, get up and walk, make a phone call. Even a simple action can break the trance.

Cultivate willingness to ask for support. In Buddhist practice, we take refuge in the sangha to support us in our practice. For support in avoiding destructive eating, we can phone a friend who understands our intention, for example, or join a support group for overeaters. On an everyday level, “support” might simply mean asking the waiter to remove the basket of rolls from the table.

Maintain nonjudgment. If you overindulge, don’t punish yourself. You will only make your suffering worse. Instead, observe your behavior with a compassionate heart. Then remember the instruction that is the foundation of meditation practice: Begin again, with wise intention.

Meditation to Work with Craving
Start by taking a few deep breaths. With a half smile on your face, imagine that you are inhaling a sense of calm and exhaling any tension, any thoughts about food. Allow the breath to return to normal. Bring your attention to your belly and the inner sensation of the breath rising and falling in that area.

When thoughts of eating or of a specific food come to mind, note “thought arising.” Become aware of the pleasant or unpleasant feelings that accompany the thought, then shift your attention back to the body, experiencing whatever physical sensations arise. Cultivate moment-to-moment awareness. Not resisting, not forcing. Just this, just this.

Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Allow yourself to experience the transient nature of thoughts and feelings, welcoming everything that arises as just this, not me, not mine.

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