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

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

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

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

“What are you doing?” asked his brother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I once fell in love with a person who interrupted our stroll in the middle of a crowded street, took my face in his hands, and told me that he never wanted to spend any time apart from me. We’d been a couple for nearly half a year and had decided to take a day trip to New Haven (where I’d gone to school) to explore the city’s art museums and my old haunts. We walked down Chapel Street on a bright spring day and ducked into a bookstore where we kissed in the nonfiction section and bought cards to write to each other. We caffeinated at a coffee shop where I used to study, and I took him to each dorm where I’d lived. We gazed up at the windows and he kissed my forehead, telling me he wished he’d known me then.

But even during our first week together, amid the fever pitch of our early relationship, a sentence arose, unbidden, in my mind: All things contain the seed of their own destruction. I was startled. The voice was kind, not dire; the words felt more like wisdom than a warning. I paid attention but ultimately dismissed them.

I had heard this lesson, expressed myriad ways, ever since I was a child. My parents, both devout Hindus, taught my brother and me that change is life’s only constant: the sky would always darken after a sunset, green leaves would always burn crimson in the autumn, and our bodies would grow feeble as the years passed. My father still reminds me that suffering ensues when we expect things to be permanent though they are not. 

As a palliative care doctor, I encounter the most marked manifestation of impermanence every day: that of bodily illness and death. There is the young man with end-stage stomach cancer that had shrunk with chemotherapy only to invade his liver and lungs quite suddenly; the older woman with Parkinson’s whose tremors were manageable until one day they grew so severe that she couldn’t walk anymore; the gentleman with heart failure who gasped when he spoke, his breathlessness worsening each day. My patients often share photos of who they used to be, their bodies fuller, their smiles wide. Sometimes memory is their sharpest pain: I felt so good a few months ago when the chemotherapy was still working. Why did it stop working? I’m taking all of my medications, so why is my breathing getting worse? 

Dying is a series of incremental losses: We become newly dependent on others to walk or change our clothes. Our appetites fade. Pain forces us to part ways with activities that once brought us joy. My patients and I often talk about living amid the chilling uncertainty that accompanies illness, and they tell me how they have coped with intense change in the past. Most haven’t deeply considered the philosophy of impermanence, but those who embrace it tell me about the freedom it confers. A body that grows weaker is slightly less shocking. Shifts in relationships are normalized. When receptivity to change supplants resistance, grief can feel like a gentler presence.

Yet everyday life is also a series of losses. And outside the hospital I couldn’t easily translate the philosophy I discussed with my patients into my daily life. My partner and I read each other poetry in each of our native languages and laughed when my dog gave him endless kisses. He didn’t want to disclose our relationship to an ex-girlfriend; I wondered whether I could trust him. We cooked elaborate meals for each other and sent the other home with leftovers. We talked seriously about how we’d combine our families’ traditions on our wedding day and discussed when we might have a child. When we fought about our differing communication styles, I grew distant and unable to express my concern for fear of seeming needy.

What made the relationship real was also what made it unbearable: the constant presence of change. 

While I could accept the idea of impermanence when helping my patients contend with dying and suffering, I couldn’t do the same when living my life.

Much of what I do as a doctor and a writer depends on observation: How do people behave when everything is on the line? What do they do when they think that nobody is looking? Who do they try to be, and why? Both practices demand control, the opposite of surrender. I’d told myself a story about my partner and our relationship, clinging unintentionally to a static image of each. Yet I’d forgotten that every story is ultimately about change. And while I could accept the idea of impermanence when helping my patients contend with dying and suffering, I couldn’t do the same when living my life.

A few months later I flew to New York to attend a friend’s wedding. I sent my partner photos of the newlyweds and the cake; he sent back pictures of himself cuddling my dog. The day I returned, his texts were distant. When he stopped by that night, he gave me a brief hug and spoke to me in a detached voice, as though I were a stranger. 

“I don’t think we should be together anymore,” he said.

I couldn’t find my words. I could barely feel the couch beneath me. I made sure that I was awake, that this was actually happening, that the person who couldn’t meet my eyes was the same person whose voicemail yesterday had said he couldn’t wait to see me. Shock rendered me silent: I couldn’t think to ask what went wrong, or whether he thought our relationship was worth at least a conversation about what happened. And though we agreed to take some time to consider the best path forward, he texted me a few days later, his tone formal, professional. Though he respected and cared for me, ending our relationship was the rational and logical thing to do, he said. I didn’t know what to say. I never wrote him back.

We don’t know when the diagnosis will come. We don’t know when the disease will worsen. We don’t know when love will arrive. We don’t know when it will fade. We can only know that the unexpected will happen, that certainty is a falsity, and that things will be impermanent regardless of how tightly we clench our fists around them. We mourn the brief lives of solitary moments, hoping that running reels through our minds might resuscitate them. And no matter how often my own life has shown me this truth, I relearn it in new ways each time loss arrives.

The loss of a relationship is not the same as the loss of a life. Suffering a sudden betrayal is not the same as dying from heart failure. Yet both can teach us how to cultivate a new relationship to surrender and acceptance. This doesn’t require forgetting or denying the past. It requires only that we examine it like a series of photographic stills, impressions we can retain and learn from with compassion instead of judgment.

In the days after our conversation, I lost my appetite and lay awake at night alternately crying and devoid of emotion. As I drove to work each morning, I tried to corral my emotions by remembering what I knew intellectually but couldn’t yet feel: Surrender is the path to salvation. Experiencing equanimity requires welcoming change. Embracing the ubiquity of transformation can offer transcendence. Yet I still searched for the reasons why the relationship had ended so abruptly, though this effort was nothing more than submission to an undertow: I found myself floundering in the depths, the search for an anchor perpetually elusive.

Not long thereafter, I sat with an elderly woman who hadn’t seen a doctor for fifty years. She felt her back snap one afternoon while gardening. Lung cancer had spread to her spine. She was too frail for chemotherapy. “I was fine until I suddenly wasn’t,” she said, looking out of the window at the gray sky that blanketed the city. I thought of Joan Didion’s famous lines: “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” 

As I left her room, I realized that in between the moment he’d left me a longing voicemail and the moment he knocked on my door, the only certainty was change. The way I’d felt in our first month together could never last, because it was the way we felt together in that first month. The second month existed only because the first had passed. And as time marched on, so did every sweet and hard moment of our relationship. The times when we saw in each other an unvarnished goodness coexisted with the times when the pain between us made it hard to look at one another. 

All things contain the seed of their own destruction—including the confusion and shock I initially felt. For even finitude offers gifts: though we will lose the things we can’t release, we will also lose the things we can’t wait to let go of. As I loosened my grip on the relationship I’d lost, as accepting its mystery became more important than understanding its demise, I began to feel how surrender begets both freedom and forgiveness. 

He would always be the person who bought me a beautiful card he’d never write, the one who said he’d never told anyone besides me about his depression, the one who accused me of holding him at a distance when I didn’t share my every feeling, the one whose mother had never met any of his other girlfriends, the one who gave me books I still reread, the one I’d see around afterward, both of us knowing I’d chosen to say nothing about something that had once meant everything. 

In the months that followed, when I thought of him, new lines came to mind, these from Mary Oliver: 

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. 

The post A Gift appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Over a decade ago, when I was a relatively new meditation teacher, a friend told me about a Tibetan Rinpoche who instructed his students to practice “extreme” letting go. He told them to stop whatever they were doing, let their limbs and muscles go limp, and literally fall down wherever they happened to be so they could “taste” the experience of releasing their clinging mind-states. He suggested doing this practice several times a day, and so they would crash to the floor or the earth on sidewalks, in office hallways, and in their kitchens. At the time, I thought it was a ridiculous and maybe even dangerous idea, and I wondered who would be foolish enough to follow such directions. But lately, I’ve grown to understand the usefulness of this teaching, as well as my aversion to it, because I’ve had to recognize and accept the truth about myself: I’m a control freak. And learning to let go—to relax and fall down, literally or metaphorically, into the reality of the present moment—is the only cure for it. 

In the past, I didn’t think of myself as a control freak, because I generally don’t try to control what other people do or say, I’m fairly adaptable to new situations, and I can tolerate difficulty as well as anyone else. But even though I don’t fall into the archetype of a demanding or rigid perfectionist, I’ve struggled for a long time to accept my lack of control over the future. For example, I often plan for the worst outcomes, strategize solutions to problems that aren’t happening, and fantasize about preventing unwanted or dangerous events from occurring. And because all of this worrying and planning prevents me from settling into the present moment, it’s difficult for me to fully rest or feel at ease.

This became all too clear at a meditation retreat a few years ago, during the pandemic. Because of social distancing and mandatory mask-wearing, we retreatants spent most of our time in our rooms. I’d brought along a notebook of inspiring Buddhist quotes and was contemplating Ajahn Chah’s advice: “If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. And if you let go completely, you will have complete peace.” As I repeated it silently to myself, I remembered the Rinpoche’s “extreme” letting go instructions and could feel my body relax. I realized that both teachers were right—I felt open, present, and less trepidatious about life. But I didn’t like it—the stillness and quiet in my mind were unfamiliar and unsettling, and I felt unprotected without all the plans and schemes that I thought were keeping me safe. My stomach clenched, my jaw tightened, and my heart closed. Even there, in that quiet, safe, and beautiful environment, I felt too helpless and weak to stop clinging. 

A minute later, I thought to myself, “Kim, what’s wrong with feeling helpless and weak?” In response, I felt a wave of sadness and fear, followed by the profound insight that my life was not special. I was subject to aging, sickness, and death just like everyone else, and I deeply understood that being a control freak enabled me to believe that I was immune to this truth. But, of course, every human is fragile and soft, subject to changes and losses that aren’t in our control. We can’t command the weather, other people, or a pandemic. And though there’s nothing wrong with using our actions to help prevent harm and contribute to beneficial and healthy conditions for ourselves and others, the outcomes are not up to us.

I finally saw that I had a choice—I could keep holding on to my painful and traumatic fantasies and continue suffering, or I could let them go and learn to tolerate and embrace my vulnerable and impermanent life. I put my hand on my heart, felt my body breathing, and chose to let my heart open to myself. As these painful feelings arose again, I remembered a practice from Thich Nhat Hanh and said to myself, “I see you, sadness and fear and I’m not going to leave you.” As I repeated these words of kindness, I felt my face, hands, and chest relax and a sense of contentment and ease arise, because I’d finally stopped trying to protect myself from this naked and tender experience of being. Paradoxically, welcoming my sense of vulnerability didn’t mean I was weak—rather, it signified courage, and the profound wisdom of meeting the future when it arrived, and not before. It inspired in me a deep confidence that, whatever happened, I could trust myself to meet it skillfully with compassion. 

Meditation is called a practice because it takes time and training to rewire and change old conditioned patterns of behavior. That experience from the retreat doesn’t mean I will never worry or try to control things anymore. But when I do sense a tightening and unease about the future, I know that I can return to my breath, connect to my feelings, and trust in the unfolding of life. It’s possible to be more open, present, and less trepidatious about life, and it’s okay to relax, take a breath, and slowly allow my illusion of control to fade. And, though I don’t think it’s necessary to fall to the pavement in a parking lot to experience the sensation of letting go, it’s a wonderful metaphor and skillful teaching that shows us that it is truly possible to drop everything—all our desires, fears, and delusions—and surrender to the truth of the present moment. 

With mindfulness and compassion, all of us can learn to meet our precious lives without aversion or ignorance and instead attend to our sadness and anxiety with love, kindness, and wisdom. If you suspect you’re a control freak like me—and frankly, I think you are because we all are—I hope you’ll practice this lovingkindness meditation that will remind you to relax, let go, and fall into the present moment again, and again, and again. 

Lovingkindness for Control Freaks 

• Find a quiet place, get still, and take a few deep inhales and exhales. Then put your hand on your heart. 

• Establish a connection with yourself. You can visualize yourself—as you look in the mirror or maybe in a moment of your childhood—or just have a sense of your loving presence. Then say these sentences silently to yourself: “May I be easy with the way life unfolds. May I be open-hearted and free.” Repeat each sentence as though you’re giving it as a gift to yourself.

• After a few minutes, include someone else who is struggling. You might imagine this person is sitting with you, or you can just have a sense of them and you together. Then say this silently to you both: “May we be easy with the way life unfolds. May we be open-hearted and free.”

• Finally, you can share your good heart and wisdom by imagining all the people all over the world struggling right now with a crisis, disaster, or unexpected calamity, and say to all: “May we be easy with the way life unfolds. May everyone be open-hearted and free.”

• After a few minutes, you can stop repeating the phrases. Just let yourself stay still, with your eyes closed, and rest here for a few minutes before you get up. Be sure to say “thank you” to yourself for your wisdom and skillful efforts.

The post Lovingkindness for Control Freaks appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

On a recent summer afternoon, novelist Andrew Sean Greer spoke with me from Tuscany, where he was visiting an ailing friend in her 90s. “These may not be her last days,” he said, “but they may be my last days with her. I’m here to be present for whatever may be happening now, and to be joyous with my friend because she’s the person who taught me to try to make a funny story out of everything.”

Greer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for Less, the comic story of Arthur Less, a struggling gay novelist on the cusp of 50 who’s traveling the world to overcome romantic heartbreak. The sequel, Less Is Lost (2022), narrates Arthur’s further adventures, this time as he journeys across the US to escape relationship and money problems. With humor and pathos, the novels explore love and loss, time and aging. The author of seven novels, Greer has received the California Book Award, an NEA grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has taught at Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1970 and raised in Rockville, Maryland, he divides his time between California and Italy.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Greer and I talked about how coming out at 19 changed his life, what made him turn to humor after writing serious novels, and why he likes happy endings. 

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Bardo is about living an authentic life. When you were 19 and home from college for winter break, you came out to your parents. What was that like? This is such a great thing to talk about for me. I was lucky to be gay because it gave me an opportunity to separate from everyone’s version of who I was supposed to be, and gave me an awareness of when something isn’t right for me. At that time, 1989, it was such a giant thing to say you were gay. Everyone took it as if I were saying I was from outer space. 

It was hard but also incredibly liberating for me—and for my mother, who came out to me right after I came out. She was raised in a strict Southern Baptist household in white America and raised me in a similar way. We both grew up with rigid ideas of what you’re allowed to do, and both of us let go of those ideas when they felt so uncomfortable they burned. 

By the time I was 17 or 18, it had become intolerable. Being gay just wasn’t in the air enough for me to be able to pick out what was going on, and I was having suicidal thoughts, a crisis of authenticity. Since then, I’ve been very aware of the feeling of inauthenticity, of phoniness, in different ways, like in a relationship or when I’m writing. The feeling of misalignment is deeply upsetting, and I’ll do anything I can to fix it.

What’s an example of it when you’re writing? Over the years, I’ve put away showy language and plot devices, stopped trying to get attention, and gotten a lot calmer and funnier. When I wrote Less, my friends said my writing finally matched my personality. I’m proud of my earlier books, but they’re heavy. There was a point where I snapped, and I thought, “I don’t want to tell it that way anymore.” It has to do with getting older—no more smoke and mirrors.

Less was a book I assumed no one would read, and very few publishers were interested in it. But I’d reached the point where I just wanted to make the thing that was in my head. I was like, “No one’s looking. It won’t be a hit, but I don’t care.” I was very proud of Less when I finished it, and even if it went nowhere, I promised myself I’d be pleased. That was great, the feeling you really want as a writer. 

And then you won the Pulitzer. Had you ever felt like being a writer wasn’t going to work out? There have been two times in my life when I felt I was never going to make it as a writer. One was after my first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, came out and no one reviewed it. The second was after my fourth novel, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, came out and no one reviewed it. 

What kept you going? My writing is what’s always gotten me through hard times. If the writing is causing the hard time, the only way to get through it is more writing. To stop the writing would not occur to me. Maybe also my vanity is so enormous that nothing can destroy it. That’s possible. But the pleasure I get from writing, even if just the struggle of it, makes me feel like it’s my actual emotional life. It’s not that I’m a person who’s constantly creating on cocktail napkins, but when I’m working on a book, it gives me a reason to live, like that selfish thing where many of us novelists are careful when crossing the street—we don’t want to be hit by a bus because we have to finish the book. The world needs your book, so you have to stay alive.

A central question in the bardo teachings is how we can find meaning in the face of obstacles. How has writing in a humorous way helped you do this? I turned to humor because my normal, serious way of writing was getting me to clichés. I found that humor was very connected to the deep things in life—if you meet real comedians, you’ll see this. Steve Martin, for example, he’ll want to talk with you about exactly what you and I are talking about rather than tell you a funny story or a joke.

Humor makes me face hard things and not think about them the way I did before. I see them from a much greater distance and realize that with anything awful, there’s got to be a funny part. When I was writing the Less books, I tried to think of the worst, most humiliating things that had happened in my life and put them in the books in a funny way. 

Along with the humor in the Less books, there’s a preoccupation with love. How do you feel about love? In Less, there’s a couple who, after twenty years, says, “I think that was good, don’t you? Wasn’t that wonderful? Let’s part.” And I surprised myself because that’s what my husband and I did after I wrote that book. Not because of the book, but I was clearly thinking, “What’s the right way to do love?” It sounds easy as I talk about it now, but it was very difficult. 

I think about love a lot. It’s something I care about and want. And I’ve gotten old enough to only want the kind that will give me freedom and support, not the other kind that seems so sexy when you’re young, that’s about possessiveness and manipulation and control. 

The bardo teachings encourage us not to fall into denial. We often stay in relationships that aren’t working, telling ourselves things like we’ve been together for a long time, nothing’s perfect, tomorrow will be different. But you recognized your marriage was over and you left. Yeah, I’m proud of that, though my husband and I were on the same page. I think the harder thing is to leave when you realize you’re not a good fit with the other person but you’re so in love with them. There’s still passion and chemicals and doubt: “Could I fix it? Could I make it work? Could I change him?” 

In bardo, we make choices and, in that way, decide our path. Do you have the sense that you’re living out your fate, or do you feel like you’re in the driver’s seat? I make choices rather than just let change happen and then have to fight against it. I’m not a brave person, it’s just that I’m aware of the feeling that change is happening and I have to go with it. I’m so afraid of being caught in a life I don’t want, or wasting time and energy in a situation that’s pointless.

I’m certainly not strategic, but I try to plan my life based on an instinct about what should come next, along with an awareness—almost an expectation—that there will be some outside force that will change whatever does come next. Like, I decide to move to a small town in Italy and that puts me in the right place for the next opportunity, whatever that may be. I don’t know where that is between fate and being in the driver’s seat, but it’s how I think. It’s not how I was raised, which was to plan everything out to the end—and which is how I used to write my books. I’ve found it’s better in writing my books to have an idea of what the ending is, and then just follow my instinct about how to get there.

“I think being present and attentive is the artist’s whole job.”

The Less books have happy endings. Was that a conscious decision? Definitely. For Less, I wanted a gay literary novel with a happy ending. It’s hard to find that kind of book, and I thought we deserved one. I thought, “There’s a lot of sad gay books out there, and they’re awfully good. But since I’m making it up, why not make up something that’s going to give people a sense of joy at the end?” I like books that end happily, like what you see in Jane Austen. And I wanted a happy ending for Less Is Lost. In fact, in the German translation, the title is Happy End! So many readers wrote to me on Instagram during the pandemic, and have approached me at events, to tell me how grateful they were to have a happy ending for the Less books. And no one’s given me crap about it yet, so I will continue. 

The Dalai Lama says the purpose of life is to be happy. Do you agree? That sounds exactly right to me. It’s wise and deceptively simple. 

Are you happy? Over the course of my life is hard to say, but right now? For sure. That’ll change very soon—like later today. I try to be aware of when I feel happy and say, “Well, this is wonderful. I’m having a lovely conversation with you. I’m working on a new book. I’m in this beautiful artist’s room with a view in Tuscany. I love my boyfriend, who’s downstairs. I had a great lunch.” I’m like, “Enjoy this. Sit for a moment with it.”

I’m not good at being present—I try my best, but I wish I were better at it. I meditate. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started doing transcendental meditation with my friend Daniel Handler, the Lemony Snicket writer. It’s been wonderful. He’s in California, and we meet every day on Zoom and meditate for twenty minutes.

Again and again, The Tibetan Book of the Dead says, “Do not be distracted.” The idea is that we can move forward only by being present and paying attention. I think being present and attentive is the artist’s whole job, and I hope meditating helps me do that. Proust believed that the role of the artist is to capture what other people retreat from because it’s too painful for them to be present with it. The artist collects it for them and reproduces it, and then they recognize it in a far less painful way. I just love that.

When the pandemic lockdowns started, a writer friend said to me, “I’m working on my novel, but it seems pointless with these protests over the George Floyd murder. I don’t know if it’s worth it to be a writer.” And I said, “Pay attention. It’s your job. You can pay attention to the details of pandemic life, or of the protest, or of absolutely anything. But do not freak out. That’s what everyone else is doing, and we need to be there, maybe not to create something that will help people right now but that will be of benefit to them later.” It’s only paying attention to the actual details of life, not a hot take on something but a considered take on something, that’s going to help someone in the future. I’m not a calm person, but it’s calming to think, “I can be here and record carefully. That will be my role in this.”

In Less, you wrote, “At ten, we climb the tree higher even than our mothers’ fears. At twenty, we scale the dormitory to surprise a lover asleep in bed. At thirty, we jump into the mermaid-green ocean. At forty, we look on and smile.” What about for you now, at 52? What’s the bold thing to do? You won’t find me climbing anything or jumping off anything. I’ve done all that and don’t have to prove myself anymore. A lot of things that people try to get me to do, I might be like, “I’ve done that plenty, thank you. I’m going to go to sleep tonight.” Or I might go out dancing.

The post Creating a Sense of Joy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Dani Shapiro’s new novel, Signal Fires, revolves around a secret that has life-changing consequences for a family living in a small New York town. An exploration of endings and moving forward, the book resonates especially deeply because of Shapiro’s own experiences with impermanence: the death of her father in a car accident, the loss of her mother to cancer, the serious illness of her only child, the revelation that her father was not her biological father, and, most recently, her husband’s cancer diagnosis. “Each time, I felt grief over what was happening,” she says, “and a parallel mourning for the self that had lost a layer of protection, a measure of innocence.”

Born in New York City in 1962, Shapiro grew up in New Jersey and studied writing with Grace Paley at Sarah Lawrence College. She has written eleven books, both fiction and nonfiction, including the best-selling Inheritance (2019), a chronicle of her journey in the wake of her discovery about her father. In 2019, she launched a podcast, Family Secrets, that now has more than 30 million downloads. Inheritance was named a best book of 2019 by Lit Hub, Vanity Fair, Wired, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and Signal Fires was named a best book of 2022 by Time and the Washington Post. Shapiro has taught at NYU, Wesleyan, and Columbia, and appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday, the Today Show, and PBS NewsHour.

From her home in Connecticut, Shapiro spoke with me about coming to terms with change, living in the present, and why she finally feels aligned with the trajectory of her life. 

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The bardo teachings say that after we die, it can take up to four and a half days for us to accept that the life we knew is over. In the bardo from birth to death this means we may struggle to accept endings, like the breakdown of a relationship or the loss of a parent; unexpected endings are especially hard to face. What have the sudden endings in your life been like? Slow Motion, my first memoir, begins with the moment I received a phone call that divided my life into before and after. I was 23, young enough to believe that life contains only one of those moments, and that the phone call about the car accident that killed my father and seriously injured my mother was that moment for me. But if we live long enough, we have a parade of such moments. The most recent before-and-after moment like this was when my husband was discovered to have a serious form of cancer. That first night after it was clear what we were entering into, my husband was snoring, so I went to our son’s room. Our son wasn’t living at home, and I climbed into his bed and wept. It’s a room that holds who I was as a young mother putting my 3-year-old to sleep, and I was lying in the bed of that 3-year-old, who was now a 17-year-old. It was as if there was a thunderclap of time, and suddenly I had a grown child and we as a family were facing the profoundly unknown. 

How did the experience of your husband’s illness change you? I have a feeling of deep knowledge, of walking with joy and gratitude and compassion and connection while carrying the awareness that life is so utterly fragile. When my husband was sick and we didn’t know he was going to survive, I had coffee with Sylvia Boorstein, a dear friend. She told me the parable of the monk who’s walking through the forest and realizes he’s being chased by a tiger. He gets to the edge of a cliff, and there’s nothing to do but get eaten by the tiger or jump off the cliff. Except there’s a vine, and the monk climbs onto the vine and sees a perfect ripe strawberry on the vine. He also sees a mouse that’s crept out from a crevasse in the cliff. The mouse is munching on the vine, trying to get the strawberry, so the monk plucks the strawberry and eats it.

The moral is that we are all always on that vine. It’s something I knew when my father was killed in the car accident and my mother almost was. I knew it again when my precious only child was very sick as an infant, facing terrible odds, and we had no reason to think it was going to be OK. I faced it again when I discovered that my dad, who raised me, was not my biological father. And again when my husband was diagnosed with cancer.

Sometimes endings are gradual rather than unexpected. What are endings like for you when you know what’s coming? My mother was 80 when she passed away from cancer in 2003. For about six months there was no question what was going to happen, and she and I shared that knowledge. As painful as the final moment was, it didn’t have the same quality of shock as losing my father in a sudden, violent manner when he was in the prime of life. If I can have a preference, I prefer knowing and being able to prepare, being able to say goodbye.

With all the endings you’ve had to face, do you feel more accepting of the inevitability of endings in life? Yes. There are people who deny that endings are unavoidable, and sometimes I envy them because they seem to be having a better time—I’m joking! I don’t envy them at all, because when the time comes, they’ll have a complete lack of preparedness. The pandemic taught us this. I have friends who could not tolerate the fact that their plans had changed, that they were in lockdown, and that everything had, in an instant, shifted for everyone. 

The pandemic was a bardo, a time when the life we knew abruptly came to an end and we were thrust into a new reality. As difficult as times like that can be, they also give us a chance for fresh insight, which is something you experienced with Signal Fires. If not for the bardo of the pandemic, Signal Fires would not exist. I had put it in the drawer about ten years earlier because it wasn’t working—I was trying to tell the story backward in time, which was a terrible idea. The possibility of rediscovering the book had never occurred to me. I thought it was going to be the one that got away, and I mourned it. But I literally found the novel again: I was cleaning out my office closet, and there was this neat little pile of pages. My mind was quiet enough that I heard my inner voice say, reread this. I’m not in the habit of rereading my work, especially not rereading it and liking it, because the self that wrote that work is hopefully doing better work now. But I sat down and reread those pages, and I loved them. The characters were still really alive for me. They’d just been sound asleep for years, like in a coma. During those years, I was moving through time and experiences: my discovery about my dad, my husband’s cancer. Through those bardo moments I was becoming seasoned and softened and open and capable, deserving the characters I’d created such a long time before. I was ready. It was a spectacular creative experience, an exercise in patience and humility and witnessing, in being awake and aware enough in the moment to rediscover those pages. 

Legend says The Tibetan Book of the Dead was written in the 8th century and buried in the earth and the sky, in dreams and the mindstream, so its wisdom could be unearthed when the time was right. Do you feel like your rediscovery of Signal Fires was an unearthing like this? Yes, and finding out about my biological father was too. If I’d found out about him when I was a teenager, or in my 20s, or shortly after my dad died, when I was lost and grieving, I don’t know that I would have survived it. I was already teetering on the edge, like, “Do I stay or go in this life?” But I made the discovery at a point when I was at my most stable and grounded, in a happy and supportive marriage, with a child who was well on the road to becoming a self-sufficient adult; at a time where, as a writer, I’d written book after book exploring identity and family secrets. One of the things I’ve learned over the last four years of doing my Family Secrets podcast is that when we find out what we find out is perhaps even more important than finding it out at all. If it meets us in the mindstream when we can tolerate it, metabolize it, and make meaning of it, it’s such a blessing.

When I wrote the first one hundred pages of Signal Fires in 2011, I created the character of the doctor, Benjamin Wilf, fully formed. It’s the character who appears in the finished book. It wasn’t until 2016 that I discovered the man who was my biological father. And it wasn’t until 2020 that I returned to the pages of the novel and finished a draft. I gave it to my son for a read—he’s been an early reader of mine for a while. He came into my office holding the manuscript and said, “Mom, he’s just like him.” Chills went through me. Benjamin Wilf is a physician, as is my biological father. He’s a pulmonary specialist, as is my biological father. There are qualities to him that are just like my biological father: a gentleness, a reticence, a moral compass. Anyone who reads Inheritance and then reads Signal Fires would think I created the character of Benjamin Wilf after I knew everything that I knew about my biological father. But that’s not what happened. So if we go back to the mindstream, to what exists in the bardo of life that we can’t explain or understand, my biological father was quite literally already inside me and I found out about him when the time was right.

Do you feel like, with all that’s happened, you have a heightened awareness of impermanence and the importance of doing what matters to you now rather than later? Virginia Woolf has these beautiful descriptions of the “cotton wool” of daily existence, as opposed to what she calls “moments of being.” We can’t live in moments of being all the time—we’d burn to a crisp if we had that awareness without end. But I’m more able to kiss the joy as it flies, to engage with the moment and understand that this moment is the only moment. My husband’s illness was the greatest catalyst for, “If not now, when?”

A good day is a day in which I’ve meditated, and I’ve unrolled my yoga mat, and I’ve spent time with people I care about or I’ve been of service in some way. I live in fear of wasting time. By wasting time, I don’t mean, “I didn’t do anything today.” I mean, “I got in my own way today.” I’m completely capable of getting caught in the external. This thing happened, or this thing didn’t happen, or I really wanted some shiny thing, an award or whatever. It’s not that I don’t have those feelings, but I’m moving through them with greater ease. Dwelling in them feels soul-deadening. It’s not, in Buddhist terms, skillful. 

In Signal Fires, there’s a point where the neighbor’s son, Waldo Shenkman, feels that he is “as aligned with the trajectory of his life as he has ever been.” Do you feel aligned with the trajectory of your life? I love that question. At this very moment, yes, more so than ever. I feel deep in all the different aspects of my life as a partner, a mother, a friend, a woman getting older, a writer, a teacher. I’m more capable than I’ve ever been in my life, more equipped. It’s the way I imagine a conductor would feel, having, for a split second, control of the music. I feel aligned because I know that we’re all hanging on the vine.

My husband got sick at the same moment as Inheritance became a best seller. There were crowds everywhere I went, and I was being invited to do amazing things with writers I admired, and places I’d longed to go. At the same time, my husband, my beloved, was facing grueling treatment, radical surgery. But we both wanted me to continue doing what I was doing, because it’s what I do. I’m a writer, and this is my livelihood, my career. I can’t just not do it. So I would go onstage and do these events and be fully present. Sylvia Boorstein has this beautiful mantra: “May I meet this moment fully. May I meet it as a friend.” That’s what I was attempting to do. 

Then I would come home and be 100 percent there for my husband as his advocate and his partner. There was no option to not do both, and it taught me a lot about how more than one thing can be true. It was true that my husband was fighting for his life. And it was also true that I was having this extraordinary moment out in the world. Those things didn’t coexist comfortably, but they did exist together.

You could have struggled against the reality of the situation. But instead, you met it. Not meeting it never felt like an option. As Joan Didion says so beautifully in The Year of Magical Thinking, “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” The ordinary instant is not a given for any of us at any moment. It’s the work of my life, both as a human being and as an artist, to not let that knowledge paralyze me, to navigate how to live with that knowledge and let it enhance my living.

The post This Moment Is the Only Moment appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Jack Pine Story #1: Wild jack pines begin life in the aftermath of a devastating fire. That’s not a coincidence; it’s a strategy. It begins with the seeds, many of which are sealed inside the cones with resin, which protects them from drying out. 

My wife’s 96-year-old mother (we all know her as Mrs. T) has dementia, and she’s been in her own home now for forty-seven years—cared for during the past five years by live-in aides. We knew that if she lived long enough, the impressive amount of money that she and her husband had saved during their lifetime would eventually run out. But we thought it would be end of summer or sometime later this year. 

After a meeting in January 2022 with our accountant, we realized…it’s now. It’s, like, right now. She needs to be moved in by February 1, and the house has to be listed by March 1. 

We hung up the phone and sat there, gaping at each other. Our minds and hearts galloping to catch up, then screeching to a halt, then galloping again, we couldn’t even find words. We went to bed, each of us awake, our seeds of growth and resilience safe inside the resin of our willingness to step up. And both of us, terrified. 

Jack Pine Story #2: In the heat of a wildfire, the jack pine’s resin melts and the seeds are released. Although the fire may kill the parent trees, the seeds survive and grow quickly, more quickly than most other trees in the forest. 

At around 3:30 a.m. this morning, Mrs. T’s aide, Lorraine, called us and said Mrs. T wasn’t responding and to come right away. We flew into our clothes and arrived to witness my mother-in-law’s face, a kind of death mask, unmoving, mouth open and only occasionally making a haunting sound with her vocal cords. 

We called the priest for last rites. We called her other children and her grandchildren. Everyone said their goodbyes. We said the Lord’s Prayer. We said the rosary. The priest arrived, forgave all her sins, and anointed her in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. 

I went home, Elena stayed with her mom. This time of resin-melting extremity released the seeds of sacred intimacy, of healing, of profound connection between them. In the morning, Mrs. T reached for her daughter, stroking her hair, smiling. Her eyes came back to life. And after a while, she actually said, “What are we doing today?” 

Jack Pine Story #3: In the heat of the wildfire, the seeds are released, they survive, and they grow quickly.

So we’re back at the “February move in, March house listing” part. Everything about our way of life—the daily rhythms we’ve developed over the last twenty years, the quiet mornings, Elena’s crossword puzzle, my blog, the daily walk and home-cooked meal with Mrs. T, combined with the blessed sanctuary of our ability to withdraw ourselves from her dementia’s unending noise, repetition, and demands—all of that expires in February. 

And if we think we’ve got troubles, it will be exponentially harder for Mrs. T. At least Elena and I are still in our own home. Of course, we will keep all her familiar furniture and photos around her, but I don’t think that’s going to mean much. During her last hospital visit due to a broken hip, she kept the entire wing awake yelling for home, furious that no one would take her there. My heart breaks for how this desperate search never ends for her. 

Heat and destruction are crucial to the seeds popping out and creating new life. 

Our existing days—all the patterns and peace that we’ve taken for granted—will go up in smoke. I’m 67, and terrified of losing my privacy. I’m scared to death we’ll buckle under the pressure, or that I’ll become someone I can’t stand, someone I’m ashamed of. That’s the fire. 

The melting resin, the seeds exploding, inseminating the ground around me—that’s this whole opportunity. This doctoral program in Buddhism. This chance to actually put my feet on the way of the bodhisattva.

I’ve studied and practiced and grown in Buddhism for twenty-three years now. And with this next step, it’s like after sending out applications and checking the mail every day, the envelope finally arrived. The fat one. My acceptance letter from the school I was most hoping to get into. 

Now I have to find my dorm room, show up for class, and do the work. 

Parting Thoughts: The jack pine doesn’t usually grow very tall because it often lives in nutrient-poor, sandy or rocky soil.

The nature of our existence is to be dissatisfied in some way with our own unique-to-us, nutrient-poor, sandy or rocky soil. We’re all too familiar with this equation: If I only had “X,” then I’d be happy. Dissatisfaction is just part of our human habitat. 

It’s what we do with it that counts. We can scurry down the dark alleys of our fear. We can run to the comforts of distraction, drugs, dissociation. 

Or we can call on the power of the seeds we carry. We can invite the flames of irritation, rage, boredom, and frustration into our experience. We can let the fire burn off our resistance to What Is. And we can let the heat melt our protective resin until we explode with new beginnings, new wisdom, new joy. 

When you reach the limits of your maturity, turn to this part of you—borrowed from the real world of trees—to remind you that the unquenchable fires in your life are the parents of every new forest in you waiting to be born.

The post Three Jack Pine Stories appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Many years ago, I was listening to a talk on lovingkindness by a Buddhist teacher when someone in the audience shared their experience: no matter how much they meditated and brought mindfulness to their day, they were still their same old shitty self. Although I initially laughed at the comment, it simultaneously resonated deeply with me. At the time, I too had been striving hard in my practice, with high hopes that after enough hours of meditation and retreats, I would somehow land myself in a blissed-out state of perfection. I truly felt that if I dedicated myself fully to the practice, I’d no longer have to deal with the messiness of my imperfections and would finally be able to love and accept myself. 

How many of us have felt just like that audience member? We go to all of these workshops, read a bunch of spiritual books, meet gurus and teachers, sign up for retreats, and do hours and hours of meditation only to meet the same difficult feelings, thoughts, and habits we started out with. This feeling of failure can be very discouraging and can easily become a breeding ground for self-hatred, which is definitely not the direction our practice is supposed to go in. 

For me, during that time, it felt like I was completely covered in mud, and no matter how hard I tried to get clean, I still ended up all muddy. I wondered: How can I love myself when I keep meeting the parts of myself that I hate? How can I be loving toward myself if I’m continuously covered in mud? 

The answer to this predicament came to me one day on an afternoon jog. As I was out running, I saw a statue of Budai, the Laughing Buddha, covered in mud. Although he was very dirty, he still had a big loving smile and was bursting with joy. Seeing this offered me a new possibility. What if we all were able to stop desperately trying to clean ourselves off and instead learned how to love ourselves anyway just as we are—warts and all? Could we cultivate an unconditional friendliness—embracing rather than fighting our so-called “shitty” selves—and learn how to be joyfully covered in mud just like the Laughing Buddha? 

I believe we can and that this is the essence of our practice. And the good news is we don’t have to wait for completion or perfection before we finally begin loving ourselves. We can actually start right now. 

If we want to love our imperfect selves, it’s helpful to see ourselves through the lens of the three I’s: Impermanent, Imperfect, and Impersonal. 

The “mud” of our lives, our mistakes, flaws, and imperfections, constantly come and go and are always changing. No matter how much we try to clean ourselves off, eventually more mud arrives. Yet, if we understand impermanence—the truth that everything changes and ends—then we can see our imperfections not as permanent traits that need to be hated or removed but rather as an ever-flowing stream of life energy to be embraced and worked with. Instead of disliking ourselves for being covered in mud, we can actually love ourselves anyway and create a warm, friendly atmosphere in our own being that’s spacious enough to allow all of the “mud” to come and go. 

I remember for many years in my practice not being able to stand certain feelings, thoughts, and habits I experienced daily. I used to joke that there were two versions of myself: “Mark,” with all his imperfect ways of being, and “Monk” who wanted to live a perfect, Buddhist-inspired life. This splitting of myself into two opposing versions made my life a living hell and left no room for self-love. There were times when I wanted to go out and have some casual drinks with my friends, but I had taken vows that included not taking any intoxicants. Yet, there I was by the end of the night, completely wasted. Or other times when I would say something inappropriate or allow myself to burst out in a fit of rage, even though I had made a commitment to wise speech. I would struggle and fight the urges of “Mark” and would always end up losing against them. No matter how hard I tried, I would eventually cave in and wind up hating myself, thinking, “You’ve been meditating all these years and you’re still screwing this up?” 

Trust me when I tell you I tried anything and everything to make these imperfections disappear. But to no avail! It wasn’t until I allowed all of it to be there—allowing both “Mark” and “Monk” to live together harmoniously—that I was finally able to find some ease. I realized that what I was running away from was not actually who I was, but rather was nothing more than temporary changing conditions—thought patterns and unpleasant body sensations. I didn’t have to hate them, nor did I have to indulge or get lost in them, and I surely wasn’t “bad” or unworthy of love for having normal human urges and feelings. Understanding impermanence, combined with the act of radical acceptance, helped me cultivate an unconditional friendliness in my heart and mind, allowing me to begin the journey of loving my imperfect self.

Because all things are impermanent, we will naturally be imperfect—the second “I.” Completion and perfection are not possible because things come together and they fall apart. This is simply the nature of this life, and even if we somehow managed to attain some level of perfection, it would be dependent upon an infinite amount of changing conditions, causing it to be uncertain and unstable. 

What does this mean for us? Our bodies, emotions, thoughts, habits, and behaviors will always be imperfect. We will never have them permanently be the way we want. The good news is this isn’t a problem, it’s just how things are.

Understanding the second “I” requires meeting our imperfections as expected guests on the path of being human, not as unexpected and unwelcome intruders. Loving ourselves involves accepting this truth that we are imperfect, and once we realize this, we can shift away from perfection and instead move toward perfecting our love toward our imperfect selves. Rather than endlessly trying to be “better” and hating ourselves along the way, we can work with the current ingredients of our lives, and moment by moment meet each imperfection with a wise heart and a warm, loving attention.

The third “I”—the impersonal nature of our imperfections—begins to reveal itself as we repeatedly observe impermanence in our own bodies and minds. Since everything is in a constant state of flux, it’s not possible for there to be some solid, unchanging entity we can call “me.” Our fleeting imperfections don’t have to turn into a permanent identity. They are not our fault, nor are they who we truly are. Sure, we are responsible for how we relate to them, but ultimately they are nothing more than impersonal changing conditions, arising and falling away. This understanding allows us to drop the heavy burden of our imperfections being who we are. 

It’s a lot easier to love ourselves when we can relate to our flaws with lightheartedness and a sense of humor. Our flaws are not personal failures, they are impermanent, imperfect, and impersonal expressions of life. When viewed through the lens of the three “I’s,” our imperfect selves become much lighter and freer, allowing more room for love and appreciation. We may still get covered in mud from time to time, but we can do so joyfully, with hearts filled with love.

May you all be free from self-hatred.

May you all be held in compassion.

May you all love yourselves completely.

May you all be joyfully covered in mud.

The post Joyfully Covered in Mud appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Like many important Buddhist words, anicca points to what something is not rather than to what it is. The Sanskrit word nitya (spelled nicca in Pali) denotes what is constant, perpetual, and therefore eternal. It has the sense of something being regularly occurring, or always occurring in a regular manner.

When the prefix a- is added, the meaning is reversed. Thus the Buddhist term anitya, or anicca, which is almost always translated as “impermanent,” might be more precisely rendered “inconstant” or “changeable.” It recognizes that human experience is always changing, becoming something different than it is, and uncovers the truth that because of this it is unstable.

For example, in the early Buddhist texts, gratification is commonly said to be found in things such as the sense organs and their corresponding objects, since they can give rise to both physical and mental pleasure. But there is also a danger inherent in them because they inevitably change and become something other—they are inconstant and unreliable. The only solution or escape from this limitation is the removal of desire for such changeable things.

In the Buddha’s very first discourse, he pointed to the impermanence of all phenomena and revealed that because of this inconstancy, everything is ultimately unsatisfying and tainted with suffering. The gratification we find in things is sure to collapse as they change.

This is the reason nothing is fit to be regarded as constituting or belonging to a consistent self. The core Buddhist teaching of nonself is not so much stating that a self does not exist as it is identifying the self as being as impermanent, inconstant, and unsubstantial as every other conditioned thing.

Insight into these three characteristics of phenomena—impermanence, suffering, and nonself—lies at the heart of wisdom. Giving careful attention to the perception of impermanence is thus an important practice for developing this wisdom.

In mindfulness meditation one closely observes the arising and passing away of bodily sensations, feeling tones, states of mind, and mental objects, thereby discerning their impermanence. You can actually see for yourself how the mind is “moving and tottering, impermanent, changing, becoming otherwise,” as one text (Samyutta Nikaya 35.93) puts it, by simply looking inward.

Perhaps the most intimate and profound encounter any of us can have with the truth of impermanence is the recognition of how fleeting, and thus precious, this human life—even this very moment—actually is. 

The post What’s in a Word?: Anicca appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Often in the pursuit of happiness, we will cling to our attachments to people, things, and circumstances that make us feel safe or content. The fundamental Buddhist teaching of impermanence relays that we will not find sustained happiness through this clinging, only suffering. With practice and applied wisdom, releasing our grasp on attachments allows us to be with what we cannot control and accept that everything changes. Consider the attachments you may be clinging onto, whether it’s a possession, a relationship, a career goal, or a certain sense of self. Letting go encourages us to open ourselves to meeting the world with a sensitive curiosity. Below is a list of teachings and tips to aid in this practice. 

Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself

“The process of letting go is a tender one. We should notice the poignancy and humor of this very human struggle. It is less of a battle and more a path of acceptance and accommodation to the natural arising and dissolving of our ordinary experience. The two-step process—first letting go, and then letting go of the letting go—allows us to approach the idea of letting go gently, precisely, step by step. In doing so we see that even though we so often tend to re-solidify our experience, between the letting go and the re-solidifying there are real glimpses of openness.”

  —from “Letting Go” by Judy Lief

Allow Feelings to Flow

“When feelings are allowed to flow through the body, they too are safe; they do not poison or destroy the container that conveys it. But when our emotional life is blocked, put off by distractions and the busyness of life, it becomes toxic; pressure builds over time, it seeks out other routes; the blocked energy eventually floods, spreading all that has developed in this damaging state.

And so when we open to our feelings as they arise, we create the causes and conditions of mental and physical health. This is what acceptance-based inner awareness entails; it is not a practice to put off, any more than breathing, sleeping, or consuming nourishment.”

          —from “Flowing Feelings” by Josh Korda

Liberate Yourself from Stagnant or Limiting Narratives of Self

“We are constantly being transformed when we travel on the path. While we may be the same individual on one level, on another level we are different. There is always continuity, and yet at each major turning point on the journey we have become transformed because certain habits have dropped away. The spiritual journey is dynamic and always tends forward because we are not fixating on things.”

—from “Letting Go of Spiritual Existence” by Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche

Practice Non-attachment

“A simple action that can be helpful in terms of relinquishing is this: on a regular basis—perhaps once or twice a year— choose something to give away. Not some old relic you don’t care about any more, but something you do care about, that has value to you. There’s no need to go overboard by giving away something that will change your lifestyle or will make the kids resent you for the next twenty years. Give away something you like yet are willing to relinquish. During the entire process of selecting and relinquishing, be mindful of your feelings. This can be more challenging than it may at first appear, but it can help us prepare for the day when we must relinquish all that we hold dear.”

—from “Lightening Your Load” by Allan Lokos

Recognize Each Moment as Enough

“A wonderful result of letting go is to experience each moment as being enough, just as it is. It allows us to be present for our experience here and now with such clarity and freedom that this very moment stands out as something profound and significant. We can let go of the headlong rush into the future, as well as the various, imaginative ways we think, ‘I’m not enough’ or ‘this moment is not good enough,’ so we can discover a well-being and peace not dependent on what we want or believe.”

      —from “What We Gain When We Learn to Let Go” by Gil Fronsdal

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The wind is picking up and the snow is coming down harder. Visibility has reduced; I can only see a few hundred feet in front of me. My hypothermia risk has increased, my energy has dipped, and I’m getting thirsty and hungry. I hear wolves howling in the distance. I realize that I must get back to my cabin before the blizzard hits, or I will die. 

I am playing The Long Dark, a survival video game with the tagline “Welcome to the quiet apocalypse.” Set in the northern Canadian wilderness on the fictional Great Bear Island, players have to navigate a frozen world without electricity in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. Players can travel from region to region to find loot, but eventually, all supplies will be depleted, and you will have to survive on your wits and skills. In the game’s survival mode, you are the only person on the fifty-square-kilometer island. You can choose one of four difficulty levels—pilgrim, voyager, stalker, or interloper—or choose a custom mode and set dozens of parameters to make it as easy or as difficult as you want to survive in the frigid Canadian north. 

Playing in pilgrim mode, I awakened on Great Bear Island in the snow-covered expanse of mountainous northern Canada with little food or clothing. I scoured the empty houses to find outdated canned food, old granola bars, and some dusty old cans of soup that had been left behind when the last people departed. As I checked cupboards and cabinets, I found clothes—some in good condition and some very old, but enough to keep me warm—and a few basic tools—a hatchet, a hacksaw, and a hunting knife. My new equipment allowed me to heat up canned food, cook the meat and fish that I scavenged, and melt snow to have water to drink. As I explored the island’s various regions, I discovered more resources, as well as workbenches to repair tools and craft items to aid survival. Over time, my skills increased, and I learned how to use my resources more efficiently. But death was always right around the corner.

Vegans don’t survive on Great Bear Island; there’s no plant-based diet in sub-zero temperatures. As a Zen practitioner, I don’t want to kill even virtual animals, but that’s the only way to survive. The first time I used a rifle to kill a virtual deer, which had been peacefully grazing around Mystery Lake, I felt like I had torn apart the natural landscape. Sure, my character needed food to survive, but why was my life more important than the deer’s? 

That deer sustained me for several days, and if I were to take down a bear, I could store the meat in the snow and survive off that for weeks. Still, I didn’t want to kill such majestic animals. Between catching fish or rabbits, I learned that fishing is the easiest and least violent way of acquiring food. While rabbits are abundant on Great Bear Island, you either have to catch them in snares or first stun them with stones and then snap their necks; I couldn’t use my virtual hands to kill bunnies. I chose to rely on snares for hunting. At least this way, when I collected them, they were already dead. 

Impermanence is built into the game. Everything you possess wears out over time. Your clothes, your tools, your food—everything eventually goes bad. You have to repair your clothes and your shoes, and, in order to perform the repairs, you need to find items like sewing kits, bits of cloth, and pieces of leather. You can repair your hacksaw with scrap metal, and if you find a whetstone, you can use it to sharpen your hatchet and knife sharp, but it, too, will wear out. Zen teaches us that everything is impermanent, and I am always aware when playing The Long Dark that a time will come—if I manage to survive long enough—when nothing other than the bare essentials will remain. 

The Zen expression “chop wood, carry water” describes what you have to do in The Long Dark. You chop wood to keep warm, cook food, boil water, and carry that water around as you travel. Every moment playing The Long Dark is the present moment. There’s no time to worry about what’s going to happen in a week or to dwell on past mistakes; all you can think of is how to stay alive. That’s the only goal of the game: to stay alive. In survival mode, there’s no golden ring or trophy. There’s only the satisfaction of making it through yet another day, discovering that you have not transitioned into “the long dark,” death. 

The only humans you see in survival mode are frozen corpses. They remind you that your life is precious, that it won’t take much to lose it, and that you better stock up on wood, catch some fish, and prepare for the next blizzard. 

The Long Dark is engrossing, as you feel the stress of your character when the temperature goes down and hunger sets in, and you don’t know if you’ll make it back to your base before the blizzard hits. Unlike many other video games, The Long Dark’s survival mode has permadeath: when you die, you must start over from the beginning. There is no rebirth; you can’t go back to a previous save and have a do-over. As Dogen said in Shoji, a chapter of his Shobogenzo, “There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth and death.” 

With this in mind, you can play The Long Dark and be in the moment, realizing that this is the only moment that you have, that the past is gone, and that the future is not yet here. Death will come, and it will be all right. But for now, you can marvel at the beautiful landscapes and the silence of the wilderness, and keep on chopping wood and carrying water. 

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