It can be so easy to dismiss joy as frivolous or not serious, especially in times of crisis or despair. But for poet Ross Gay, joy can be a radical and necessary act of resistance and belonging. In his new essay collection, Inciting Joy, Gay explores the rituals and habits that make joy more available to us, as well as the ways that joy can contribute to a deeper sense of solidarity and care.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and co-host Sharon Salzberg sat down with Gay to talk about finding joy in the midst of grief and sorrow, the dangers of believing ourselves to be self-sufficient, and how joy can dissolve the boundaries between us. Read excerpts from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen (JS): At the beginning of the book, you mention a student who said they’d always been told they couldn’t write about joy because it wasn’t serious enough. How do you understand a comment like that?

Ross Gay (RG): Sometimes people see joy as a kind of lightweight or consumerist emotion. And that’s not it at all. Joy emerges from the understanding that we live in the midst of profound difficulty, and it seems to me to be about the practices of entanglement. When we’re entering these practices of understanding that we belong to one another, that we are not separable from one another, what comes from doing those practices is joy.

Joy is so powerful because it reminds us that we can belong. Culturally, there’s a kind of profound alienation that people are experiencing, and I feel like joy itself is the evidence of a feeling of belonging. That feeling of belonging can be mutual heartbreak. It can be a gathering around all kinds of things. But it does feel like it is the evidence of the belonging to one another, and that feeling of belonging incites more stuff by which we understand we belong to one another. I want to be able to articulate all these ways that we do this daily. I want to be able to notice the ways that as I’m walking down the street, going to get my coffee, or whatever, I’m in the midst of a kind of remarkable care.

JS: Instead of imagining joy as separate from pain, you suggest that it emerges from how we care for each other through sorrow and suffering. Can you say more about how you came to this understanding of joy?

RG: I spent a lot of time fighting to avoid my sorrow and isolate myself from my sorrow, which is also a way of isolating myself from other people. One of the teachings that felt like a life-changing teaching happened at a mindfulness class at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. We were doing a body scan meditation, and the teacher asked, “How’d it feel?” One of the students in the class said she didn’t like it. The teacher said, “Well, why not? Are you OK to talk about it?” And she said, “Well, it made me sad.” As this was going on in this class of thirty people, I realized that I literally couldn’t watch. I couldn’t look at them. It wasn’t like someone was having a finger cut off. It was someone saying they’re sad. But I couldn’t bear to look.

In my body, I was having the same exact feeling that I would have when I would visit my mother. My father had died recently, and my mother was really sad. It was so difficult to be with her in the midst of that sadness, and I learned to watch the ways I would try to get out of being with that sadness. Being with that sadness, to me, is called joy. Being with your mother in the midst of her sadness is one of the aspects of joy, I think.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): I think what you’re saying is so powerful because we can have so many conditioned reactions to that sense of sorrow, which is not allowed for many people. In the book you use an image of inviting sorrow in for tea, echoing the story of the Buddha inviting Mara to tea. But the tea soon turns into a neighborhood potluck full of dancing and raucous celebration. Can you say more about that image of the neighborhood potluck and the boisterousness that can come from sharing our sorrow?

RG: One of my hunches is that if we don’t reject our sorrow, then we don’t reject the sorrow of other people, and if we know that sorrow is not unique to us, maybe we are less inclined to be overcome by it. I think of that potluck itself as a kind of practice of entanglement. In the potluck, there’s a group of people who form a fermentation crew, and then a coven forms. People are dancing and making kites out of the obituary pages. It feels to me that all of these practices emerge as a way for people to acquaint themselves with and then be with their sorrows. When the sorrows get invited in, it’s actually a party where people figure out how to care for each other.

“Joy is so powerful because it reminds us that we can belong.”

JS: You organize the book around two guiding principles: investigating the rituals and habits that make joy available to us and exploring how joy makes us act and feel—in other words, what incites joy and what joy incites. Can you say more about these principles and how they’ve shaped how you see joy as a practice?

RG: The question of what incites joy goes back to the student who said, “Well, I’ve been told that joy isn’t serious. Why should I be thinking hard about joy?” And to me, what I’ve found is that what incites joy is, in fact, deadly serious, including the fact that we die, we grieve, we suffer, and so on. In the book, I talk about pick-up basketball. I talk about gardening. I talk about dancing. A lot of these things are ways that we practice making room for and accommodating as many of us as possible. Often, these are practices where the divisions between us get murky—like dancing, hard. The idea of you and me changes when you’re dancing. Any time you’re growing a garden, a very regular practice of the garden is to share. You’ve got extra zucchini; you share them. Your potato harvest was wild; you share the potatoes. That sharing itself troubles the boundary between you and me.

JS: You say that joy can kindle “a wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity,” which in turn can incite further joy. Can you tell us about this transgressive power of joy in bringing us together across boundaries?

RG: It’s my understanding that there’s extreme care in, say, a pickup basketball court or a strike. What does it mean when people who have been told they’re not supposed to care about each other really love something together and come together around something, whether it’s a song, a garden plot, or a waterway? It feels to me like it’s dangerous, that transgressive joy, that transgressive gathering.

The post Inviting Sorrow in for Tea  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Inciting Joy, poet and professor Ross Gay’s latest inquiry into happiness, reads like an intimate conversation with a close friend. With his usual playful, openhearted wisdom, Gay explores what incites joy and what joy incites through subjects like basketball, dancing, and losing your phone. The word “incite” is often used alongside something like a riot or a revolution, but it’s just as apt for Gay’s definition of joy: a force that dissolves our deepest systems of order—“me,” “you,” “good,” “bad”—and embraces the sweet complexity of what’s left. 

Sorrow is inextricably bound up in Gay’s definition of joy. In the first chapter, Gay describes this with a scene almost identical to the night before the Buddha’s enlightenment when Mara attacks him beneath the Bodhi tree. The assault finally ends, as the story goes, when the Buddha says, “I see you, Mara,” and invites him to sit down for tea. Gay’s version adds one more step: Invite your friends and their demons (he calls them sorrows) to the table too and make it a party. This “potluck of sorrows” places communion and interdependence at the center. Joy isn’t the lack of pain but the presence of love.

If joy happens when the borders of the self dissolve, suffering happens when they harden.

Gay addresses the traditional beliefs about joy, namely that it’s confined to accomplishments and possession: the big raise, a new car, organizing that pernicious storage closet, or “getting the dishes sparkling clean.” “It is sad, so goddamn sad—that because we often think of joy as meaning ‘without pain,’ or ‘without sorrow’… not only is it considered unserious or frivolous to talk about joy, but this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live without/free of heartbreak or sorrow.” 

In the chapter “Death: The Second Incitement” Gay explores his father’s cancer and eventual death. Amidst the tragedy is a tender, enduring caretaking between the father and son. The litany of pains and indignities his father suffers (being too weak to open a water bottle, vomit stains on his clothes) chips away at the ice block between them. “It was through my tears I saw my father was a garden. Or the two of us, or the all-of-us… And from that what might grow.” Illness forces us to face the reality we all exist in—we know how this ends, or more aptly, that it will. Although not all of us look after someone right up to the end, we’re all caring for the dying. From that, what might grow?

The essays on skateboarding, poetry, comedy, and academia that follow are a cartography of connection. “Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie,” Gay writes, “we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually, you name it.” Each incitement enumerates the ways we brush against each other: We imitate a pro’s three-point shot, we let a classmate look at our exam, we offer a high five to a stranger.

Or we plant a garden. Gay frequently touches on his experience planting the Bloomington Community Orchard alongside a group of go-getters who transformed a barren lot into a hundred yards of fruit trees. Digging into the soil side-by-side (whose hand is whose becoming less important) to nourish seeds and saplings so they can, in turn, nourish a community—that is interdependence.

Holding each other while we fall apart, Gay says, is another word for joy. 

Caretaking, a “radical joyning,” happens when we soften the boundaries around the self. A community garden can just be another hobby, but when every mouth that enjoys a ripe mulberry is your mouth too, it becomes something much more beautiful. In a story about dancing to Kendrick Lamar in a sweaty basement, Gay describes how the crowd became “amoebic, hive-ish,” how “‘each other’ got murky.” 

If joy happens when the borders of the self dissolve, suffering happens when they harden. An essay on Gay’s college football career shows how hypermasculinity backed by violence shrinks who the self is allowed to be. After a while, there’s no need for the figure of the coach or the cop to mark the boundaries—you become your own enforcer. Don’t cry. Don’t talk back. Make the right jokes. On either side of that narrow plank, shame and punishment await. 

Even amid the minefield of men’s sports, joy persists. Gay recalls how they shaved their legs together before games, feeling each other’s freshly smooth skin, and a teammate breaking his fall with a hand on his lower back. “In almost every instance of our lives—our social lives—we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking,” Gay writes in his previous collection A Book of Delights.

Lest you think Gay just has a natural proclivity for happiness, he describes a significant period of doubt and depression following his graduation. “Falling Apart: The 13th Incitement,” catalogs how his pattern of repressing tough emotions—those things we think of as “not-joy”—led to a dark period of numbness, doubt, and depression. 

“The obsessive thoughts were the churning, disturbed waters of grief denied, or grief refused, and the way to soothe those waters, it seems so obvious from here, is to wade into them. Into the deep waters, as my nana says.”

In the midst of his struggles, Gay attends a meditation class and is horrified by the teacher’s inquiries into a student’s discomfort. “Not only couldn’t I look at them talking about sorrow,” he says, “I thought it was cruel and unusual that we might be invited to watch.” Unsurprisingly, he later realizes, when you avoid your own pain, you can’t bear to look at anyone else’s either. If we want to be in meaningful relationships with others, we don’t just have a responsibility to ourselves to wade into the deep waters; we have a responsibility to our community. And holding each other while we fall apart, Gay says, is another word for joy. 

Gay’s sometimes cheeky, always honest narratives are a pleasure to read, but the book’s real gift is that it prompts us to consider our own joy. What are my incitements? What family legends and ordinary delights and old, not-forgotten wounds would end up in my own tome of joy? Not the well-polished milestones, but the moments that feel like a handful of soil in my fist: fragrant, full of life and decay, and proof of how we sustain each other. 

The post A Radical ‘Joyning’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

You might think this rather odd advice to come from my dog, Brooklyn. After all, let’s be honest: She herself doesn’t even really dance.

Well, unless I’m dancing with her, that is—which I admittedly do sometimes. I pick her up in my arms and we waltz around the kitchen to old-school hip-hop or Jamaican ska or random mambo beats, her front paws hanging over my shoulder, a distant, bemused, almost bored look in her eyes. Brooklyn is not a small dog, either—maybe thirty-three pounds or so, including a good couple pounds of scruff—and so I know she looks a little ridiculous in my arms, too big to be carried around that way, but I cannot help myself: The moments I get to dance with my dog are some of my happiest. I could say Brooklyn likes it, too—or perhaps at least that she doesn’t seem to mind—but maybe a more truthful way of putting it is that she tolerates it.

Anyway, as I was saying, excepting our little waltzes in the kitchen, Brooklyn doesn’t “dance” in the traditional sense of the word.

But she does have moves.

For instance, her wiggle-butt—that full-tilt, whole-body wag, every atom of her ecstatic, shimmying with good vibrations.

Or the way, hoping for a treat, she’ll look up at us with expectant eyes and do an eager little two-step with her front legs, a sort of deerlike prance of sorts, her toenails clicking against the kitchen floor.

Or the way when she’s really excited, she’ll run off and grab one of her little stuffed toys—her flamingo, or her rhinoceros, or her moose—and then trot back in proudly with the thing in her mouth to show it off to us.

Or the way she’ll look up at us and tilt her head with perfect curiosity, as if trying to figure out just what the hell we’re talking about.

In fact, it’s hard to think of anything Brooklyn does that’s not a move of sorts, almost as if her whole life is in fact a kind of dance, every instant of it a work of art. After all, dogs have this remarkable way of inhabiting their bodies with a kind of unqualified ease, and the result is that there is something exact—something perfect and irrevocable—about their every movement. Even when Brooklyn’s not moving—say, for instance, when she’s sprawled out, asleep—she does so in positions that have a certain flawlessness, as if they cannot be improved (though, apparently, in her own mind, they can be, for every now and then Brooklyn will rise to her feet, make a few determined circles, paw at her dog bed a little bit to soften it up, and then settle back down again, often in almost exactly the same spot: which is of course yet another ridiculously cute move).

And it’s not like Brooklyn’s trying to take these poses—or trying to do anything, really—she’s just being herself, doing her thing. But there’s something truly enviable nevertheless about the way dogs are so present and at home in their bodies, in their skin. About their existence, so natural and fluid. Yes, even with all the collars and the leashes and the crates, dogs are free in a way it sometimes feels we humans can only dream of: that ability to just be themselves without any apparent self-consciousness—their calm, easy presence. And the result, unintentional, is that dogs emanate a kind of languid grace. A simple, unadulterated perfection.

Of course, whether we realize it or not, we humans are not actually so different. We, too, are wholly complete, though we may not always feel that way. Each of our lives is a unique and marvelous dance, utterly our own, and beautiful, too—though for some strange reason it seems easier to recognize this in a dog than in ourselves. But consider this: At any random moment, if your simple posture or your lovely, sad eyes could be captured in paint by a true master, the result would be a masterpiece. Because you are a masterpiece—you just can’t see it. As it is with dogs, so it is with us: At any moment—in every moment—each of us is this great, fathomless treasure.

The problem is, if it doesn’t feel that way, who cares? If we humans go through existence feeling separate and awkward, rather than beautiful and whole, isn’t that, then, the reality of it? And if that’s the reality we’re experiencing, what can be done?

Like the helpless wag of a dog’s tail, dancing, too, is an expression of joy.

Well, one solution, as Brooklyn might suggest, is to dance. Put on some funky music and shake your butt a little bit! (After all, let’s not forget that shaking your butt is basically the same thing as wagging your tail.) And the great thing about dancing is that it gets us out of our brains and into our bodies, into the moment. Yes, start moving our muscles, and suddenly we’re not thinking so goddamn much anymore, thank God. For once, like dogs, we’re just existing, we’re just moving, jumping up and down and shaking ourselves free from ourselves and all our ridiculous fears and inhibitions—we’re being a little silly and having a little fun—and it feels really, really good . . .

Yes, and let’s not forget that this is the point of dancing: to celebrate. After all, like the helpless wag of a dog’s tail, dancing, too, is an expression of joy. It is to be at play; it is, for once, to be free.

How wonderful it would be to go through your whole life like this, with the simple, joyful presence of a dog. The funny thing is, if you’re truly going to inhabit the moment the way dogs do, you almost have to dance. Because the nature of the here and now is that it’s ever-shifting, and so to remain with it requires that you stay on your toes. You need to be alive to what’s in front of you—almost as if life itself were your dance partner—you need to be able to be flexible, respond, adjust. You step to the side, do a pirouette, take two steps forward, two steps back, do the cha-cha. And then, all of a sudden, it’s clear that you, too, are free—that you’ve always been free—and that in each and every moment, you can make of your life whatever you want, as big and beautiful as you please. You can make of your life a work of art, a dance—which is what it already was—only now, you no longer feel so separate from it.

Of course, admittedly, this is mostly conjecture on my part. I myself catch only the most fleeting glimpses of the moment—and rather than waltzing freely through my life, alive and responsive, I often feel stuck in mud. But I do believe it’s possible that we can be more present, that, like dogs, we can be lighter on our feet, and in our hearts—though for me this is, as I say, a work in progress. All I really know for sure is that I like dancing with my dog—and she likes dancing through her life. I bet we would, too.

♦

Originally published here on Love, Dog, an online publication that explores the companionship between humans and dogs.

The post Lessons from a (Mostly) Good Dog: #5: Dance appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A few days before the eminent scholar Lance Cousins passed away, in 2015, he revealed to one of his students, Sarah Shaw, that he had been working on a book on Buddhist meditation. After his death, with the permission of his family, Shaw found the manuscript on his desktop and prepared it for publication. The book, Meditations of the Pali Tradition: Illuminating Buddhist Doctrine, History, and Practice, is the first comprehensive exploration of meditation systems in Theravada Buddhism, and it offers an in-depth analysis of the ritual, somatic, and devotional aspects of Theravada practice that are often overlooked. In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, spoke with Shaw about a system of Buddhist meditation known as the jhanas, as well as the underappreciated role of joy in meditative practice.

James Shaheen (JS): Many of the essays in this book focus on the jhanas. To start, can you walk us through what those are?

Sarah Shaw (SS): The jhanas are a way of the mind finding unity and peace within itself.  The Buddha is said to have stumbled on this state as a child while sitting under a rose apple tree simply through watching his breath. He found this state by chance, and his system of breathing mindfulness is a way of training the mind to enter the jhanas. 

We usually apply our minds to things we need to do. But what we don’t do very easily is release the mind from the preoccupations around us and just let it settle on the breath. When we can apply the mind to breath, great joy and happiness can arise. This will eventually take the mind to the state known as jhana, this great unification where the mind is freed from searching for other objects.

JS: Cousins focuses on the jhana factor of piti, or joy. Can you share more about the role of joy in meditative practice?

SS: The Sri Lankan Buddhist teacher Walpola Rahula once said that Buddhism always gets a reputation for going on about suffering, but people forget that the central factor for awakening—the fourth out of seven—is joy. Joy is the most important thing you can have in Buddhist practice, and Rahula said it was the hallmark of the Buddhist path at every stage. Cousins talks about it quite a bit in his book because he felt that it was a crucial aspect of how Buddhist meditation actually works. Without joy, we just can’t do things well. This is described at great length in the boran kammatthana, or the ancient system of meditation. Joy is one of the starting points for meditation, and it’s something that changes people. Cousins actually thought that the closest translation of piti was love, though it’s a difficult word to use in the West.

In the jhanas, the joy can get quite violent, but it eventually settles and deepens into sukha, or happiness, and then equanimity. In one of the suttas, piti is compared to what someone feels when they’re parched in a desert and see a wonderful freshwater lake, and sukha is what they feel when they’ve drunk from the water. I think that gives a nice analogy of the movement from the second jhana to the third: In the second jhana, there is said to be so much joy that it is the overriding experience. But, then, in the third jhana, that joy is stilled. The mind is refreshed, and there’s an increase in mindfulness.

JS: In Western practice, the jhanas are often dismissed or less frequently discussed, but Cousins defends them as part of a rich tradition crucial to the Buddha’s own life story. Can you speak to the role that the jhanas played in the Buddha’s biography?

SS: In what the Buddha told us about his life, he clearly wanted jhanas to occupy an important role. He describes the instant under the rose apple tree when he attains the first jhana. He then describes various meditations he pursued before he became enlightened, as well as after attaining enlightenment. The Buddha and a lot of the arhats [beings who have achieved enlightenment] continue to enter jhana after they’re enlightened—it’s where they refresh their mind. At the moment of his entrance into nibbana, the Buddha goes up through all the jhanas and formless states and then back down again, leaving his human body on the fourth jhana. In this way, he made his departure from his human body a form of meditation for those around him. He wanted to demonstrate that the jhanas were really important. It’s almost like that’s where he wanted his body to be.

Often, people will say that you need wisdom to get to enlightenment and jhana won’t get you there. It’s rarely looked at the other way around. But the Dhammapada says that you can’t get wisdom without jhana. The two are very closely linked. People who practice jhana defend it as a way of being able to go deeper into the mind and thereby get more insight because the mind is more peaceful.

JS: Cousins also examines the development of insight meditation. Today, we tend to see insight as opposed to the jhanas, but the relationship between vipassana and samatha is more complex. Can you share more about how this relationship is described in the Pali canon and commentaries?

SS: Samatha is calm meditation, and it’s always been seen as in tandem to what is known as vipassana, or insight meditation. They’re often compared to the two wings of a bird—both are needed. Most Buddhist practices tend to have an emphasis on one or the other, but they still have elements of both. In samatha breathing mindfulness, the emphasis is on the pursuit of calm, but there are also elements of insight because you’re aware of the rise and fall of the breath and its impermanence and unsatisfactoriness. The two are often described as yoked together. The Buddha says that some people practice samatha first, then insight; some people do insight first, then samatha. They’re not really in opposition. It’s a bit like how you feel and what you see. If I’m looking at a beautiful view, the act of seeing the view is vipassana, whereas how I feel is samatha. That’s the state of my being. The two aren’t in contradiction. They’re just two slightly different functions that can be going on at the same time.

♦

Listen to the full discussion between Sarah Shaw and James Shaheen here on Tricycle Talks:

The post The Joy of Jhana appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Psychotherapist Mark Epstein is often asked how he incorporates his Buddhist practice into his therapy sessions. His latest book offers an answer to that question. In The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, Epstein documents dozens of therapy sessions over the course of a year, tracing the Buddhist themes that arise. Weaving together psychoanalytic theory, Zen poetry, and the music of John Cage, Epstein presents a compelling model of therapy as spiritual friendship.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Editor-in-Chief James Shaheen sat down with Epstein to discuss the improvisational nature of therapy, composer John Cage, and why we turn away from joy. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and listen to the full episode here. 

You often refer to the composer John Cage in your work. How does the music of John Cage inform your approach to therapy? As a musician, John Cage was deeply influenced by Buddhist thought. He went to hear D. T. Suzuki teach at Columbia in the early 1950s. Cage said that he wasn’t going to start meditating because he had already decided to devote his life to music and any more sitting would take too much time away from that. So he decided to try to adapt Suzuki’s teachings to his music. He started not to screen out non-musical sounds from musical sounds and instead to hear all sounds as music. I found that deeply inspiring because it’s such a Buddhist notion: not to screen out or push away the unpleasant and not to cling to the pleasant, but instead to help people dig down into themselves and be kinder and more accepting toward themselves. That’s what I’m trying to communicate as a therapist—the idea of not pushing away the unpleasant emotions, feelings, and thoughts and not clinging to the pleasant.

John Cage was playing when I was at Berkeley, and I went with a childhood friend. It was amazing because as all of these sounds began to erupt, many people started getting up and leaving. When I was reading your understanding of Cage, I realized that I was witnessing something there: they were turning away from the sounds in the same way I might turn away from a thought or emotion. When you talk about the quality of mindfulness that you bring to your therapy sessions, it’s a way of letting it all in, not turning away from and not moving toward. And yet it’s so easy to say and so difficult to do. What is it that doesn’t allow us to let it all in? What doesn’t let us let it all in is what the Buddha described in his first noble truth as the universal experience of what’s difficult, or dukkha, generally translated as suffering—mistranslated, really. When you take the word dukkha apart, kha is face, and du means difficult. There’s always something in life, even in a good life, that’s difficult to face, so dukkha is that which is difficult to face. We naturally don’t want to deal with the unpleasant—in the Buddha’s language, with old age, illness, death, separation, and loss. Even for people who get through most of their lives without having to face the unpleasant, there’s still old age, illness, and death. We have to train our minds to be able to do that difficult thing, which is what Cage was trying to show his audience.

In your psychotherapeutic sessions, it seems that both you and the patient are training to allow for what you call the unobstructed flow of emotional energy. It seems very clear to me why I would turn away from the unpleasant, the painful, and anything that reminds me of my mortality. But you also talk about how, counterintuitively, we’re turning away from joy and happiness. Why are we afraid of experiencing joy? That is more mysterious. Why do people pull back from those kinds of feelings? I think there’s a loss of ego or a loss of self or a loss of control that happens when there’s bliss, when there’s joy, even when there’s some simple happiness. To fully experience it requires us to at least momentarily let go of all the defensive ego mechanisms that we’re employing to hold ourselves together in this scary world that we find ourselves in.

That’s one reason. Another reason might be cognitively that those experiences challenge deeply held convictions that we have about ourselves as inadequate, ashamed, insufficient, unworthy, or unable to love. I remember one of my first meditation retreat experiences when I was just watching my breath, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, I was filled with these sensations of love. I had no idea where they came from, and then they were sweeping through me. I’ve been chasing those feelings ever since. It’s not like they happen every time I go on retreat, but it was very profound. I remember Ram Dass, who was one of my early influences, saying, “You’re not who you think you are.” I always love that because I thought I was only who I thought I was. The subtitle of the book is “Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life,” and I was thinking a little bit about that experience of love, that lurking within all of us are these capacities for these kinds of experiences.

As you were speaking, I thought of a student of Tibetan Buddhism who was with her teacher driving through the Rockies. Everything around them was quite beautiful. She couldn’t stop saying, “Oh my God, that’s so beautiful,” and her teacher finally turned to her and said, “Is it too much for you?” Because it’s hard to be with something that powerful. It requires that you let go of who you think you are. There’s a famous story in Freud’s writing in a little essay called “On Transience.” It’s one of my favorite things Freud wrote. He’s hiking in the mountains in Switzerland where he used to go in the summer with an unnamed poet (who people say was the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke). The poet couldn’t open to the beauty that was around him, and Freud asked him, “What’s wrong with you?” and tried to figure it out with his psychoanalytic mind. It was the same kind of thing where the beauty of the surround was too overwhelming. Freud ends the essay by asking, “Is a flower that blooms for only a single night any less beautiful?” I thought, wow, what could be more Buddhist than that?

♦

The post Why Do We Turn Away from Joy? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We all want to be happy and there are many books and teachers in the world that try to help people be happier. Yet we all continue to suffer.

Therefore, we may think that we’re “doing it wrong.” Somehow we are “failing at happiness.” That isn’t true. Being able to enjoy happiness doesn’t require that we have zero suffering. In fact, the art of happiness is also the art of suffering well. When we learn to acknowledge, embrace, and understand our suffering, we suffer much less. Not only that, but we’re also able to go further and transform our suffering into understanding, compassion, and joy for ourselves and for others. 

One of the most difficult things for us to accept is that there is no realm where there’s only happiness and there’s no suffering. This doesn’t mean that we should despair. Suffering can be transformed. As soon as we open our mouth to say “suffering,” we know that the opposite of suffering is already there as well. Where there is suffering, there is happiness.

Suffering and Happiness Are Not Separate

When we suffer, we tend to think that suffering is all there is at that moment, and happiness belongs to some other time or place. People often ask, “Why do I have to suffer?” Thinking we should be able to have a life without any suffering is as deluded as thinking we should be able to have a left side without a right side. The same is true of thinking we have a life in which no happiness whatsoever is to be found. If the left says, “Right, you have to go away. I don’t want you. I only want the left”—that’s nonsense, because then the left would have to stop existing as well. If there’s no right, then there’s no left. Where there is no suffering, there can be no happiness either, and vice versa.

If we can learn to see and skillfully engage with both the presence of happiness and the presence of suffering, we will go in the direction of enjoying life more. Every day we go a little farther in that direction, and eventually we realize that suffering and happiness are not two separate things.

Cold air can be painful if you aren’t wearing enough warm clothes. But when you’re feeling overheated or you’re walking outside with proper clothing, the bracing sensation of cold air can be a source of feeling joy and aliveness. Suffering isn’t some kind of external, objective source of oppression and pain. There might be things that cause you to suffer, such as loud music or bright lights, which may bring other people joy. There are things that bring you joy that annoy other people. The rainy day that ruins your plans for a picnic is a boon for the farmer whose field is parched.

Happiness is possible right now, today—but happiness cannot be without suffering. Some people think that in order to be happy they must avoid all suffering, and so they are constantly vigilant, constantly worrying. They end up sacrificing all their spontaneity, freedom, and joy. This isn’t correct. If you can recognize and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that although pain is there, joy can also be there at the same time.

Some say that suffering is only an illusion or that to live wisely we have to “transcend” both suffering and joy. I say the opposite. The way to suffer well and be happy is to stay in touch with what is actually going on; in doing so, you will gain liberating insights into the true nature of suffering and of joy.

No Mud, No Lotus

Both suffering and happiness are of an organic nature, which means they are both transitory, always changing. The flower, when it wilts, becomes the compost. The compost can help grow a flower again. Happiness is also organic and impermanent by nature. It can become suffering and suffering can become happiness again. 

In each of our Plum Village practice centers around the world, we have a lotus pond. We know we need to have mud for lotuses to grow. The mud doesn’t smell so good, but the lotus flower smells very good. If you don’t have mud, the lotus won’t manifest. You can’t grow lotus flowers on marble. Without mud, there can be no lotus. 

If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses.

It is possible of course to get stuck in the “mud” of life. The hardest thing to practice is not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by despair. When you’re overwhelmed by despair, all you can see is suffering everywhere you look. But we must remember that suffering is a kind of mud that we need in order to generate joy and happiness. Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.

When I lived in Vietnam during the war, it was difficult to see our way through that dark and heavy time. It seemed like the destruction would just go on and on forever. Every day people would ask me if I thought the war would end soon. It was very difficult to answer, because there was no end in sight. But I knew if I said, “I don’t know,” that would only water their seeds of despair. So when people asked me that question, I replied, “Everything is impermanent, even war. It will end some day.” Knowing that, we could continue to work for peace. And indeed the war did end. Now the former mortal enemies are busily trading and touring back and forth, and people throughout the world enjoy practicing our tradition’s teachings on mindfulness and peace.

If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses. If you know how to make good use of suffering, you can produce happiness. We need some suffering to make happiness possible.

A Meditation on Transforming Suffering

The essence of meditation practice can be described as transforming suffering into happiness. It’s not a complicated practice, but it requires us to cultivate mindfulness, concentration, and insight. First of all, we come home to ourselves, make peace with our suffering, treat it tenderly, and look deeply at the roots of our pain. It requires that we let go of useless, unnecessary sufferings and take a closer look at our idea of happiness; our idea of happiness may be the very cause of our suffering. Finally, it requires that we nourish happiness daily, with acknowledgment, understanding, and compassion for ourselves and for those around us. This is the art of suffering and the art of happiness.

According to the Buddha, a human being is made of five elements: form (body), feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. You are the surveyor, the caretaker, and these elements are your territory. You have to know your own territory, including the elements within you that are at war with each other. In order to bring about harmony, reconciliation, and healing within, you have to understand yourself.

Begin this practice by looking deeply into your body. Ask, How is my body in this moment? How was it in the past? How will it be in the future? Look into your body to see whether it is at peace or is suffering. Look at the condition of your lungs, your heart, your intestines, your kidneys, and your liver to see what the real needs of your body are.

Next, observe your feelings—whether they are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Feelings flow in us like a river, and each feeling is a drop of water in that river. Look into the river of your feelings and see how each feeling came to be. See what has been preventing you from being happy, and do your best to transform those things. Practice touching the wondrous, refreshing, and healing elements that are already in you and in the world. Doing so, you become stronger and better able to love yourself and others.

Then meditate on your perceptions. The Buddha observed, “The person who suffers most in this world is the one who has many wrong perceptions.” Most of our perceptions are erroneous. You see a snake in the dark and you panic, but when you shine a light on it, you see that it is only a rope. Please write beautifully the sentence, “Are you sure?” on a piece of paper and tape it to your wall. Meditation helps you learn to look with clarity and serenity in order to improve the way you perceive.

Next, observe your mental formations, the ideas and tendencies within you that lead you to speak and act as you do. Practice looking deeply to discover the true nature of your mental formations—how you are influenced by your own individual consciousness and also by the collective consciousness of your family, ancestors, and society. Unwholesome mental formations cause so much disturbance; wholesome mental formations bring about love, happiness, and liberation.

Finally, look at your consciousness. According to Buddhism, consciousness is like a field with every possible seed in it: seeds of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity; seeds of anger, fear, and anxiety; and seeds of mindfulness, concentration, and insight. Consciousness is the storehouse that contains all these seeds, all the possibilities of whatever might arise in your mind. When your mind is not at peace, it may be because of the desires and feelings in your unconscious mind. To live in peace, you have to be aware of your tendencies—your habit energies—so you can exercise some self-control. This is the practice of preventive health care. Look deeply into the nature of your feelings to find their roots, to see which feelings need to be transformed, and nourish those feelings that bring about peace, joy, and well-being. With each breath, we ease suffering and generate joy. With each step, the flower of insight blooms.

⧫

Adapted from No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering by Thich Nhat Hanh ©  by Thich Nhat Hanh © 2014 Parallax Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Interested in reading more by Thich Nhat Hanh and supporting the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation? Parallax Press—the non-profit publisher founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in 1986—has partnered with Humble Bundle to celebrate his literary legacy through The Art of Happiness, a charitable ebook bundle that supports the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation and includes Thich Nhat Hanh ebooks like No Mud, No Lotus, The Other Shore, and Happiness. Check out The Art of Happiness ebook bundle here, available worldwide from February 12-March 5.

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In this Dharma Talk series, you’ll learn how to approach the uncertainties of life and find real happiness in a seemingly collapsing world. Jon Aaron, a teacher at the New York Insight Meditation Center, invites us to embrace the uncertainty of each unfolding moment as an antidote to despair and anxiety.

Jon Aaron is a New York Insight Meditation Center teacher and co-founder of the online meditation community Space2Meditate. A longtime student of Matt Flickstein, Jon has also studied with Thanissara and Kittisaro of the Sacred Mountain Sangha and is certified as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher and Somatic Experience® practitioner.

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On a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen spoke with meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, the cofounder and guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts with whom he had recently completed an online retreat. “I’ve sat with Joseph on retreats before, but what really struck me this time were the repetitive patterns playing out in my mind and body,” Shaheen says. In the episode, Goldstein discusses some of these patterns, and how to break free of them. Find a collection of excerpts from the podcast below, and listen to the full interview here.

On creating energy via investigation

Our usual way of thinking is that we need energy in order to make an effort. But actually, it’s just the opposite: making the effort creates energy. A very simple example, which most people will recognize, is if we’re feeling tired and lethargic, and then we make the effort to go out and exercise, the very making of the effort to exercise brings about energy.

So investigation takes a kind of effort. It’s obviously a more subtle effort than going out to exercise. But it means coming out of our habitual way of being with things. And instead of simply being subsumed by it, we arouse the effort to investigate. And that very effort to investigate brings about energy. And so the whole system wakes up—becomes more alive. So I think that’s really helpful for people to understand—that we don’t have to wait for the energy in order to make an effort, to investigate. That very effort will bring the energy.

On understanding selflessness

Impermanence is easy to understand, even if it’s on the conceptual level. And we’re all familiar with suffering—one form or another—at different times. But the notion of no self—selflessness—is really counterintuitive. It takes time to really absorb the meaning of it.

I found one way of pointing to it in a way that’s much more accessible. If we think of it in terms of lack of self centeredness, I think that’s easier for people to understand. When we’re not self-centered, it’s the deepest meaning of that phrase. It’s a lack of self at the center, but we can approach it in a more ordinary understanding of that phrase. 

On having a sense of humor

For me, over all these years of practice, a sense of humor about my mind has been so helpful. Sometimes it’s hard to access, but we can always come back to it, even if it’s a little after the event, and just look at what the mind was doing. When we’re interested in our minds, we can see the humor of it all.

There’s a book that was popular back in the 1960s and the 1970s, Zorba the Greek by [Nikos] Kazantzakis. And there’s one line in that book—I forget the character who says it—but the line is, “Self-knowledge is always bad news.” From a meditator’s point of view, to understand that with a sense of humor, that, yes, as we pay attention to our minds, we’re going to see the whole show. We’re going to see all the skillful things and we’re going to see those things are not so skillful. But can we hold it lightly?

On easing self-judgement

Self judgment is not uncommon, and sometimes on retreat, it really gets magnified. It feels like all we are is a massive self judgment. So if people come in and are reporting that experience, sometimes I suggest that they spend one day simply counting the self judgments. “One self judgment… 598 self judgments… 5,056… At a certain point, the mind is going to start smiling. When you get up to some ridiculous number, you just see how ridiculous it is and the mind starts smiling. Just the shift of attitude can make a huge difference.

On finding joy

Joy has a lot of different connotations. Sometimes when I think of joy, I think of a very exuberant feeling. That can happen in meditation, and sometimes it does, but there’s a deeper kind of joy that I think is more pervasive. It’s the joy of a deeply flowing river that doesn’t have a lot of ripples on it, or waves, and this is really the joy of peace. 

The Buddha at one time said peace is the greatest happiness. We might call it a quiet joy, and that quiet joy can be underneath all the waves, because there will be waves—the ups and downs, times of exuberance and times when we’re feeling low.

Those waves are just a part of our lives. But I think what the practice brings is a deeper understanding of the dharma. Living it, we really settle into this quiet joy. That’s underneath all of it and is, I think, a very fundamental way to really give meaning to our lives. When we’re experiencing that to some extent, we’re either explicitly or implicitly sharing it with others because the more peaceful we are, even if we don’t say anything about it, that’s what we’re transmitting. So there’s this beautiful flowering of the dharma within ourselves and then, you know, in our relationship with everybody we’re with. For me, that’s the kind of joy that really is emblematic of the Buddhist teachings and of our own meditation practice.

♦

These excerpts have been edited for length and clarity. Listen to Joseph Goldstein’s full interview, “Tired of Pretending to Be Me,” on Tricycle Talks here.

The post Joseph Goldstein on Easing Self-Judgement and Finding Joy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As part of a month-long series of events celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tricycle, Helen Tworkov, Tricycle’s founding editor, spoke with Tibetan Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche about his experience and outlook during the past year. Tworkov is a student of Mingyur Rinpoche’s, and the two published a book together in 2019 called In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying.

Among the wide range of topics discussed in this exclusive interview was joy—specifically, how Mingyur Rinpoche maintains a joyful outlook in times like these. Mingyur Rinpoche explained how he arrived at his viewpoint by divulging his personal experience with panic, his father’s advice, and how he learned to let things go. Read an excerpt of the interview below, then watch the video to hear Tworkov and Mingyur Rinpoche discuss more, including the pandemic, race, climate change, and advice for practitioners in today’s world.

Helen Tworkov: You have a reputation for being very happy and very joyful, and many of us would like to know more about this because, especially in the last year, it’s really been difficult. So how do you maintain a joyful outlook, a joyful view, a joyful life in the midst of so much confusion? Do you have some secret to share with us?

Mingyur Rinpoche: Don’t tell anybody: I have one secret! I used to panic when I was young, so I was not so happy, actually. My nature, when I was young, was very sensitive. Something would go slightly wrong, then I felt unhappy for weeks. I could not sleep well at night. But what really helped me was  meditation practice. 

I learned this meditation technique [that has existed] in Tibetan Buddhism for thousands of years. I learned this from my father. The main point of meditation is the transforming of poison into medicine. So panic becomes your friend. Panic becomes your teacher. That’s the main technique. 

Of course, it’s not that easy to do that at the beginning. We need to practice step-by-step first. We need to connect with our own awareness. Awareness is our own fundamental nature. Awareness is always calm, peaceful, joyful… Awareness is free! But then we experience panic. 

My father said awareness is like the sky, panic is like clouds. 

Not only panic, but also depression, not feeling happy, blaming, stress—all of these are clouds, and those clouds don’t change the space. That cloud doesn’t change the sky. So how to do that? We need to connect with the sky. Sky is the awareness. 

So to connect with awareness, at the beginning, we can connect through the breath, through the sound, through the body’s sensations. And slowly, slowly, we can use panic as a support for awareness. (Or depression, everything.) Not fighting with panic; welcoming it. There is love. Accept panic. Once we can accept panic, then we can accept that bad friend in your company or in your social circle. If you can accept panic, you can accept the challenging person or difficult environment. But at the same time, accept doesn’t mean give up. You’re not giving up. You’re transforming your friend. You’re trying to help your colleagues. You’re trying to help the world. You’re trying to help the climate. So don’t give up; accept it and let it go. Letting go is not giving up. 

That really helped me. When I have a problem that comes to me, I’m not looking for the solution in something else than the problem itself. Actually, the problem can be the solution. 

♦

This excerpt has been edited for clarity. 

Access recordings of past 30th Anniversary events here

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Welcome back for the fourth and final week of Tricycle Meditation Month, our annual challenge to sit all 31 days of March with mindfulness instructor and former Zen nun Martine Batchelor.

This week, Martine leads a guided meditation in altruistic joy, which the Buddha developed as an antidote to envy. We start the meditation by appreciating our own efforts, rejoicing in our own happiness, and feeling grateful for our existence. We then extend these sentiments outward, first to people and other beings in our lives, then to people we might see but don’t really know, and finally to all beings. Martine finds that this practice especially helps us see negative bias and recognize unpleasant feeling tones, which we investigated last week.

Martine also reflects on the four practices she’s taught for developing a firm foundation, and makes practical (and easy!) recommendations for incorporating these meditations into our daily routine.

Download a copy of this talk. It has been edited for clarity.

If you’re hearing about Meditation Month for the first time, missed a video, or need a refresher, this video series will remain free and available. You can also watch a recording of Martine’s introductory live call from Saturday, March 9 here, and her closing live call on Saturday, March 30 here.

Thank you for joining our worldwide sangha this month!

Related Meditation Month articles:

• These Are Not “Your” Thoughts by Joseph Goldstein
• Love Is a Skill by Ayya Khema
• Tibetan Yoga Techniques for Better Breathing by Anyen Rinpoche and Allison Choying Zangmo
• Glimpsing Mindfulness by Loch Kelly
• Joy Is a Radical Act by Scott Tusa
• Write Concentration: Using a Pen and Paper to Meditate by Lauren Krauze
• 11 Benefits of Loving-Friendliness Meditation by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
• Zen All Day by Rev. Grace (Sangjin) Song

The post Meditation Month 2019: Practicing with Joy and Gratitude appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.