When we are held prisoner by our own past actions, or the actions of others, our present life cannot be fully lived. The resentment, the partially experienced pain, the unwelcome inheritance we carry from the past, all function to close our hearts and thereby narrow our worlds. 

The intention of forgiveness meditation is not to force anything, or to pretend to anything, or to forget about ourselves in utter deference to the needs of others. In fact, it is out of the greatest compassion for ourselves that we create the conditions for an unobstructed love, which can dissolve separation and relieve us of the twin burdens of lacerating guilt and perpetually unresolved outrage.

It is not so easy to access that place inside of us which can forgive, which can love. To be able to forgive is so deep a letting go that it is a type of dying. We must be able to say, “I am not that person anymore, and you are not that person anymore.”

Forgiveness does not mean condoning a harmful action, or denying injustice or suffering. It should never be confused with being passive toward violation or abuse. Forgiveness is an inner relinquishment of guilt or resentment, both of which are devastating to us in the end. As forgiveness grows within us, it may take any outward form: we may seek to make amends, demand justice, resolve to be treated better, or simply leave a situation behind us.

The sense of psychological and spiritual well-being that comes from practicing forgiveness comes directly because this practice takes us to the edge of what we can accept. As you do the reflections, many conflicted emotions may arise: shame, anger, a sense of betrayal, confusion, or doubt. Try to allow such states to arise without judging them. Recognize them as natural occurrences, and then gently return your attention to the forgiveness reflection.

Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and let your breath be natural and uncontrolled. Begin with the recitation (silent or not, as you prefer): “If I have hurt or harmed anyone, knowingly or unknowingly, I ask their forgiveness.” If different people, images, or scenarios come up, release the burden of guilt and ask for forgiveness: “I ask your forgiveness.”

After some time, you can offer forgiveness to those who have harmed you. Don’t worry if there is not a great rush of loving feeling; this is not meant to be an artificial exercise, but rather a way of honoring the powerful force of intention in our minds. We are paying respects to our ultimate ability to let go and begin again. We are asserting the human heart’s capacity to change and grow and love. “If anyone has hurt or harmed me, knowingly or unknowingly, I forgive them.” As different thoughts or images come to mind, continue the recitation, “I forgive you.”

In the end, we turn our attention to forgiveness of ourselves. If there are ways you have harmed yourself, or not loved yourself, or not lived up to your own expectations, this is the time to let go of unkindness toward yourself because of what you have done. You can include any inability to forgive others that you may have discovered on your part in the reflection immediately preceding—that is not a reason to be unkind to yourself. “For all of the ways I have hurt or harmed myself, knowingly or unknowingly, I offer forgiveness.”

Seeing Goodness

Since the proximate cause, or most powerful conditioning force, for metta to arise is seeing the good in someone, we make an effort to turn our attention to any good we can find in a difficult person. 

The first time I was given the instruction to look for one good quality in a person I found difficult, I rebelled. I thought, “That’s what superficial, gullible people do—they just look for the good in someone. I don’t want to do that!” As I actually did the practice, however, I discovered that it had an important and powerful effect. In fact, it was doing just what it was supposed to do: looking for the good in someone did not cover up any of the genuine difficulties I found with that person, but allowed me to relate to them without my habituated defensiveness and withdrawal.

There may be people who absolutely defy our ability to think of even one good thing about them. In that case, focus on the universal wish to be happy, which this difficult person also shares. All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others. 

The Difficult Person

As we come to sending metta to a person with whom we experience conflict, fear, or anger, we can reflect on this line from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that needs our love.”

It is useful to begin with someone with whom the difficulty is relatively mild—not starting right away with the one person who has hurt us the most in this lifetime. When I was first practicing metta in Burma, I received the instruction to send metta to a benefactor repeatedly, for about three weeks. The whole time I was frustrated, thinking, “Why am I spending all this time sending metta to someone I already love? That’s easy—I should be sending metta to my worst enemy. That’s the only kind of love that really counts.” I expressed some of this to U Pandita, who laughed and said, “Why do you want to do things in the hardest way possible?” This practice is not meant to induce suffering, though it may reveal it. If a particular person has harmed us so grievously that it is very difficult to include them in the field of our loving care, then we approach sending them metta slowly, with a lot of care and compassion for ourselves.

In order to begin to develop metta toward a person with whom we have problems, we must first separate our vision of the person from the actions they commit that may upset or harm us. In developing metta, we put aside the unpleasant traits of such a being and try instead to get in touch with the part of them that deserves to be loved.

Perhaps you can most easily feel metta for the person if you imagine them as a vulnerable infant, or on their deathbed (but not with eager anticipation—be careful). You should allow yourself to be creative, daring, even humorous, in imagining situations where you can more readily feel kindness toward a difficult person. As the strength of our metta grows, we can eventually reach a place where we sincerely extend wishes of well-being to the difficult people in our lives, even while we work to counter their actions and activities of which we disapprove.

Sit comfortably, and start with directing the metta phrases toward yourself, enveloping yourself with your own loving care. After some time, direct the phrases toward a benefactor, then a friend. If you have found a neutral person, you can then include them. You should turn your attention to the difficult person only after spending some time sending metta toward yourself and to those you find it relatively easy to feel metta for. If you can, contemplate one good thing about them. If you can’t, remember that this person, just like ourselves, wishes to be happy, and makes mistakes out of ignorance. If saying, “May you be free from danger, may you be happy,” brings up too much fear or sense of isolation for you, you can include yourself in the recitation: “May we be free from danger. May we be happy.”

Gently continue to direct metta toward the difficult person, and accept the different feelings that may come and go. There may be sorrow, grief, anger—allow them to pass through you. If they become overwhelming, go back to sending metta to yourself or a good friend. You can also try to hold those feelings in a different perspective. A classic one is to ask yourself, “Who is the one suffering from this anger? The person who has harmed me has gone on to live their life, while I am the one sitting here feeling the persecution, burning, and constriction of anger. Out of compassion for myself, to ease my own heart, may I let go.”

Another reflection is done by turning your mind to the suffering of the difficult person, rather than viewing their actions only as bad or wrong. When we feel anger, fear, or jealousy, if we feel open to the pain of these states rather than feeling disgraced by their arising, then we will have compassion for ourselves. When we see others lost in states of anger and fear, and we remember how painful those states are, we can have compassion for those people as well.

When you can, return to directing the metta phrases toward the difficult person. You can go back and forth between yourself, a friend, the reflections, and the difficult person.

You may find yourself expressing greater lovingkindness in actual life situations before you experience a greater depth of loving feeling in your formal meditation practice. Sometimes in difficult encounters there is more patience than before, more willingness to listen than before, and more clarity than before. 

Be patient with yourself in this practice, and try not to hold rigid expectations of what you should be experiencing. When we have rigid expectations, we can feel a great sense of helplessness if those expectations are not quickly met. We see our actions as being fruitless, not going anywhere, and we get lost in contempt or self-condemnation. We can always return to the intention to care for ourselves and for all beings. 

Beginning again and again is the actual practice, not a problem to be overcome so that one day we can come to the “real” meditation.

♦

From Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg © 1995 by Sharon Salzberg. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

The post How to Forgive: A Meditation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In metta meditation, we direct lovingkindness toward ourselves and then, in a sequence of expansion, towards somebody we love already. Somebody we are neutral towards. Somebody we have difficulty with. And ultimately toward all beings everywhere without distinction.

In vipassana meditation, we become aware of our ever-changing experiences, without adding to what is going on through our reactions and projections.

The main difference between metta and vipassana is that metta is a concentration practice, while vipassana is an insight practice. This is a functional difference. If you’re doing mindfulness practice, there is no such thing as a distraction. You pay attention to whatever arises in your awareness and make that an object of meditation.

There is no sense of preferring one experience over another, since each experience is seen as having the same ultimate nature. Each is characterized by impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) and having no separate existence (anatta). You can see these characteristics by looking at either pleasure or pain.

Related: 11 Benefits of Loving Friendliness Meditation 

Vipassana and Metta Meditation

In contrast to vipassana, in metta practice you are not focusing on the ultimate nature of phenomena. Furthermore, you are choosing a particular object of meditation, which is the metta phrase, such as “May I be happy.” You hold the phrase in your heart just the way you’d hold something fragile and precious in your hand. As you cherish each phrase, distractions inevitably arise.

Your head starts itching or your knee starts hurting or you start thinking about the phone call you didn’t make. When distracted, you drop the distractions as quickly as possible and come back to the phrase, the chosen object of meditation. Choosing a particular object to stay focused on makes metta a concentration practice. When some other experience arises you don’t explore it, note it, or try to see its changing nature.

Nonetheless, I still call metta “a sneaky wisdom practice,” because people often have enormous insight doing metta. Since it is a concentration practice and you have a chosen object of meditation, you keep shepherding your attention back to that object. This means that you are letting go again and again of everything else that comes up in your awareness. That moment of letting go is very instructive, because it shows you where you are holding on.

Related: Theravada Vipassana Practice 

Letting go

The only way you can let go with grace and ease is when you begin to understand that the distraction, whatever it may be, has the characteristics of anicca, dukkha and anatta. You then don’t have to fight or fear it. In the moment of letting go – without any intended development of wisdom – you find wisdom. Ultimately, of course, the most powerful insight that comes from metta practice is the sense of nonseparateness. That insight comes through opening one’s heart and from being inclusive rather than exclusive.

During metta meditation, people are amazed to find out that they have a capacity for lovingkindness, both for themselves and for others. Due to our past conditioning, many of us do not trust our capacity to love. Metta involves a tremendous opening and purifying of our fields of intention, which can then infuse our vipassana practice as well as our entire life. We discover that we can indeed love and that everything comes back to love.

♦

This essay is from the Tricycle book, Radiant Mind.

The post What is Metta Meditation? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A friend invited me out to lunch one day and in the course of the meal offered the following confession: ‘‘I’ve been meditating for about three years now,” he said, “and I’d have to say honestly that my experience when I’m sitting isn’t what I thought it would be or should be. I still have ups and down; my mind wanders and I start over; I still have bouts of sleepiness or restlessness.

“But I’m like a completely different person now. I’m kinder and more patient with my family and friends, and with myself. I’m more involved with my community. I think more about the consequences of my actions, and about what habitual responses I bring to a situation. Is that enough?”

“Yeah,” I replied, beaming at him. “I think that’s enough.”

This is why we practice meditation—so that we can treat ourselves more compassionately; improve our relationships with friends, family, and community; live lives of greater connection; and, even in the face of challenges, stay in touch with what we really care about so we can act in ways that are consistent with our values.

One of the things I’ve always found so interesting about meditation practice is that the arena can seem so small—just you in a room—but the life lessons, the realizations and understandings that arise from it, can be pretty big.

The process is one of continually trying to greet our experience, whatever it is, with mindfulness, lovingkindness, and compassion; it helps us to realize that everything changes constantly and to be okay with that. The effort we make in meditation is a willingness to be open, to come close to what we have avoided, to be patient with ourselves and others, and to let go of our preconceptions, our projections, and our tendency not to live fully.

Meditation practice helps us relinquish old, painful habits; it challenges our assumptions about whether or not we deserve happiness. (We do, it tells us emphatically.) It also ignites a very potent energy in us. With a strong foundation in how to practice meditation, we can begin to live in a way that enables us to respect ourselves, to be calm rather than anxious, and to offer caring attention to others instead of being held back by notions of separation.

But even when you know that these benefits make meditation well worth the effort, it can be hard to keep up a new meditation practice. On the following pages you’ll find some suggestions for strengthening your commitment.

I used to feel, very early in my practice, that mindfulness was awaiting me somewhere out there; that it was going to take a lot of effort and determination, but somehow, someday, after a great deal of struggle, I was going to claim my moment of mindfulness— sort of like planting a flag at the top of a mountain.

My view of the matter was enlarged and my understanding transformed when I realized that mindfulness wasn’t inaccessible or remote; it was always right there with me. The moment I remembered it—the moment I noticed that I was forgetting to practice it—there it was! My mindfulness didn’t need to get better, or be as good as somebody else’s. It was already perfect. So is yours. But that truth is easily forgotten in the midst of our busy lives and complicated relationships. One reason we practice is to recall that truth, so that we can remember to be mindful more and more often throughout the day, and remember more naturally. Regular practice makes mindfulness a part of us.

Meditation is never one thing; you’ll experience moments of peace, moments of sadness, moments of joy, moments of anger, moments of sleepiness. The terrain changes constantly, but we tend to solidify it around the negative: “This painful experience is going to last the rest of my life.” The tendency to fixate on the negative is something we can approach mindfully; we can notice it, name it, observe it, test it, and dispel it, using the skills we learn in practice.

As you continue with your meditation practice, each session may be very different from the one that preceded it. Some sittings feel great, and some are painful, with an onslaught of all of the hindrances magnified. But these varied experiences are all part of our process. A difficult session is just as valuable as a pleasant one—maybe more so, because it holds more potential lessons. We can look mindfully at joy, sorrow, or anguish. It doesn’t matter what’s going on; transformation comes from changing our relationship to what’s going on.

I was recently teaching with the psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein. He told the class that since beginning his meditation practice in 1974, he’d tried to attend a retreat each year. And from the start he has kept a notebook in which he jots the most compelling insight of the retreat, along with the teacher’s single most illuminating, profound, or provocative statement. A few years ago, he told us, he decided to reread his notebook. He was startled to find that year after year, he’d recorded some variation of the same thing: “What arises in our experience is much less important than how we relate to what arises in our experience.”

Mark’s central discovery can be restated in several ways: “No matter what comes up, we can learn new ways of being with it.” “We have a capacity to meet any thought or emotion with mindfulness and balance.” “Whatever disagreeable emotion is coursing through us, we can let it go.” Rereading those words may keep you going when sitting down to practice is the last thing you want to do.

Breaking away from our habitual ways of looking at things, thinking at a new level, and responding differently take a good deal of courage. Here are some ways to help you rally when your courage flags—when you feel too scared (or tired or bored or stiff in the knees) to continue your practice:

Start Over
If your self-discipline or dedication seems to weaken, remember first of all, that this is natural and you don’t need to berate yourself for it. Seek inspiration in the form that works best for you—reading poetry or prose that inspires you, communicating with like-minded friends, finding a community of meditators, maybe a group to practice with. Or form your own meditation group. If you haven’t been keeping a meditation journal, start one. And keep in mind that no matter how badly you feel things are going, no matter how long it’s been since you last meditated, you can always begin again. Nothing is lost; nothing is ruined. We have this very moment in front of us. We can start now.

Guided meditations are meant to be read and listened to again and again. Don’t dismiss them, saying to yourself, I heard that already, and I get it. They repay revisiting; they are opportunities to practice, and they deepen over time. Each time you use one of the meditations again, it’s different. Work with these mediations daily, and watch how you feel connected one day and drift off the next. The hard day and the easy day each teach you a lot. And the next day holds the promise of a fresh, new experience.

“Just Put Your Body There”
I once complained to my teacher Munindraji about being unable to maintain a regular practice. “When I sit at home and meditate and it feels good, I’m exhilarated, and I have faith and I know that it’s the most important thing in my life,” I said. “But as soon as it feels bad, I stop. I’m disheartened and discouraged, so I just give up.” He gave me quite a wonderful piece of advice. “Just put your body there,” he said. “That’s what you have to do. Just put your body there. Your mind will do different things all of the time, but you just put your body there. Because that’s the expression of commitment, and the rest will follow from that.”

Certainly there’s a time to evaluate our practice, to see if it’s useful to us and worth continuing. But the evaluation shouldn’t happen every five minutes, or we’ll be continually pulling ourselves out of the process. And when we do assess our progress, we need to focus on the right criteria: Is my life different? Am I more balanced, more able to go with the flow? Am I kinder? Those are the crucial questions. The rest of the time, just put your body there.

You may think, I’m too undisciplined to maintain a practice. But you really can manage to put your body there, day in and day out. We’re often very disciplined when it comes to external things like earning a living, getting the kids off to school, doing the laundry— we do it whether we like it or not. Why can’t we direct that same discipline (for just a few minutes each day) toward our inner wellbeing? If you can muster the energy for the laundry, you can muster the energy to “put your body there” for a happier life.

Remember that Change Takes Time
Meditation is sometimes described this way: Imagine you’re trying to split a huge piece of wood with a small axe. You hit that piece of wood ninety-nine times and nothing happens. Then you hit it the hundredth time, and it splits open. You might wonder, after that hundredth whack, What did I do differently that time? Did I hold the axe differently; did I stand differently? Why did it work the hundredth time and not the other ninety-nine?

But, of course, we needed all those earlier attempts to weaken the fiber of the wood. It doesn’t feel very good when we’re only on hit number thirty-four or thirty-five; it seems as if we aren’t making any progress at all. But we are, and not only because of the mechanical act of banging on the wood and weakening its fiber. What’s really transformative is our willingness to keep going, our openness to possibility, our patience, our effort, our humor, our growing self-knowledge, and the strength that we gain as we keep going. These intangible factors are the most vital to our success. In meditation practice, these elements are growing and deepening even when we’re sleepy, restless, bored, or anxious. They’re the qualities that move us toward transformation over time. They’re what splits open the wood, and the world.

Use Ordinary Moments
You can access the forces of mindfulness and lovingkindness at any moment, without anyone knowing you’re doing it. You don’t have to walk excruciatingly slowly down the streets of a major metropolis, alarming everyone around you (in fact, please don’t); you can be aware in less obvious ways.

Rest your attention on your breath, or feel your feet against the ground—in a meeting, during a telephone conversation, walking the dog; doing so will help you be more aware of and sensitive to all that is happening around you. Throughout the day, take a moment to stop your headlong rush and torrent of doing to simply be—mindfully eating a meal, feeding a baby, or listening to the flow of sounds around you. Even in difficult situations, this pause can bring a sense of connection or of relief from obsessing about what you don’t have now or about what event or person might make you happy someday in the future.

Once when I was teaching a retreat, I had to go up and down a flight of stairs many times a day. I decided to make walking on that staircase part of my practice. Every time I went up or down, I paused first to remind myself to pay attention. It was useful, and it was fun. I’ve also resolved to do lovingkindness practice whenever I find myself waiting. Waiting on line in the grocery store. Sitting and waiting in a doctor’s office. Waiting for my turn to speak at a conference. And I count all forms of transportation as waiting (as in waiting to get to the next place or event), so on airplanes, subways, buses, in cars, and when walking down the street, I begin: May I be peaceful; may I be safe; may I be happy. Why not, in those “in-between” times, generate the force of lovingkindness? You’re likely to find that this weaving of meditation into everyday experience is a good way of bringing your meditation practice to life.

Make Sure Your Life Reflects Your Practice
Many years ago my colleagues at the Insight Meditation Society and I hosted a teacher from India and accompanied him around the country, introducing him to various communities where interest in meditation was growing. At the end of the tour we asked him what he thought of America. “It is wonderful, of course,” he said, “but sometimes students here remind me of people sitting in a rowboat and rowing with great earnestness, but they don’t want to untie the boat from the dock.

“It seems to me,” he went on, “that some people here want to meditate in order to have great transcendent experiences or amazing alternate states of consciousness. They may not be too interested in how they speak to their children or treat their neighbor.”

The way we do anything can reflect the way we do everything. It’s useful to see whether our lives outside of meditation practice are congruent with our lives as we sit. Are we living according to our deepest values, seeking the sources of real happiness, applying the skills of mindfulness, concentration, and lovingkindness throughout all areas of our lives? As we practice, that begins to happen naturally over time, but in the meantime we can look at our lives to see if there’s any disharmony we want to address. Are there disconnections between our values in meditation and our values in the world—our habits of consumption, for example, or how we treat a particular person, or how well we take care of ourselves? If we find something off-kilter, we have the tools to work for balance.

We all have cherished hopes about what our meditation practice should look like. However, the point is not to achieve some model or ideal but to be aware of all the different states that we experience. That’s a difficult message to believe, and somehow we need to hear it again and again.

♦

All artwork by Doug + Mike Starn: Excerpt from an installation of 99 color-carbon prints; each piece is unique (2005 to present), private collection.

The post Sticking with It appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There is an image I often come back to, where I am sitting at home, minding my own business, quite content, [when suddenly] I hear a knock at the door, only to get up and discover that it’s greed, fear, jealousy, or hatred at the threshold. How do I act? What do I do in that moment? In the past, I have flung open the door and said, “Welcome home, it’s all yours,” only to forget that I live here. My consciousness, my awareness lives here. My capacity to love lives here. This is just a visitor. 

When I think back on the Buddha’s reminder that the mind is naturally radiant and pure—the mind is shining—I can chill for a moment because the visitors are just dropping by. They’re not permanent. They aren’t indicative of my deepest, innermost self. The Buddha said that it is because of visiting forces that we suffer. So it’s in that spirit that I work to reconfigure my relationship to all of these difficult and challenging states that may come, that will come. 

Naming the Experience

To establish the beginnings of a more authentic relationship [with this unexpected guest], see if you can recognize what’s going on by naming it. Every time my mind says, “this is a bad thing to feel, it shouldn’t be here,” I try to retranslate that identification from “bad” to “painful,” “difficult,” “full of suffering,” or “devastating,” and watch to see what happens.

Watching the Mind

I talk about sitting and looking at my own fear. One of the things we say in mindfulness practice is that we pivot. Usually, with a strong emotion, our interest is going toward the object. If you really want a new car, for example, you likely spend your time thinking, “Should I get that kind of upholstery or that kind of upholstery?” It’s not that common to turn our attention around to the desire itself and say, “What does it feel like to want something so much?” 

What is this feeling? What’s it like in my body? What’s the mood of it? 

And that’s how we come to understand feelings as compounds. It’s not just anger. Within the anger, you might also see fear, sadness, and helplessness. When observing my own fear, I notice that despite the world’s pronouncement that we’re afraid of the unknown—which, of course, is true—I’m actually most afraid of all the stories that I tell myself. 

When I first went back to New York after many months away, ahead of that trip, in my mind, I was just watching [my mind create narratives/stories], “I haven’t been back to my apartment in New York for four or five months. I heard people can get Legionnaires’ disease when they turn on the faucet after it’s been off for a long time. My faucet hasn’t been turned on for a long time. I wonder what the water’s going to look like. Will I be able to tell? Does it smell a certain way? What are the symptoms? What am I going to do if the first night in New York I come down with Legionnaires’ disease? There it is!”

Whereas, even in the midst of that, if I remind myself, “You know what? You don’t know. This is just a story. You’re not even in New York yet.” Then I relax. I feel space. I feel openness. So the goal in some way is that space. It’s not an icy distance, it’s space. It’s important that you’re not all caught up in it, [that] you’re not defined by the emotion and driven into action. That’s a state of freedom.

Mindfulness is the place in the middle, which is not sucked in and overcome by something; nor is it pushing it away or recoiling from it in fear.

Not Compounding Suffering

Some things in life just hurt. Losing somebody hurts. People can be so unjust toward themselves in the light of that, insisting “This should not hurt. If I were a better person, if I’d been meditating longer each day, it would not hurt.” Which is quite unfair. There’s a layer of extra suffering [in our making] assumptions and interpretations that we do not [actually] have to endure. [When this takes place], we pile [it] on and we’re not holding that original hurt in a compassionate light or with any spaciousness. 

One of the extra layers of suffering we add on to our feelings or stories is what I call our inner critic. I’ll suggest to people that they give it a name, give it a wardrobe, give it a persona, because the transformation is going to be in how you relate to your inner critic, so we establish a relationship that way. I say [this] with apologies to any Lucys who may be [reading, but] I named my own inner critic Lucy, after the character in the Peanuts comic strip. I named my inner critic Lucy, because a friend had rented a house for many of us to do a retreat, and [when] I went into the bedroom set aside for me, there was a cartoon on the desk. And in the first frame of the cartoon, Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown and says, “You know, Charlie Brown, what your problem is? The problem with you is that you’re you.” Poor Charlie Brown replies, “Well, what in the world can I do about that?” And then Lucy responds, “I don’t pretend to be able to give advice. I merely point out the problem.” 

Somehow, whenever I was walking by the desk, my eye would fall right on that line. “The problem with you is that you’re you.” Because that Lucy-dominant voice had been so strong in my childhood, in my earlier life. Soon after seeing that cartoon, my very first thought was, “It’s never going to happen again.” And I greeted that thought with, “Hi Lucy.” Over time, my favorite response to Lucy became, “Chill out Lucy. Just chill.” That’s different from, “You’re right, Lucy. You’re always right. I’m completely worthless.” It’s also different from, “Oh my God, I’ve been meditating for forty years. Why is Lucy still here? I spent all that money on therapy. Why is Lucy still here? She shouldn’t be. I’m a failure.”

Mindfulness is the place in the middle, which is not sucked in and overcome by something; nor is it pushing it away or recoiling from it in fear. In a vast oversimplification of a certain Tibetan Buddhist practice, they would say:

Invite Lucy in for a meal. Keep an eye on her. Don’t let her have the run of the house, because you might end up with no silverware, but you don’t have to be so afraid. You don’t have to be so ashamed. You don’t have to be so freaked out. Your awareness, your capacity for kindness, for compassion, is actually much stronger than Lucy. Lucy may come. Lucy may come a lot. But you’re OK because of the environment that’s being created.

I used this as an example for the group I was teaching, and some of them didn’t like it. So I said how about inviting Lucy in for a cup of tea? They didn’t like that either. So I said, “OK, what’s acceptable?” And one said, “How about a cup of tea to go?” 

If We Can Be with Something, We Can Learn From It

Interestingly enough, something we often mistakenly do is insist that Lucy never show up again, but that is not going to work. Instead, we can consider what’s skillful and unskillful, realize that we’re not going to prevent things from arising, and refocus our attention toward how they are met. 

The states that lead us toward contraction and suffering are translated as defilements. Whatever we call them, they only function as actual hindrances when we relate to them in a certain way. Otherwise, they’re more like clouds moving in the sky. 

If a certain emotion comes, for example, and you try to dismantle it or evade it immediately, there’s not going to be a lot of learning. But if you can hang in there with it, take some interest in it, pay attention in this different way, there can be a lot of learning, just as I learned in that very personal insight about my own fear. It could be a personal insight, or it could be a more universal insight like, everything that arises—everything—is impermanent. If you look at anger and you see moments of rage and moments of fear, moments of sadness, moments of helplessness … that’s an alive system. That emotion that arose seems so solid, maybe so unchanging, but really look at it: it’s constantly changing. Physical pain arises in a superficial glance, it feels like some entity has just taken over our knee, our back, or our head. But if we really pay careful attention, we see, “Oh, it’s moments of burning, moments of twisting, moments of piercing, moments of iciness. None of that sounds good. None of that feels good. But that’s an alive system. And within that, there’s movement and flow.”

I have a friend, for example, with a very severe chronic pain condition, who said to me, after working in this way, “I found the space within the pain.” We like to think when we look at pain, that it’ll just go away. But it may not be that way. And yet something can happen that brings a whole other kind of relief, if we can find the space within it. We’re investigating when we’re not running away, when we’re not drowning in something that is arising and yet temporary. 

♦

If you would like to learn more about this offering, visit this link here. 

The post A Guide to Changing How We Relate to Difficult Emotions appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What is the role of contemplative practice in times of crisis? And how can meditation actually support us in meeting the greatest challenges of our time?

Meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer takes up these questions in his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. As a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, Sofer has spent decades exploring the relationship between contemplative practice and nonviolent communication. In his new book, he lays out twenty-six qualities of the heart that can expand our capacity to respond to the challenges of oppression, overwhelm, burnout, and injustice.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Sofer to talk about the dangers of burnout, the power of being patient with not knowing, and the role of curiosity in nonviolent approaches to conflict. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, then listen to the full episode.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You begin the book with the quality of aspiration, which you describe as an act that connects us with a sense of what is possible. Can you say more about the power of aspiration?

Oren Jay Sofer (OS): Aspiration is a verb. It’s not something that we have; it’s something that we do. To aspire is to connect with the energy of our life, to the spirit inside that moves us. Aspiration is how I translate the Pali term saddha, sometimes translated as faith, conviction, or confidence. I think about saddha as a stirring inside of our heart that yearns for something better and that trusts that there’s something meaningful about being alive, that there’s something fulfilling, just, or good in this remarkable, mysterious experience of being conscious. The Buddha’s placement of aspiration at the beginning of his teachings is so brilliant to me because he makes the connection that if we don’t have a sense of what’s possible, we won’t try.

[The meditation teacher Anagarika] Munindraji was fond of saying that any aspiration can be accomplished if you’re wholehearted and you know the way. That stayed with me all of these years as an invitation to really look deeply and ask, What is my aspiration? What is it that I’m here on this planet to do? If we all were able to listen deeply and ask ourselves that question, we could change this world so profoundly because I think that what all of these crises are calling for is not for all of us to do the same thing but for each of us to find our vocation and to contribute in the way that only we can, whether that’s through teaching or parenting or making art or doing direct social change work. The articulation of an aspiration on a collective level can move entire populations, and holding fast to that vision can power social movements in the face of tremendous resistance and odds.

James Shaheen (JS): You write that aspiration can help provide us with the energy for change. Sometimes we think of energy in terms of all or nothing, and it can be very easy to get burnt out. So how have you come to view energy in a more sustainable way?

OS: I love exploring [the theme of energy] because it’s present in our lives at all levels. In Western society, we tend to have an all-or-nothing approach to energy, which comes from the fossil fuel industry’s extractive model of getting as much as possible as fast as possible for the most productivity. Many of us are conditioned to live our personal lives with this sense of pressure to strive and to push past our limits.

There are many ways to reclaim a more balanced relationship with energy and cultivate the kind of sustainable power you’re referring to. We can look to nature and the cycles of the seasons, day and night, and our very breath. All religious traditions honor cycles of activity and rest. This is a very potent investigation in each of our lives to explore how we relate to our energy and how we can start to see the degree to which we’ve become disconnected from our bodies and from the rhythms of the planet. 

JS: Do you think that disconnection is what leads to burnout?

OS: Absolutely. When we’re disconnected, either we’re unaware of the signals that our body is sending us to rest, or we’re aware of them and we override them. This is one of the key factors that leads to burnout. Angela Davis says that anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn to take care of themself. I think that the conversation about energy is deeply connected to the conversation about rest. In order to have sustainable energy, we need to learn how to rest—and how to reclaim our right to rest. Once we start to examine this, we begin to see that self-care and rest are actually radical acts.

JS: Learning to rest often requires patience, and it can be particularly hard to practice when we feel stressed or under pressure. How have you come to understand patience, and how can practicing patience actually support us in responding deliberately?

OS: There’s a powerful quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he says, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait’ . . . this ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” When we look at social transformation, sometimes patience can mean passivity, and there’s a certain kind of healthy impatience with oppressive conditions that urges us to act. And yet at the same time, there’s a need for patience on the moment-to-moment level.

Through the lens of contemplative practice, I’ve come to understand patience in relation to our resistance to whatever’s happening. With patience, we can learn to bear the internal tension of resisting pain and unpleasant experiences, whether it’s unpleasant sensations or the pain and rage related to oppression or the destruction of the earth. Having patience on the moment-to-moment level allows us to have more breathing room so that we can tolerate the discomfort we experience when we disagree with what’s happening or when it goes against our values. That capacity to bear discomfort on a moment-to-moment level starts to open up more space inside us so that we can draw on other resources to make a more wise and empowered response. That way, we’re not reacting based on discomfort and resistance.

JS: You also mention the etymology of the word patience. Can you tell us about that?

OS: Patience comes from the Latin patientia, which means “suffering.” To be a patient in a hospital is to be one who suffers. In a sense, patience includes the willingness to bear discomfort consciously. And I think for many of us who are troubled about what’s happening in the world, I see us called to be patient with not knowing. The more we’re able to be patient with not having an answer and not being able to see the outcome, the more sustainable our energy can be because the more we need certainty, the more strained our internal resources become and the less resilience we have to stay engaged.

SS: You’ve mentioned the connection between patience and rest. Can you say more about how we can reclaim our right to rest?

OS: There are a few things that are important to me in examining our need for rest and how to honor it. The first is expanding our definition of rest. I love Tricia Hersey’s definition of rest in her book Rest Is Resistance and her social media platform, the Nap Ministry. She defines rest as anything that connects the body and mind, which broadens the sense of what it means to rest. If we take an evolutionary perspective, we can see that our ancestors engaged in downtime activities that were very regulating for our nervous system, whether it was threshing or weaving or toolmaking or engaging in chit-chat conversations. Any kind of downtime can be recharging.

I think it’s also important to be very real about the barriers that are there to rest. Rest is a human need. It’s a right; it’s not a luxury. And yet the structures of our society often make it so that those who have access to rest are those who have resources. There are very real economic pressures just to meet basic needs like housing and healthcare, and then there are also internal barriers to rest, like how our sense of self-worth and belonging gets tied to how much we accomplish and how well we perform. We might think that the busier we are, the more important we are, so some people feel proud of being busy and not resting.

I’ve found that it takes a very deliberate effort to learn how to rest. It involves learning to honor our limits. What can we let go of and say no to? A lot of that rides on cultivating self-compassion, seeing the suffering of being tired and strained and stressed and actually being willing not only to do something about it but to feel it. We can also investigate other questions: How much of my activity is necessary and how much of it is self-imposed? Can I relinquish my need to please others to take care of myself? Can I lower my standards in order to get more downtime? What would it be like to not always be productive? I think that we can find rest in small ways in short moments if we’re willing to look for it and break from our habits.

JS: Patience and rest can also open up space for curiosity. Can you say more about the power of curiosity in transforming our relationship to afflictive emotions?

OS: Well, we can’t transform anything if we don’t understand it. In order to understand it, we need to get curious. Curiosity doesn’t have an end or a goal. It’s just an openness to understand and to receive and absorb and learn. And there’s a certain kind of radical curiosity that we cultivate in contemplative practice that I think has a direct connection and support for social change, which is that we get interested in all of our experience, including what repels us.

It’s one thing to be curious about a beautiful sunset or a fascinating connection we have with a person in our life. It’s another thing to be curious about someone who annoys us or about our back pain, our depression, or a social condition that troubles us and keeps us up at night. Curiosity brings us into the experience of something to start to understand how it’s functioning so that we can engage with it in a more clear and skillful way.

Curiosity plays a direct role in nonviolent approaches to social transformation. Dr. King and Gandhi were both huge proponents that the initial stage of a noncooperation campaign began with being curious and gathering information. A strategic nonviolent approach to any social change work includes curiosity and openness to one’s opponent and really understanding what their needs and values are, not creating an enemy in our mind’s eye but seeing a potential partner to join us in beloved community. And so curiosity has that power to open the door to empathy and to deep connection.

The post Nurturing the Energy for Change appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In her first book, How to Do Nothing, artist Jenny Odell examined the power of quiet contemplation in a world where our attention is bought and sold. Now, she takes up the question of how to find space for silence when we feel like we don’t have enough time to spend.

In her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Odell traces the history behind our relationship to time, from the day-to-day pressures of productivity to the deeper existential dread underlying the climate crisis. In the process, she explores alternative ways of experiencing time that can help us get past the illusion of the separate self and instead open us to wonder and freedom.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Odell to discuss the social dimensions of time, how paying attention can unsettle the boundaries between us, why she views burnout as a spiritual issue, and how love can bring us out of linear time. Read an excerpt from their conversation, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen (JS): These days, it can be so easy to fall into apocalyptic thinking and what you call declinism, which you describe as the belief that a once stable society is headed for inevitable and irreversible doom. Can you walk us through some of the dangers of this view?

Jenny Odell (JO): I think declinism can foreclose a really crucial space of questioning or imagination that would allow you to imagine other pathways forward. It may be the case that that space is vanishingly small, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still very important. Rebecca Solnit has written really beautifully about this: what you believe very literally affects what it is possible for you to do. You see this individually in people where what they think they’re capable of doing affects what they’re able to do, but I think it’s also true collectively. So I worry a lot about not only giving up before it’s over but also how the world looks to someone who’s given up. 

Declinism goes hand in hand with the idea that things used to be better—and a lot of things did used to be better. But a blanket notion that things were stable for a long time and now we’re going over the edge is a myopic view in both directions. I’m much more interested in a notion of history where every moment is actually contingent and at every moment things could have gone different ways. If you look at history that way, the present moment appears very different—it looks like it could also go a lot of different ways.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You also discuss the phenomenon of climate grief, and you suggest that grief can be incredibly useful as it can teach us new forms of subjecthood. Can you say more about the types of subjecthood that grief makes possible?

JO: Climate grief is so much grief for something—or for someone or someones. I think in that acknowledgment is this recognition that you don’t really belong to yourself. In How to Do Nothing, I describe going to Elkhorn Slough and seeing all of these birds. At that moment, there was such a profusion of them and they were so beautiful, but I also couldn’t see them not against the backdrop of loss.

In that moment, I realized that it doesn’t really logically make sense to love anything. From the point of total utilitarian logic, why would you tie your fate to something that is endangered? And yet that is the moment when you experience your deepest sense of humanity. The experience of grief itself is that I care about something so much that it’s disassembling my ego. It’s almost like the center of gravity is between you and the being that you’re grieving for.

JS: Moments like the one you just described seem to unsettle the boundaries between us. So what have these experiences taught you about what you call the illusion of the bounded self?

JO: What the self is is still a very active question for me, and it’s only become more fascinatingly complicated for me through experiences like that. I am someone who has thought a lot about context for a long time. A lot of my art asked the question about how you can separate an individual thing from its context. I was an artist in residence at a dump, and I researched 200 objects, everything I could find about them, and the conclusion that I came to was that this object you’re holding in your hand is the crystallization of economic patterns: people thought they wanted this, or people thought they could get people to want this, or these materials were available and cheap at this time. You have this thing that seems like it’s just given, but actually all of these factors fed into it. So I’ve always been interested in that in all domains.

The same is true for the self. I do feel like I have some sort of core vaguely, but I do also feel like there’s Mountain Jenny, and then there’s Oakland Jenny, and there’s Paralyzed by a Butterfly Jenny, and I’m very different around different people. I think someone could come to the conclusion that there just is no self and it’s all totally meaningless, but I don’t really think that. Instead, I have a very ecological view of the self, like it’s something that’s alive. It’s entirely made out of relationships.

SS: Along those lines, in contrast to the notion of an isolated individual, you write that you’ve come to define being alive as an embrace. What does it mean that being alive is like an embrace?

JO: I think of it as a mix of sensitivity and love. I feel alive to the extent that I can see the birds [around me]—and not just see them but also feel moved by them. I think that is the kind of engine behind wanting to see what the next day brings and also wanting to see how I change in response to those things. My nightmare is feeling like I’m just an isolated unit that’s just incidentally here on earth without having any relationship to anything.

I’m very fortunate to have been able to mostly live in the same place my whole life, and the relationship that I have to this place is so, so meaningful. It’s so much a part of who I am. Someone recently said to me, “I don’t just think that we see places. I think that places see us.” That’s what I mean by the embrace: I want to feel like I’m sensitive to things that are happening around me, but I also want to feel seen—there’s a reciprocal relationship where I’m looking at a world that’s also alive.

SS: You quote the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who writes that when we are actually seeing, we’re in a state of love and there’s no yesterday and no tomorrow. Can you say more about this state of love?

JO: One of the reasons love feels related to time for me is that there’s nothing instrumental about love, and there’s so much right now that feels instrumental. In How to Do Nothing, I talked about Martin Buber’s idea of I-Thou versus I-It relationships. Having an I-Thou relationship to something is much closer to what I was saying earlier about the center of gravity, and I-It is more like things exist in the world for me to either use them or discard them.

Anyone who’s experienced even one second of love toward anything or anyone knows that the notion of gain or strategy just doesn’t make any sense. It is the ultimate end in and of itself. If you’re there, you just want to be there. I have the linear timeline of my life, but I also know that in these moments that I’ve had where I felt a feeling of love, it felt like time stopped. I don’t really think of myself as having an age in those moments. They’re very strikingly similar, and I suspect they will continue to be similar.

♦

The post There Is No Yesterday and No Tomorrow appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have found a simple image from one of my teachers hugely helpful: “The mind will get filled with qualities like mindfulness or lovingkindness moment by moment—just the way a bucket gets filled with water drop by drop.” As soon as that image appeared in my mind’s eye, I clearly saw two powerful tendencies. One was to stand by the bucket lost in fantasy about how utterly exciting and wonderful it would be when the bucket was filled, and while lost in the glories of my someday enlightenment, I am neglecting to add the next drop. The other tendency, equally strong, was to stand by the bucket in despair at how empty it was and how much more there was to go—once again not having the patience, humility, and good sense to add one drop exactly in that moment.

Because I’ve used this image in my teaching, I’ve heard variations on my own fantasies. Often people come to me and say “I tend to completely overlook my own bucket to peer into someone else’s to see how well they’re doing. Is theirs fuller than mine? Is it emptier? What’s going on over there?” 

Comparison is disempowering. It dissociates us from our own potential. 

Often people say “I think my bucket has a leak.” My response: “These buckets don’t leak.” 

Mindfulness and lovingkindness are not objects we can either have or not have. We can never lose them. We may lose touch with these qualities of heart, but right here and now we can recover them. It is each moment of recovery that adds a drop to the bucket. In every single moment, regardless of what is happening, we can be mindful, we can be compassionate. In an instant, the mind can touch these qualities again, come to know them again. In that sense, the bucket is completely full with every drop. 

Excerpted from Finding Your Way: Meditations, Thoughts, and Wisdom for Living an Authentic Life by Sharon Salzberg (Workman Publishing) © 2023.

The post Drop by Drop appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 2016, poet Ross Gay set out to document a delight each day for a year. Shortly after he completed the resulting essay collection, The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Recognizing delight’s potential endlessness, Gay decided to turn his yearlong exercise into a lifelong project.

Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights, demonstrating that the sources of delight are indeed limitless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. For Gay, delight serves as evidence of our interconnectedness, and it is inextricable from the fact of our mortality. With characteristic humor and grace, he chronicles his everyday encounters with delight, from the fleeting sweetnesses of strangers to the startling beauty of the falsetto to the unexpected joys of aging.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and Insight Meditation Society cofounder and teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Gay to talk about the relationship between delight and impermanence, how he understands faith, and how delight has restructured how he pays attention.

James Shaheen (JS): The last time we spoke, you had just published a book on joy. How do you think about the difference between joy and delight?

Ross Gay (RG): I’m starting to feel like among the definitions for delight is something like the pleasant evidence of our connection. It’s occasional—a hummingbird lands very close to you, and you feel delight. But joy feels like it’s always there, and you can enter into it.

In a way, joy feels like the connection itself, and delight feels like the little bells—the little reminders that, oh yeah, there’s this fundamental connection here. So that’s how I think of it: delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.

“Delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.”

JS: In your practice of noticing delight, you write that you’re not being optimistic; you’re just paying attention. Do you think delight has shaped or restructured how you pay attention?

RG: Absolutely. I feel like just by doing this practice, I’ve built a kind of reservoir of things that now I know delight me. Instead of just, “Oh, that’s happening,” it’s like, “Oh yeah, this is another thing that I love.” I find myself arguing with the notion of delight as optimistic in part because in this practice, I don’t mean to diminish the fullness and complexity of life.

What I mean to do is attend very fully. And in attending very fully, I’m also attending to what is astonishingly beautiful. I’m not looking at the bright side of things; I’m just trying to look at everything.

JS: Right. Often what you’re fully attentive to is what we might otherwise take for granted, and in your work, the everyday becomes unfamiliar and new. You describe this as being “perpetually wonderstruck.” Can you say more about the relationship between wonder and delight? 

RG: It might be the case that while I’m doing this practice, I’m alert in a certain kind of way to what’s going to delight me. It’s starting with a question: I wonder. I wonder what’s going to delight me. And I wonder too if that experience of not knowing what’s going to delight you prepares the ground of not knowing. In a way, the vocation is to not know. Maybe there’s a first knowing, which is like, “Something’s probably going to delight me,” but the not knowing is like, “I don’t know what it is.” That practice of not being sure feels connected to wonder, which to me feels like a fundamental unknowing.

It’s an opening question: What do we love in common? What is beautiful? What is given to me? These are questions that can bring us closer to one another and help us acknowledge our connection, which then further makes that connection possible. They grow [the connection] that they witness.

JS: You’ve said that the most interesting thing about us as humans is that we die and we change. How do you see our mortality as an occasion for joy?

RG: There’s something really moving about walking down the street and seeing whoever is walking toward me and being like, “Oh, yeah, you too will die. We’re both going to be dead.” It’s an interesting ground to operate on, where there’s a shared fleetingness of things. If we can get a handle on that and be less afraid and more curious, it also seems to me to be another ground of sharing: to be witnesses of how fleeting this whole thing is. It offers a possibility for a different kind of generosity.

This also comes back to the fact that we are not one thing. We are many things, and in fact, we are many things in the process of becoming many more things. And that feels to me like a kind of faith—a kind of faith that also inclines me to feel tender toward someone when I can hold that, oh yeah, we’re changing. I don’t know what I’m going to be tomorrow or next week. But I also don’t know what anyone else or anything else is going to be tomorrow or next week. And although it’s a kind of groundlessness, it also feels like a potential for sweetness.

Sharon Salzberg: You write that delight can be occasioned by faith—faith in each other and our capacity for “radiant, unpredictable, sloppy, mycelial, transgressive care.” So how do you understand faith?

RG: This feels like a lesson for me regularly, and maybe it’s part of the practice of delight. To write a delight every day requires a kind of faith that there will be a delight every day, which I think comes from practice. The faith actually follows the practice—the practice has provided the evidence that you can have faith. Maybe faith and delight arrive together. They have a connection to one another.

In one essay in the book, my friend Kate’s cat gets lost. Every time I see a sign on a telephone pole that says “Lost Cat,” I’m like, “Oh, man, that’s a bummer. You’re never going to see your cat again.” In a way, I have faith in a certain kind of universe, and my faith in that universe compels me to contribute to that universe, which is to say that when I say, “Oh, bummer,” I’m not looking around for anyone’s cat. And if my friend’s cat gets lost, I’m not helping them out. I’ve been an asshole on account of that.

My friend Kate, on the other hand, has faith in this other kind of cat-rescuing universe. It’s a beautiful story, actually. Her cat got lost, she put up signs, and at dawn, when she went to the place where her cat got lost, which is behind a strip mall in a murky, swampy area, there were people out there calling her cat’s name. And she got her cat back.

That’s the kind of faith that she gave me. But I needed a reason to have that faith. Often, these things are given to us by other people. Someone has to teach you that when you put signs up, people will actually try to take care of you.

♦

Listen to the full conversation at tricycle.org/podcast.

The post Limitless Delights appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As a young oncologist, Anthony Back turned to Buddhism as a practical way of processing the suffering and death he encountered each day. “I came to Buddhism out of a sense of trying to survive,” he told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. Over the years, his practice has become an essential support to his work in accompanying patients as they navigate illness and death, and it has radically transformed his understanding of what it means to provide care.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Shaheen and Salzberg sat down with Back to discuss how he integrates his Buddhist practice into his work as a physician, how he deals with burnout and moral injury, and what James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have taught him about paying attention. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen (JS): You’re currently the co-director of the University of Washington Center for Excellence in Palliative Care and a professor of oncology and medicine, and you’re also a practicing Zen Buddhist. How did you first come to Buddhism?

Anthony Back (AB): I came to Buddhism out of a sense of trying to survive. I was a young oncologist, and I was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of suffering and death that I was dealing with. I thought, “How will I make a career of this? How will I keep doing this day in and day out?” That led me first to mindfulness and then to Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya Zen Center.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You currently work in palliative care, and so much of palliative care seems linked to honest communication about illness and death. How has your Buddhist practice influenced your ability to have these conversations?

AB: What my practice has enabled me to do is work at a layer that is below the words. Of course, there’s a lot of teaching about what words to use and what words help you come across as empathic. But what my practice has taught me is that my stillness can make space for whatever the other person is experiencing and that my ability to be with it and not push it away can create a field for deeper communication. I don’t think I would’ve learned that any other way. The priority in my world is not about stillness. It’s about efficiency. And it really took taking myself out of the hospital to learn to practice that kind of stillness inside and outside to be able to sit with people.

SS: When we’re confronted with suffering, it can be so tempting to look away or to try to avoid it at all costs. How have you seen this avoidance or resistance to suffering play out in the medical field, and how do you train providers to be able to talk openly about suffering?

AB: In the medical field, the usual reaction to suffering is that we should be able to do something about it, and if we can’t treat it now, we need to find new treatments, and so we need to do more research. There is something really good in all of that—that is how medical practice improves. And yet if we don’t pause to be with that suffering and to witness it and to be present with the person, then something gets missed.

It is a constant struggle to make the time to be still in the midst of these busy practices. And because it’s not reinforced by the system, because it’s not reimbursed or formally taught, very often mindfulness gets the label of being just another technique. Of course, what you learn after years of practice is that it is a way that you bring yourself into everything. It’s not just something that you apply at the moment; it is a way you are present in the moment. It is the ground that you’re coming from.

The more that we can both be present with everything, the more there is really potential for a kind of healing.

JS: You’ve talked about the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness you can feel in the face of a patient’s suffering. Has your Zen practice shifted your relationship to this powerlessness, and more broadly, has it changed your understanding of what it means to provide care?

AB: First, I would say that Zen practice has radically shifted my sense of what powerlessness means in the sense that I appreciate all the things that medical technologies can do, and yet I don’t use them with the same kind of expectation that I will be able to have power over another person’s body. There are things going on biologically that are so complicated that we’ll never be able to completely understand them. And so coming at it that way gives me a kind of humility about the situation, which changes my expectations about what will happen.

The other thing that has shifted in my understanding is that there’s a technical aspect to the care that I provide, but then there is also a more personal aspect, which is more than just emotional care. It is the care of being present. It is the care of witnessing. It is the care of sharing space with another human being. And I think that’s a very different sense of care than the one I had earlier in my career.

When I was a young physician, I was trained that care was all the nice things that you did that were beyond the minimum. Now, I think of care as the way I bring myself to the room to meet the other person. It is the way I can stay there—or try to stay there—regardless of what is coming up for them and, in the time that we are together, to invite everything into the room. The more that we can both be present with everything, the more there is really potential for a kind of healing.

SS: You’ve discussed how your practice influences your clinical work, but I’m also curious about the other direction. Has your day-to-day work as a palliative care doctor changed your relationship to Buddhist practice?

AB: My experience as a doctor sitting with people who are dealing with serious illnesses has totally changed my worldview. I started out in this work as kind of a materialist: I thought that you have a body and it’s just stuff and you die and it’s over. Sitting with people has given me the sense that something very, very different is going on. Being with somebody at the moment of death and being really present for that, there is clearly something happening that is not described by medical science—there is a profound shift when someone’s spirit leaves the room. That has forced me to recognize that there is something else going on in the universe that I was never trained in. My Buddhist practice is what has allowed me to perceive that.

If I had not learned to stay still long enough to feel inside myself, I don’t think I would have noticed that that was happening. And I see it all the time at work. Everyone [at the hospital] is running around so much, and someone dies and they don’t even notice. They don’t feel it. I think those experiences [of being with people at the moment of death] have tuned me in to a level of my practice that I’m not sure I would have accessed on my own.

Being with people in this way has changed what it means for me to be present in my own body. That has given me a different reference point for myself, but it’s also given me a point of reference about how we are all interconnected. If I pay close enough attention and my mind is quiet, I can actually feel this interconnection all the time, and that is a source of encouragement and a kind of joy and curiosity and awe. Even in really busy moments, I can get a taste of that.

The post Inviting Everything into the Room appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For the past sixty years, Meredith Monk has been expanding the possibilities of the human voice. A pioneer of extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary performance, she has created collaborative performance pieces that stretch the limits of music, inspiring figures from Björk to Merce Cunningham. Her most recent work, Indra’s Net, draws from her decades of Buddhist practice and explores themes of impermanence and interdependence against the backdrop of our ecological crisis.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Monk to discuss the relationship between her art and her meditation practice, the importance of listening fearlessly, and art as a bodhisattva activity.

James Shaheen (JS): So Meredith, you’re celebrating your 80th birthday this year, and you’ve been performing since you were a child. Over the course of your career, you’ve composed and performed for figures ranging from your own teacher, Pema Chödrön, to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. How did you first come to music?

Meredith Monk (MM): My mother was a singer on the radio in the 1930s. She did solo performances on music shows like the Prudential Family Hour, and then she became a jingle singer and recorded commercials. My grandfather was a bass-baritone who came from Russia and had a concert career in New York, and my great-grandfather was a cantor in Russia. I’m a fourth-generation singer, so music was just like breathing for me. I was singing at a very young age, reading music before I could read words. But I had to find my own way. I could have followed the same path as a singer, but I knew that I liked making things, and I wanted to make my own work.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You’ve compared making art to jumping from the edge of a cliff, and you say that being an artist is learning to tolerate the fear of the unknown. Can you say more about the relationship between your art and this space of not knowing? How do you work with mystery and uncertainty?

MM: I’m terrified every time. There are two different ways of thinking about making art. Some people have a more product-oriented approach, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But my way has always been to try to start from zero and to try to learn to tolerate the unknown. It’s hard every time. After sixty years of making work, I still feel incredible fear, and then I say to myself, “Be playful, Meredith,” and I just start. From there, it’s a bit like being a detective. A little clue will come up, and then I get interested in that. Little by little, the curiosity takes over, and the fear is less present. At a certain point, the piece makes itself known, and there’s this magic birth of an entity. Then it just becomes so miraculous. I’m so grateful to be doing something that affirms mystery and magic in this world. To remember that you can’t see everything or hear everything or label everything is a wonderful thing.

JS: In an interview with Tricycle several years ago, you spoke about fearless listening, or listening with all of your being. What have you learned from listening fearlessly?

MM: I’ve always thought that art requires being open to listening, and my art always has a lot of space and quiet and stillness. Each piece is another world, and you are trying to say to it, “Make yourself known,” and it’s coming through you. This is similar to the meditation process of just letting things come without expectations.

I think listening fearlessly applies both to making a work and to performing. I believe performing is a prototype of the possibility of human behavior because we’re so in tune with each other. If one person is having a hard night, you can tell by the first note that comes out of their mouth. [As performers] we know each other so well. Live performance is really such a generous and vulnerable act because anything could happen. We could fall on our faces!

SS: You’ve written that the experience of creating is as close to meditation as anything you can think of, particularly the combination of focused attention and relaxation that both require. Can you say more about the connection between your meditative practice and your creative practice?

MM: The processes are so similar, and it’s just a matter of how much time each process takes. The creative practice takes longer. Your consciousness is not as heightened as it is in meditation. But in performing, it really is. In your lifetime, there are a handful of performances where you are truly one with your material. There’s no you. You’re absolutely pinpoint-focused, and at the same time, you’re relaxed and open to what’s going on in the moment. That’s the beautiful thing about performing. It’s so present. You’re in nowness. In those performances, the judge or observer in your mind that’s going “You’re flat” or “You’re slow” is not there. All that voice is saying is “Wow,” in the best sense of the word. It’s kind of a miracle.

“I believe that art can be an affirmation not only of the artist but of all of us as human beings.”

I wrote a piece called “Hocket,” which is a duet. In a hocket, the performers throw notes back and forth, and the notes make a melody. It’s like a moving meditation. If even one thought comes into your mind, you’re off. That’s an example of how now you have to be. You’re just in your body. You’re one with your body and the material.

SS: You describe making art as a bodhisattva activity, where the inner transformation that results from dharma practice flows into the work, and the work in turn becomes an offering. Can you tell us about that transformative process?

MM: In these late years of my life, I’m more aware of how much my practice has gone into my work. As a young artist, I didn’t think of the two in such an integrated way—I felt that I had my art practice over here and my dharma practice over there. Little by little, I’ve come to see how the dharma practice is a kind of ground or a foundation that underlies every piece I work on. In the time I have left on earth, I want to make art that has a healing aspect to it.

Once, at a retreat, a woman said, “I’m a painter, and I’m afraid that if I meditate, then my art won’t be good anymore because it comes from my pain and my neuroses.” But I’ve found that my practice has made my art grow more. I think it’s a myth that we have in the Western European tradition that you have to cut off your ear and suffer for your art and that neurosis is what feeds the artwork, and I really don’t believe that.

Of course, there will always be dark aspects of my work too. I feel that it’s very important that art has sadness as well as joy, and that it reflects this world that we’re living in rather than saying that everything is great. I don’t think that that is good art. A work of good art has the richness of the different centers of our being and a full range of emotion. I believe that art can be an affirmation not only of the artist but of all of us as human beings. Hopefully, it’s a prototype for our possibilities and the richness of our experience.

The post Acts of Dharma appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As a pastoral counselor, chaplain, and activist, Pamela Ayo Yetunde has witnessed both our capacity for enlightenment as well as the ways that our humanity is distorted by forces of oppression and ignorance. She believes that our true nature is to care for one another, yet distraction and delusion keep us from this natural impulse. Drawing from Buddhist and Christian teachings on mutuality and liberation, Yetunde lays out a path for how we can become better caregivers to ourselves and our communities in her new book, Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, she spoke with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg about the ancient Vedic image of Indra’s net, what she has learned from Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of mutuality, and how we can practice nonviolence in our everyday lives.

James Shaheen (JS): What is Indra’s net?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde (PAY): Indra’s net is a concept that comes out of ancient Vedic teachings. It was believed that Indra, the god, had a net that he used to capture his enemies and punish them in something that they could not escape from. Over time, Indra’s net has become a way of understanding our interconnectedness and interdependence, as well as our capacity to reflect one another’s goodness back to each other and rely on one another to make it through hardships.

When I talk about casting Indra’s net, I’m talking about each one of us pouring out the love from our hearts into the net for the benefit of all. It’s a practice of lovingkindness in its abundance. This lovingkindness is not limited by my one body. It’s at the level of imagining that you are in the field of lovingkindness and that this field of lovingkindness is without bounds—for all beings throughout space and time, throughout the universe, throughout the multiverses. The practice of casting Indra’s net is really about imagining that everyone and everything is in the field, yourself included.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You draw from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he describes us as living in the “inescapable network of our mutuality.” Could you say more about what you’ve learned from that vision of mutuality and how it relates to Indra’s net?

PAY: I can say about mutuality that when I feel it, I feel whole, I feel connected, and I feel appreciated. I feel like we can have an exchange of equals, and I already know we are equal. As equals, there are going to be times where I need to reach out because I’m vulnerable, and there are going to be times where you need to reach out because you are also vulnerable.

I’m not saying that our relationships have to be tit for tat, reciprocating one act of kindness with another act of kindness as if we’re tallying up our kind acts. The nature of being human is to care for one another, and there’s no shame in that. Oftentimes, we don’t get it right, and I always encourage people to try not to dwell in the fear of not doing it right to but err on the side of compassion and then apologize if you don’t get it right.

SS: You say that our task is to reflect our mutuality with as little distortion as possible. So can you say something about what gets in the way?

PAY: What gets in the way…so many things. One is our self concept. There’s a part of us that is—some would say that has to be—a little narcissistic in order for us to get out of the bed in the morning and believe we can accomplish anything. This can cloud our view of others. When we become so self-absorbed, making sure we get everything we want when we want it, then we can’t see anybody else. We can’t feel anyone else. It’s not possible to feel the resonance of another, even when you’re in the same space. One of the beauties of Buddhism is the practice of decentering yourself so that other people can have space. When we decenter ourselves, then that creates the capacity to mirror one another better.

SS: You suggest that we broaden our understanding of caregiving to a communal and national level, learning to become caregivers to our community. Can you say more about what it looks like to apply a spiritual care approach to society as a whole?

PAY: As a chaplain, one of the things that I’ve learned is that when we are working in public, pluralistic settings, we should treat people not based on our own proclivities but based on the fact that each person has their own story, their own history, their own culture, their own commitments, and their own causes and conditions. They are in a state of vulnerability, and so are we. But from chaplain to patient, it is understood that the patient has not chosen to be in the situation, and the chaplain has chosen to be in the situation. Therefore, the chaplain has more power. In order to reduce the chance of abusing that power, we bracket the power. We recognize that we are vulnerable. Hopefully, that leads us to be humble and therefore open to all these people who have come to this place through their own journey.

We are not able to care for everyone all the time. But we can adopt a posture of nonharming toward almost everyone. And that’s what I’m suggesting we begin with: all of us adopt the posture of nonharming, recognizing that most of the people who are ill are not actually in the hospital. Most of the people who are ill are in the world. And so why not treat the world as a place of healing and ourselves as agents of healing?

We can’t do this by ourselves. We’re not superheroes. We are people just like everyone else. The more we can create communities of care where we share the responsibility of caring with each other, the greater chance we have of living our best lives, our most connected lives. And that is another way of casting Indra’s net.

The post Communities of Care appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

According to meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, it can be easy to feel like we’re bystanders to our own lives. “Sometimes we live a short distance from our bodies and our emotions,” Salzberg told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, on a recent episode of Life As It Is. “Life loses its texture, and we’re just getting by, living out each day.”

Salzberg believes that many of us yearn for a deeper sense of happiness and purpose, but our familiar patterns tend to get in the way and keep us trapped in constriction. In her new book, Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom, she explores how we can work with our habitual patterns and cultivate greater creativity, connection, and joy. Weaving together Buddhist psychology, her own experiences, and insight from a variety of contemplative traditions, she lays out a path toward what she calls “real life,” or a life of spaciousness and freedom.

In the podcast episode, Shaheen sat down with Salzberg to discuss the forces that keep us trapped in isolation, what it means to live a real life, how to work with the three hindrances, and how expansiveness makes love more available to us. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

Throughout the book, you explore the ways we yearn for something beyond traditional successes and accomplishments. Interestingly, you write that it’s not the yearning that causes the trouble; instead, it’s our tendency to search in the wrong places. Can you say more about how our yearning for happiness can actually support us in our journey to a real life? Everybody wants to be happy, and happy not in a superficial sense but in a deeper sense. We all want a feeling of being at home somewhere in this life. Whether it’s in the body, in the mind, with our families, with friends, or on the planet, we want a sense of belonging without any artifice or pretense of being better than we are—we want to belong just as we are. 

We all long for this, but generally, we’re not looking in the right places. So the problem is bad aim. We think the problem is wanting to be happy, but it’s not. When we look at our life, we can realize, “Wow, if I’m generous, I actually feel a kind of joy that’s different from when I’m enslaved to my fearful thoughts.” These are different paths, and they have different consequences. We can observe that. So it’s through the force of attention that we get to see that there are actually ways we can craft our lives. It’s like our lives themselves become our own creative medium for more happiness.

So though we might yearn for a deeper sense of happiness, we often get caught by our patterns and conditioning. You describe the hindrances of Buddhist psychology as patterns that hinder our ability to live fully and respond to the world around us in meaningful ways. Can you walk us through the three hindrances? First, what are the typical behaviors associated with grasping, and how can it narrow our sense of where happiness can be found? First of all, it’s not the sheer arising of these states that’s the problem. It’s when we’re seduced by them, when we take them to heart, and especially when we act motivated by them. Then we’re in trouble. But the sheer arising is just what’s happening. It becomes a problem when we feel like we’re bad or wrong because we still feel grasping or hatred. You can’t control what comes up in your mind. One of my early teachers, Munindra, used to say to me, “Why are you so upset about this thought that has come up in your mind? Did you invite it? Did you say, ‘At 3:15 I’d like to be filled with self-hatred, please’? No.” When conditions come together for something to arise, it will arise. But that doesn’t mean you have to feel passive. How we relate to what comes up in our mind is everything. That’s sort of the point of the path.

Grasping can take the form of infatuation, clinging, craving, always looking for the next thing that will permanently satisfy us, or an inability to see the bigger picture. When we’re caught in this state, do we look at what we’re compromising in order to get the thing that we think we need? Are we looking at what we’re giving up? Are we holding onto what we want too tightly? We completely freak out because it’s not fixed. But nothing is fixed. Everything is changing. I sometimes wonder if we’re all a little bit like hoarders. Maybe we don’t have piles of phone books in our apartment, but [we still accumulate] a lot of stuff. These things are almost like totems against change, totems against death: “If I get another one of those, then I will feel fulfilled and whole.” But really, we can feel whole without it, and it’s better not needing that new object or accolade. Because once we feel we need it, we’re kind of sunk.

After craving or grasping, we have aversion, which you describe as a punishing attitude toward ourselves and others. Can you walk us through the forms that aversion can take, as well as the dangers they may bring? In some schools of Buddhist psychology, it’s thought that anger and fear are the same mind state: they’re both aversion. They’re both striking out against what’s happening, trying to declare it to be untrue. Anger is the outflowing, expressive, energized form; fear and all its manifestations are the frozen, imploding form of striking out and wanting to separate from what’s happening.

Again, it’s not that these states are bad. But let’s look at anger as one example. The example I use a lot in the book is shame as a form of anger at oneself, real lacerating self-hatred. Is shame onward-leading? Look how exhausting it is. Look at how humiliating it is. Does shame really give us the energy to seek change, to make amends, or to maybe see, “Oh, yeah, I blew it, how can I go on in a better way?” Well, no. We’re devastated. We feel like we’re the worst person who ever lived. It’s not just what we said or what we did—it’s like our whole being is restless in that state. As someone said to me, whom I quote in the book, the brain filled with shame cannot learn.

So we really try to look at anger and fear in all their forms, and we try not to condemn these feelings or to judge them but to ask: How much of this pattern leads to more suffering, and how much leads to the end of suffering? We have a chance here.

The third hindrance is delusion, which you describe as a sense of numbness, disembodiment, and resistance to seeing things as they truly are. Can you say more about how we can work with our patterns of delusion? I should emphasize that we can work with all these patterns. It’s not just a question of recognizing them and feeling sad. All of these states are completely workable, and we can learn a different relationship to them instead of falling into them on the one side or hating them on the other. Cultivating this new relationship is the first and foundational step, and it’s almost the definition of mindfulness. It’s the place in the middle where we can see what’s going on in a balanced way: Is learning happening? Is kindness happening? Is there more spaciousness? Everything is workable, and these patterns aren’t forever.

Delusion is my favorite of the three. We all have a mix of grasping, aversion, and delusion, but sometimes people’s personality structure really favors one over the other. My personal pattern is delusion. Before I get into grasping or aversion, I’ll just space out and go numb. It can be comforting in some way. But it’s not onward leading. When we’re lost in delusion, we’re often counting on other people to define life for us, to define reality for us, and to tell us what’s good and what’s not because we’re just lost in space. So that’s very confining, too. When combined with fear, delusion can make us want to hold on to anything that seems like it’ll give us a sense of security or knowing. That’s where fundamentalism is said to come from from the Buddhist perspective.

Can you say more about what meditation has taught you about looking directly at difficult feelings and being with them rather than these fruitless attempts to escape them? I think it starts with an understanding and direct knowledge that those attempts are fruitless. They’re not bad, and they’re not cowardly or evidence of some character flaw, but they’re not going to work. The feelings just come back in some other form. They might ambush us in some way. And so we practice looking directly at them, taking an interest in them, rather than having a judgment about them. We ask, What does it feel like in my body? Let’s say you want a new car, and you’re experiencing craving or desire. All your energy is going toward: Should I get that kind of upholstery or that kind of upholstery? Should I get that speaker system or that other one? It’s very rare that we pivot our attention back and say to ourselves, What does it feel like to want something so badly? What’s that craving made of? Because sometimes we see that these feelings are compounds. These are strong feelings, and they’re complex. We look at craving, and sometimes we find a lot of loneliness. It’s not only craving. We look at anger, and we see a lot of sadness or fear or hopelessness. But unless we make the pivot, we’re not going to learn about the very nature of those forces.

Part of being mindful is making that pivot: not, What am I angry about and what am I going to do, but, What is anger? What does it feel like in my body? We name it, if we can. We pay attention to it. We take an interest in it. We remember, as we start to put ourselves down, that that’s not the point. These are painful states; they’re not bad states. We can have some compassion for ourselves in the face of them. And lo and behold, you find that things begin to shift. Even though that very state has come up, even though it may come up a lot, you’re so different with it. That changes everything.

The post Why We Look for Happiness in the Wrong Places appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One time when my colleague Joseph Goldstein and I were visiting a friend in Houston, we all went out to a restaurant to order takeout. As we were waiting for the food to be prepared, Joseph struck up a conversation with the young man working behind the counter. After a few minutes, he told Joseph that he’d never left Houston and went on to describe, somewhat passionately, how his dream was to one day go to Wyoming. When Joseph asked him what he thought he would find there, he responded, “Open, expansive space, a feeling of being unconfined, with peacefulness and freedom and room to move.”

Joseph responded, “There’s an inner Wyoming, too, you know.” At that point, the young man fixed a stare at Joseph and said, “That’s freaky,” as he sidled away.

But there is an inner Wyoming, a potential for openness, spaciousness, clarity, and freedom that exists within each of us. We just need confidence in it, to make the journey to that place, to discover it, nurture it, and hold the memory that it’s there, waiting for us to visit anytime.

In moving from contraction to spaciousness, it’s as if we’re sitting in a narrow, low-ceilinged, dark room—so accustomed to it that we don’t even realize we’re confined—and then the door swings open, revealing light, room to move, and possibilities that suddenly await. We don’t know just what is out there, but it’s certainly more vast and spacious than that tiny room.

My favorite way of imagining that expansive state—as someone with asthma—is “being able to breathe again.” More than just pleasure, different from indulgence, it is mostly a sensation of huge relief. It is peace.

Theologian Howard Thurman recommended that we “look at the world with quiet eyes.” It’s an intriguing phrase. It seems like with the way we so often look at the world, we resemble cartoon characters whose eyes are popping out on springs: “I see something I want! Give it to me!” Our heads rapidly turn to the object of our desire in a fixed gaze, so as not to lose sight of it. Our bodies lean forward in anticipation. Our arms extend, reaching out to acquire it. Our fingers flex, ready to grab on to what we want, to try to keep it from changing, from eluding our grasp. Our shoulders strain to hold on even tighter.

That’s grasping, contraction.

It happens in a moment, or an hour, or a day, a month, a lifetime—and it brings a lot of pain.

So, look at the world with quiet eyes whenever you can, and let go of grasping. The world will come to fill you without your straining for it. In that relaxation, you will find peace. Peace isn’t a fabricated state, repressing all woes and challenges. It is tuning into our fundamental nature.

Willa Maile Qimeng Cuthrell-Tuttleman, when she was seven years old and a student at Friends Academy in Manhattan, wrote a poem that beautifully expresses what I understand as peace.

Peace Is Friendship

Peace looks like nature
Peace smells like fresh air
Peace sounds like wind blowing through the trees
Peace tastes like bubble gum
Peace feels like a soft pillow

I have a friend who describes himself as pretty obsessive when nursing a grudge, another contracted state. He can go over and over and over the words of the misunderstanding, or his resentment at not being included, or someone’s reckless behavior. Over and over and over. After one such interlude, he reflected on the obsessive quality, declaring:

“I let him live rent-free in my brain for too long.”

Now imagine yourself going home to that blessedly quiet apartment of your mind. What a relief. You can play music. You can cuddle with your dog. You can reach out to a struggling friend. You can cook a meal, or write a poem, or maybe finally get some sleep.

Expansiveness leaves room for our fundamentally loving hearts to uncoil and lead us onward.

Expansiveness doesn’t lead us to a vacuous place—cavernous, muted, disconnected. Expansiveness isn’t being spaced out, floating above it all. In the sense that I’m using the word, expansiveness is energized, confident, creative, brimming with love. The subtle balances in life—of rest and action, of passion and letting go, of the power of intention and of patience—all can take place in this expansive space.

Expansiveness helps broaden our perspective, so we can think more flexibly and with a more open mind. We become better able to focus on the big picture and not feel so discouraged by the constant array of ups and downs we experience every day. When faced with adversity, we can generate more solutions. Expansiveness invites experimentation and imagination. We’re more willing to pour ourselves fully into life’s pursuits. It is the freedom of letting down the burden we have been carrying. It leaves room for our fundamentally loving hearts to uncoil and lead us onward.

Many years ago, I attended a stress-reduction program led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, longtime meditation teacher and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. In one exercise, he stepped up to the blackboard, and in the center, he drew a square made up of nine dots, arranged in three parallel lines with three dots in each line. He then challenged everyone in the class to take the piece of chalk and see if we could connect all the dots using only four straight lines, without removing the chalk from the blackboard and without retracing a line. One by one, all thirty of us went up to the blackboard. We tried beginning from the left, from the right, from the top, from the bottom, and returned to our seats frustrated, unable to do what he’d asked. The room was vibrating with stress.

That’s another meaning of the word dharma: actualizing that potential for freedom we all have.

Then Jon picked up the chalk and, with great sweeping strokes that extended well beyond the perimeter of the small square, did exactly what he had challenged us to do. Every one of us had presumed that to succeed we had to stay within the circumscribed area formed by the nine dots. Jon had never said that we were limited to that little space, but all of us had concluded that was the only area we could move within, the only place to find options. Not one of us could see beyond our limited sense of how much room we had to work in.

That’s another meaning of the word dharma: actualizing that potential for freedom we all have, shedding the stories others have told about us to discover who we genuinely are, understanding what we care about most deeply, what makes for a better life. Dharma is not something we are fated to, or stoic about, but the very set of practices that can lift us out of our conditioning, out of an assumed set of limits and away from what is often a pervasive resignation. We can see for ourselves the elements of life that sustain us, bring us closer and closer to the truth of how things are. Rather than the fixed assignment we are given at birth, dharma reflects a breathtaking capacity of any one of us to take a journey away from constriction and resignation to a vital, creative, free life. None of this is determined in the external conditions of who we are; it is all held in the universal potential of who we might become.

To breathe life into dharma in this sense is the journey of liberation we make. Step by step, we move toward freedom and we manifest freedom all at the same time.

♦

Listen to an interview with Sharon Salzberg here.

Excerpted from Real Life by Sharon Salzberg. Copyright © 2023 by Sharon Salzberg. Used by permission of Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The post Expansion and Contraction appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.