Dancing with Life

Lama Surya Das is scheduled to be here in April, so in anticipation of his visit, I thought I’d talk this morning about one of his wonderful teachings, entitled, “Dancing with Life” (from his latest book, The Mind is Mightier Than the Sword). It sometimes seems that we make life out to be difficult, even the first Noble Truth reminds us of this fact, but the second Noble Truth is equally important and that is life seems difficult because of the way we perceive ourselves, others and situations. It easy to get into the habit of thinking of life as a struggle. My printer broke on Friday, and I spent two hours trying to fix it. Now I was trying to be mindful, but I could feel my frustration increasing, I could hear myself thinking, “Computers are out to make my life miserable” and “I hate Hewlett Packard”. Why does it have to be so hard???? Why can’t it just work? And on and on. Instead of walking away for a bit to find the humor in the situation, I just kept digging in even deeper. I found myself at the end of the two hours with no printer and a mind and body full of frustration. I certainly wasn’t dancing with life, and if I was, I was stomping on its toes with both my feet.

It seems that there are things that happen in our lives, sometimes little things like a printer breaking and at other times, big things like illness, death and other tragedies, like the terrible earthquake in Haiti. In each situation, regardless of what is happening, we ALWAYS have a choice about how we respond. So, this teaching about dancing with life has two critical components. FIRST, the waking up part, and SECOND the seeing things differently part.

So, FIRST waking up. Ken McLeod, in his book Wake up to Your life, describes the central importance of paying attention. He says,

“The essential tool is attention—not the weak, unstable, reactive attention that is part of our autonomic functioning, but the strong, stable and volitional attention cultivated in such disciplines as meditation. Active attention, composed of mindfulness and awareness, is the key. Attention, in this sense, is not intellectual or physical. It is energy. “

So we can experience this active attention, this mindfulness, as a powerful energy. If most of us were honest with ourselves, we spend a good part of most days sleepwalking through life. How many times are we doing something but not fully aware of what’s happening. We lock the front door, then can’t remember for sure if we did it. We drive or walk to work, and don’t fully remember the entire trip. Superficially it might seem okay. We’ve all done certain tasks so many times that we may not need to be mentally present to complete them. BUT, from a Buddhist perspective, we must ask ourselves why would we NOT want to be fully present in our lives? Perhaps it seems too painful at times or too boring. But waking up is the most important action we can take to live our life to the fullest. The word, Buddha, in fact means, the Awakened One. If we’re not aware of what’s happening and equally importantly what we’re thinking about what’s happening, we can never fully appreciate the joy of living. So, in this moment, let’s take a moment to experience being alive. What does alive feel like? Who or what is living? Who or what is breathing? Where is life? Is it in your head or your heart. How does it feel to be alive??? Can you find it? NOW, what are your thoughts telling you about being alive? When you get distracted, where do you go?

As scary as it might seem at first, being actively attentive is like a powerful solvent, that dissolves away years of conditioned behavior, pre-conceived notions, old dysfunctional patterns. We are fearlessly shining a flashlight on our old ways of living, then allowing the attention to dissolve old thoughts and habits away. With practice, we see ourselves and the world more clearly, and over time, things start to seem a whole lot less scary, because we begin to see thoughts as the ephemeral activity that they are. We begin to see thoughts arise and fall away. If we can continue to pour attention over all that is happening, we begin to see emotions arise and fall away. Then, we can truly begin to dance with life.

So, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, active compassionate attention, is helping us wake up to what is really going on. First, we compassionately face what is currently happening and what we’re thinking, then, SECOND, we can actually change the way we perceive ourselves and others and any situation. The SECOND component of dancing with life is about recognizing the incredible power we have to change our perception of the world. It doesn’t happen overnight, but with steady consistent practice, we can change our thoughts, which will change our perceptions, which will truly change our lives. An extremeexample are some of the responses to the Haiti earthquake. Some individuals have decided that this earthquake was an act of GOD to punish the Haitian people. Now if you believe that there is this being outside of you that punishes you for some perceived sins, then imagine how you would respond to this tragedy. OR, if you see the earthquake as it is, a terrible tragedy, that also is an opportunity for people to reach out and help our brethren in need, this tragedy can reinforce our awareness of the inter-relationship of us all, then imagine how you would respond from that perspective? We each have a choice in every moment about how we perceive everything that happens in our lives. We have a choice: We can either constantly judge ourselves or others as less than, not good enough, somehow damaged, OR we can be kind, we can encourage, motivate, show compassion. Each of us is incredibly powerful, and most days we waste our power on old inaccurate ways of thinking. This was what the Buddha discovered 2500 years ago, and is still intensely true today.

So, FIRST, we can wake up to how we are living our lives, to what is going on. SECOND, we can create new thoughts of encouragement and compassion. These two changes alone can have an incredible impact on how we live our lives. Instead of constantly thinking, “I’m struggling with life”, we can instead see things from the more magical perspective of “I’m dancing with life”, maybe not getting it right all the time, but staying open to the possibilities, open to change, open to seeing new answers to old problems, open to reaching beyond our comfort zones and finding a happiness, joy, wisdom, that we might not have thought possible before.

Right now, imagine that you are dancing with life, swirling around the dance floor, elegantly effortlessly floating through life. As difficult as life seems sometimes, the Buddha discovered this human life is incredible preciousness. When you look at history, the billions of years of evolution that it took to get us to this point, right here, right now, then we can see that life truly is precious. You can’t go back and change the past, no matter how much we would like to, and you can jump ahead to future. You only have one moment at a time to live your life. Lama Surya Das says in the sweepstakes of living, you must be present to win!

So, wake up and decide to dance with life. The point of power in your life, in all our lives, the point of power is the present moment. IT IS THE ONLY POINT in which you can make a change. And if you screwed it up last moment, then another moment is right around the corner waiting to be lived differently, lived better, lived fully awake.

So, as we leave here this morning, as you walk or drive back home, try being fully conscious, fully aware of being alive. Fully awake to the interconnectedness of all beings and all things. Try dancing with life fearlessly, and be prepared for magical things to happen. Every moment can be the best moment.

Phillip Moffett says,

“The path to happiness and a sense of well being in your life lies not in avoiding suffering but in using the direct experience of it as a vehicle to gain deep insight into the true nature of life and your own existence.”

My friend’s card reminded me that, “Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass. It's about learning how to dance in the rain!"

So, this week, try dancing with life, and see what happens.

Begin Anew

At the dawn of this fresh and shiny new year, it's a great time to reflect on the Buddhist perspective about starting fresh. Over the next several weeks, we will be bombarded by advertising and media telling us that this can be our best year ever, that we can transform our life in some spectacular way, usually by buying some product or service to support us in this challenging effort. But imagine, that there was absolutely nothing you needed in your life to live the best life possible. You don’t need some new thing or new person or new experience. There are not gadgets to purchase or experiences to chase after. To live your life spectacularly, all you have to do is practice being present. Practice being compassionately aware of what’s going on inside and outside of you moment by moment. In practicing being present, the full world of possibilities opens up to us in a way not possible when we are sleepwalking through life. It seems so simple that many might think that can’t possibly be true. Or some consider it so hard that we might as well not try. Or, we try for a little bit but get discouraged at the first sign of resistance.

Granted, practicing being present is a lifelong process. But it’s a tried and true method for completely transforming lives. Practicing presence continuously reminds us that Life is a verb not a noun. If we think of life as a noun, we concretize ourselves and everything before and after and during. We think of ourselves as a certain way, a certain kind of person, a certain type of life. We think of the past and the future, as some kind of immutable thing. But in Buddhism, nothing is seen as immutable, everything is seen as always-changing. In order words, life is a verb. We are in the process of living it, in each and every moment; we are riding a wave of births and deaths, of being and not being, in each moment. As you sit here this morning, allow your attention to rest on the sensation of being present in this moment. Visualize your body, your mind, and everything around you as ever-changing, impermanent. If we could see ourselves and things at the atomic level, we would see that this is so very true, just energy swirling around in a certain form.

So, instead of having this thing called our life and these experiences called our past, instead we have this process of living, riding the wave of being. It might feel a little shaky at first, what do we hold onto if nothing is permanent? The only thing we can really hold on to is our compassionate awareness of the present moment. Imagine that your old beliefs about the way life is, imagine those beliefs are just electrical stimuli in your brain, knowing that stimuli is changeable. Imagine that any concerns you have for the future are just electrical stimuli which might include emotional responses that once again are always changeable.

When the Buddhist teachings talk about impermanence it can at first seem very depressing. If I can’t hold on to anything then why do anything? It might feel scary or worthless. But, if we can experience this tried and true method of mindfulness, we can learn to ride the wave of life, not just sit on the shore in fear. Riding the wave of life includes clear seeing of what’s happening, and…knowing with full presence, we can appropriately deal with whatever comes our way, trusting the moment to deliver the information needed and the internal knowing to live this life as best we can. Think of yourself as someone riding the waves of the ocean on a surfboard rather than sitting in a beach chair waiting for the ocean to come to you.

Now imagine that you don’t need the New Year to change your perspective, to give yourself a fresh start because you get a fresh start in every moment. And imagine that you don’t have to deny or let go of those parts of you or parts of your past that you might feel are unlovable or bad in some way. Buddhism is about compassion and compassion is about letting experience in, not shutting it out.

The practice of mindfulness means letting experience in. A Japanese poet, a woman named Izumi who lived in the tenth century, wrote: “Watching the moon at dawn, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely. No part left out.” When we can open to all parts of ourselves and to others in the world, something quite extraordinary happens. That’s the point at which we begin to connect to ourselves and with one another.

–Joseph Goldstein, from “Heart Touching Heart,” Tricycle, Winter 2007

Sharon Salzberg says in “The Force of Kindness “

We need to be able to forgive ourselves when we stumble or forget, and based on that forgiveness, be able to reconnect to our basic intention. Our intention of being mindful. One of the primary tools we have in spiritual life is the understanding that everything is changing all of the time, that nothing is fixed, and nothing is permanent. Because of that truth, when we make a mistake we realize that we can always begin anew.”

So, we can use this time of renewal to reinforce our intention to practice mindfulness. We can find moments in each day when we mentally take time to find out where our awareness is, where are our thoughts? Are we dwelling on the past in some way, reliving it over and over? Or perhaps we’re dwelling in the future on some possible event or situation. What happens when you pull yourself back and take a few moments to be fully present? To bring awareness to that specific moment. This process of waking up within our life is the process of learning to ride the wave. Not fixing something then being done.

You can learn many different techniques and traditions. You can get a special mat and special bell. Those are all good things, but they aren’t the thing. The Process. So, perhaps we can let this new year be simply about practicing compassionate awareness, of accepting all of ourselves, and all of others, of staying present to find out about what is really happening in our life, of learning new ways to deal with old problems and new opportunities. If we could bottle mindfulness and sell it on an infomercial, we’d get phenomenal sales. So, alas, we just have to take this free gift, open it up, explore it, use it, and see what happens. All for free.

So, to end with some additional motivation to practice, I’ll quote BHG from an article he wrote on the practice of mindfulness. In it, he says,

Ancient Pali texts liken meditation to the process of taming a wild elephant. The procedure in those days was to tie a newly captured animal to a post with a good strong rope. When you do this, the elephant is not happy. He screams and tramples, and pulls against the rope for days. Finally it sinks through his skull that he can’t get away, and he settles down. At this point you can begin to feed him and to handle him with some measure of safety. Eventually you can dispense with the rope and post altogether, and train your elephant for various tasks. Now you’ve got a tamed elephant that can be put to useful work. In this analogy the wild elephant is your wildly active mind, the rope is mindfulness, and the post is our object of meditation, our breathing. The tamed elephant who emerges from this process is a well-trained, concentrated mind that can then be used for the exceedingly tough job of piercing the layers of illusion that obscure reality. Meditation tames the mind.

- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, from “On Practice: Breathing,” Tricycle, Spring 1995

So, for this new year, let’s take advantage of all this advertising and media onslaught. Each time you see an ad for weight loss product or something about New Year’s resolutions, use those moments to practice mindfulness. It costs a lot less and delivers a lot more good in the long run.