Working with Afflictive Emotions

(For podcast, click here)  (For the ITunes version, click here)


Today, we continue a series of talks based on Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness:  A Guide to developing Life’s most important skill.    This happiness thing—something we all say we want, but sometimes can’t quite figure out how to get it or keep it. 

First, Matthieu clarifies that the happiness he is talking about is not the passing pleasure that wears off or grows old.  This happiness that we are working on here is a deep sense of well-being, regardless of our external circumstances.  It is a sense of flourishing that is linked to certain mental qualities, states of mind like loving-kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity, qualities that can be learned and mastered by each and every one of us.

So why aren’t we all simply luxuriously happy all the time?  May be some of you are!  Oh happy day!  Please come and teach us!  But for rest of us, we might have moments of a deep sense of well-being, then we lose it.  Then maybe we find it and lose it again.  Let’s look at what’s happening according to our happiness expert.

Mathieu says that it is our muddled approach to happiness and suffering that causes us to not maximize our life experience.  Most of us muddle through life wanting happiness but not being clear about what causes it, and maybe not even sure that we deserve it.   This deep happiness is not reserved for a chosen few, not just for some people with special abilities.  It is something possible for everyone.  It does not take extra-ordinary intelligence or strength.  It merely takes making it our primary purpose.  Then, everything else starts to fall into place.

Do not underestimate the power of your mind to transform your experience of the world!    It helps to recognize that you are capable of great change.  I am encouraging you to consider having a deep sense of happiness, this inner well-being, let that be your primary purpose in life.  Because by doing so, everything else falls in to place.  It doesn’t mean you will never feel sadness again.  It doesn’t mean that your life situation will not continue to have ups and downs.  But it does mean that you will find the deeper joy of living regardless of your external or emotional circumstances. 

So what on earth is getting in the way of our happiness? 

Several years ago, there was a theory in psychology that our stuffing our emotions was standing in the way of our happiness, so we must experience them fully, even act them out to get over them.  Anybody remember the anger management practices of taking baseball bat to an old car, or screaming into a pillow?  These were actual prescribed practices to help people overcome their difficult emotions.  It turns out, oops! That doesn’t work very well.  In fact, acting out our difficult emotions actually strengthens our unskillful response to them.  It may initially enable us to become aware of them, but letting it all hang out on a regular basis turns out to not be very good advice.

AND continually recalling our past unskillfulness or when someone was unskillful towards us, can sometime serve only to reinforce the emotional turmoil.  If I keep thinking myself and telling everyone who will listen about how awful my situation is, that simply reinforces me being hooked into those unskillful emotions of resentment and anger.  Therein lies, our dukkha, or suffering, which is the opposite of sukha, or this deep happiness we are learning to experience.

Our practice for today is finding the balance, the middle way, between wallowing in our thoughts and emotions and denying them.  We are learning to experience the fullness of our emotions, without being dragged around by them. We are practicing this rich experience of life in all its glory without drowning in the ebb and flow of thoughts, emotions, sounds, sensations, forms, feeling.

One of my favorite images for this practice is that we are like the ocean.  At the depth, is this pristine quiet, a stillness, not easily swayed, that is that innate sense of well-being. But on the surface there are various waves and winds that whirl around causing a great deal of churning and turmoil.  Think of the waves as those difficult emotions, in Buddhism, they’re called afflictive emotions, because they afflict us with this unhappiness, if we get caught up in the hurricane of their energy.  The emotions can be both the painful and the pleasurable, and the obstacle is when we get stuck in pushing them away or grabbing on to them for dear life.

 “Into the Demon’s Mouth” in Tricycle Magazine

Dr. Aura Glaser, she wrote a book entitled, Call to Compassion

How do we unskillfully deal with afflictive emotions?

• Avoidance/Distraction:  I’m so angry!  Let’s go have a cocktail
• Denial: Me, Angry? I’m FINE…..
• Wallowing:  Can you believe what they did to me?  Let me tell you again about how horribly I’ve been treated!
• Spiritual bypassing:  I’m Buddhist now, Buddhist aren’t supposed to get angry or jealous or resentful…

More skillful ways of handling afflictive emotions:

• Awareness,  even if we shut down, we can be aware that we shut down
• Acknowledgement –learning to not be afraid of who we are, warts and all
• Willingness  to have curiosity about what they have to teach us
• Letting go, letting be, no longer fueling it with more energy

“We can view all our life situations as inherently workable by using our innate qualities of loving-kindness and compassion,” towards ourselves and others.

“Every time we’re up against a wall, we’re standing at a threshold of new possibilities”

The source of our wisdom lies within the afflictive emotion.

We each have our own favorite top five afflictive emotions that keep coming up.  Pema Chodron describes it like having a radio that can only be tuned to five radio stations—worry, fear, resentment, frustration, whatever your common afflictive emotions might be.  If I asked you to make a list of what makes you unhappy, you could list them right now.  Think of times in this last week or month, when you felt unhappy.  What afflictive emotion or thought was simmering in your brain and your body?

The Buddhist practices are not about removing the afflictive emotions, but rather beginning to have a curiosity about them, taking a more inquisitive look, rather than getting hooked in the old cycle of emotion, thought, unskillful action, or emotion, thought, more emotion, more thought.   So, we can begin to get curious about what is making us unhappy instead of denying, ignoring or wallowing.

Lastly, I want to talk about the importance of Optimism:  it’s important to imagine that you are capable of change.  Even if it hasn’t work the last the last 15 times.  There’s a wonderful documentary called Bob and the Monster, which is about Bob Forrest, who is now a highly respected drug and alcohol counselor.  He himself had to go through rehab over NINE times before he got sober and stayed sober for the last 12 years.  I love the inspiration of someone turning their life around.  Imagine meeting Bob or being Bob somewhere around rehab #5.  Would you give up?  What would you say to Bob or to yourself to make #5 the winning number?  Bob is an example to remind us that this time is the time we can get it right, this time, this moment can be the one when we take our life in a new direction.  This moment, right now, can be that moment.  Every moment is pulsing with that possibility.

In each moment, we might have an afflictive emotion arise.   The practice that Mathieu is teaching is encouraging us to watch more closely, to see more clearly, have more curiosity about what exactly these afflictive emotions are, then building a greater sense of the vast ocean beneath, the pristine stillness, the depth of well-being. 

We can learn to manage our mind.  We can manage our thoughts and perceptions of our selves and the world around us.

May You be Happy! Number One

(For podcast, click here)  (For the ITunes version, click here)


Today, we begin a series of talks based on Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness:  A Guide to developing Life’s most important skill.    When you ask people what they want in life, most of us would say that we want to be happy.   But what does that really mean?  When you think about being happy, what does that mean to you?


Definitions of happiness can often be vague and even conflicting, everything from it being some kind of momentary pleasure based on our external circumstances to some utopian ideal of joy throughout all of life.  For the purpose of this series, let’s look at how Matthieu describes happiness :


“...a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind.  This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, or fleeting emotion or mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is ALWAYS possible to change the way we look at it.”  Page 19


He goes further to talk about that ultimate happiness is when we let go of any sense of internal conflict, letting go of any sense of struggle within ourselves.  When we get into the flow of living, beyond trying to merely manipulate our external circumstances will never make us truly “happy”.


And he points out some important distinctions:


“The search for happiness is NOT about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world.  Nor is happiness a state of ecstasy to be perpetuated at all costs; INSTEAD he defines it is as the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that are literally poisoning the mind.  It is about learning how to put thing in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality.”  P. 23


As I reflected on this idea of happiness this week, I thought about a dear congregant, Shannon Humphrey, who is a school teacher and single mom with three children.  Shannon, as I speak, is going through her second bone marrow transplant in two years.  She is isolated, sick, hair has fallen out, can’t see her children because she has no immune system.  Happiness in this moment might seem like a faint memory to Shannon.  But, I can tell you that every time I’ve seen Shannon in the last two years, she has been smiling, and been happy to be alive.  She is my hero.  She continues to cherish the love of her family, to retain a sense of humor, and has tremendous courage to face unbelievable suffering.   I believe Shannon understands happiness at the deepest level.  


This book is filled with practical tools that enable us to rest in sense of happiness and well-being, not because we are chasing after happiness, but because we have peeled away all the habits and factors that cause us to not be happy.  Happiness can naturally arise in each and every moment of life, regardless of our external circumstances.  The Sanskrit term for this state is “sukha”.  


So, where do we start, to increase the sense of happiness in our lives and in our world?  We will look not at what to “get”, but how to “be” in order to experience happiness.  Mathieu encourages us to start with a practice of analysis and introspection.  We will be learning how to analyze what is the cause of true happiness versus what is the cause of our suffering.  A critical factor in this practice is learning to go beyond a superficial understanding of our thoughts, emotions and actions, to a deeper understanding of our motivations, our intentions and our unskillful beliefs about ourselves and the world.


But first and foremost, before we start this journey together towards greater happiness, you need to be motivated to change.  How much do you want to be happy?  If you are here for the intellectual entertainment to learn more about Buddhism, that is fine and dandy, but let’s not fool ourselves that intellectual curiosity will be enough to change us at the deepest level.  How badly do you want to be happy?   Are we willing to give up old ways of coping with suffering?  Some of our old coping methods, as unskillful as they may be, still provide some momentary relief.  We To be deeply happy over the long haul may first require us to give up some momentary pleasure.  The Buddhist texts encourage us to practice as if our hair is on fire, as if mindfulness and meditation were the only ways to put out the flames.  I know for me, at times, my life has been such a mess, it certainly seemed like my hair was on fire—something was causing me to experience great pain, and it almost always turned out to my own unskillful thoughts, words and actions. The suffering could always be found in my response to my situation.  


Letting go of Drama
Let’s face it, sometimes people love the drama, even if it includes suffering, maybe even beBECAUSE it includes suffering!  It can sometimes seem like we’re spicing life up with a little drama.  There are people who see the misery we create in our lives as that which enables us to better appreciate the happy times.  But do we really need to act unskillfully just to make life interesting?  Really?  We can get addicted to the drama, just like an addiction to drugs or alcohol.  Life starts to feel boring, and we get uncomfortable with it.  Some might decide to stir the drama pot to feel alive.  I encourage us all to imagine the possibility that there is a deeper happiness, and aliveness, beyond the drama.   Emulating “The Real Housewives” of any city will not lead to an inner sense of well-being!  There is a happiness that is far more satisfying, far more long lasting, than any short term thrill that drama might provide.  


Finding happiness is NOT about removing all risk-taking from our lives.  It’s not about just sitting down in meditation and doing nothing.  It’s about practicing happiness in midst of life, in each and every moment, of committing to acting more skillfully, to practicing a sense of well-being, moment by moment.  Therein lies the beginning of happiness.  We are operating most of the time in a tiny spectrum of possibilities.  This book enables us to explore a much wider range of experience that we can experience in our lives.  


Steve sent me a fascinating YouTube about the spectrum of electro-magnetic rays.  If we think about the spectrum as a reel of film that is 2500 miles long, the visible portion of the spectrum would be a single inch.  That’s what we see with our eyes.  Think about the constraints that you put on your own life.  There is so much more happening in each moment, so many more possibilities, that we overlook or ignore because we often  focus only on this tiny spectrum of habitual responses because that is what we have always done, and that brings us some momentary pleasure or at least relief.   For this journey towards being happier, we will focus on a deep state of well-being, and discover some practices that enable us to expand our way of interacting with ourselves and the world.  


Lastly, Matthieu includes that true happiness is not possible without wishing for others happiness as well.  We can discover that our own happiness and the happiness of others does not need to be mutually exclusive.  Solely focusing on our own happiness will not lead to that deep state of well-being.  


"One should seek for others the happiness one desires for oneself"
Buddha 


Two practices as we begin:   Analysis and Introspection, and Serving others


#1 What is it that makes you happy?  What makes you unhappy?


#2  How might we have a sense of purpose greater than ourselves? ?How could we include the happiness of others in our intentions and actions?




In Sanskrit, “Sarva Mangalam” means  “May all beings be happy”

Our life is Our Practice by Joe Goodding

April 1^st, April Fools’ Day… How appropriate that today is the day that Ivolunteered to lead the Sunday meditation for Janet! Actually, doing

this on April Fools’ Day is a support for me to relax into my humanness and not take myself so seriously, and decreases my internalized pressure and stress to be perfect, to do this perfectly.

As I speak, simply let my words pass by as if you are sitting on a river bank and are watching the water flow past. May what I say be beneficial to you. If it is not, simply let it go by.  This is the title I have chosen for today’s dharma talk, “Our Life Is Our Practice”. This means that everything in our life, everything we encounter, everything we experience… what we label as the good, the bad… the beautiful, the ugly… the easy, the difficult… the pleasant, the unpleasant… everything is potentially useful for our practice, whether you consider your practice as “Buddhist” or not. Now the above dichotomies are simply labels that we may impose upon our experiences to help our human mind relate to our world, categorize our world, make sense of our world. However we interpret our experience or label our experience, we can bring attention and mindfulness to everything we experience in this life of ours, our thoughts, our emotions, our perceptions, our actions and reactions, our interactions, and our relationships. All is relevant to our practice. In this way I also believe that we can say, “Our Practice Is Our Life”.

I had thought that perhaps I could call this talk, “My Life Is My Practice” in that my life experience is different from each of yours which is also different from everyone else’s in this room. If we do this, if we say, “My Life Is My Practice”, and everyone else’s life is his, her or their practice, then it seems to me to imply a greater separation among us, that each of us is going about her/his life independently from each other while occasionally bumping up against or interacting with one another.

However, I think that we are more interdependent upon one another than we consider. In studying Buddhist thought and philosophy, I often hear and read that no thing exists independently of everything else. Consider, how did you get here this morning?...  For those who rode in a car, who made your car? Who designed, mined, milled, manufactured, and produced all of the parts and substances (including the gas and oil), and put them together to make up our “cars”? How did we “obtain” our cars? Who designed and made our streets upon which we drive our cars? For those who walked here, as well as all of us, who made and produced our shoes or sandals?... And our clothing?... Who has provided us with the use of this room in this building?... Who designed and built Unity Temple?... We can expand this to consider all life upon this planet, the development of human culture, language and civilization, our interdependency with our natural environment … and our connection and relationship with our sun and solar system… and the entire universe. Therefore, our interdependent life is our interdependent practice.

Come back to the present moment, feel your breathing, in and out… feel your life force in your body. Feel your aliveness. You deserve to be here. You deserve to be alive.

This relates to another concept that I frequently hear or encounter along this Buddhist path. That is the Preciousness of our Human Birth. I know both personally and professionally that many of us, perhaps all of us, have had difficult and painful life experience in our relationships with our parents, caretakers, family members and/or partners. (My personal life experience has significantly influenced my professional career in mental health, substance abuse treatment & prevention, and social work.)

Regardless of trauma that we may have experienced, our biological parents conceived us and birthed us, and for that fact alone we may be grateful. Yes, there may also be traumatic experiences and feelings to process, and the fact that we are alive with consciousness as human beings places us upon a path that Buddha encourages us to follow.

The Buddha described the Four Noble Truths which include the existence of suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the way out of suffering that is the Noble Eightfold Path. This is the path that the Buddha asks us to try out for ourselves, not to blindly accept his words, but to put it into practice in our daily lives.

I am certain that each of us could describe suffering that we personally experienced in the past or now in the present, and that each of us could describe that which we wish we did not have to deal with in our personal lives, whether it be personal habits, self-concepts, emotions, relationship patterns or anything else that brings us to suffer.

That which we find personally difficult is where we need the compassion of the Buddha (the Buddha nature of ourselves and others), the Dharma (teachings of love & understanding) and the Sangha (those who love us & support us) to guide us along our respective paths. I believe that we are doing the best that we can do, and that we deserve to love ourselves and to be loved by others.      

Eightfold Path - Wise Livelihood

(For podcast, click here)  (For the ITunes version, click here)


Today, we are finishing up our series on Awakening the Buddha Within with the last Eightfold Path component to be covered:  Wise Livelihood.  How do we reconcile making a living with making a life?  The teaching at its simplest says we earn a living without harming others.  Ah, that it was that easy to be happy, make money, and do no harm!

I know some of you have jobs that you adore.  You wake up in the morning and can’t wait to get to work.  Others I know are less enthusiastic—you might think, meh, I’m okay with what I do.  There are also some that might have that Bataan death march feeling every day—where your brain toys with the idea of steering the car toward the highway going the opposite direction of work and running away from life.  Or maybe… you have a job that includes all three experiences in any given day or week or any given year.  No job is perfect.  Even if you are retired or working in the home, there is an opportunity to see whatever action we are taking in life to support ourselves as an opportunity to support our values, to live our values.   Wise livelihood is about living our values, living an ethical life, and exploring the possibility of joy in a myriad of places.

So, first we must be clear on what we value.   What is most important to you?  Take this moment to make a mental list. Now, think about how your work is supporting those values.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings, he says "To practice Right Livelihood, you have to find a way to earn your living without trampling upon the values of love and compassion. The way you support yourself can be an expression of your innate Buddha nature, OR it can be a source of suffering for you and others. " ... We should be awake to the consequences, far and near, of the way we earn our living."  The way you earn your living is not merely about the product or service created.  It includes your attitude and actions in HOW you do your work, how you interact with yourself and others, day by day, moment by moment.

Work is an opportunity to put our spiritual beliefs into action.  One of the most practical applications I have found for enjoying my work are:

Miguel Ruiz  The Four Agreements

1.    Be Impeccable With Your Word.

2.    Don't Take Anything Personally.

3.    Don't Make Assumptions.

4.    Always Do Your Best.

See work as an opportunity to practice the four Agreements.  Sometimes, we spend too much time asking ourselves the big questions of what do I want to be when I grow up, that we miss the daily opportunities to show generosity and compassion.  And an critical component of these agreement is to let go of expectations!  We can do the right thing and not expect anyone to notice or thank us for it.  That is part of the Buddhist practice.  Do your best, do what is needed in each moment, be generous, help others, be grateful. 

I would add a five agreement:  Look for the good!  Many times, people sabotage their work by pro-actively looking for the negative in themselves and in others.  Catch yourself and your co-workers doing something good and praise it.

Officially, the Buddha is quoted as saying, "A householder should not engage in five types of business: Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison."   So, we can each evaluate whether we feel ethical about what we do to make a living.

A common misperception is that Buddha was against making money.  Not at all—he counsel Kings and businessman of his day.  He just encouraged it to be done in ethical and skillful ways.  But he knew that does not buy happiness in and of itself.  So we get to decide, how much money to we really need?  Matthieu Ricard’s story about Tahiti. 

How we relate to money?  Money comes with plenty of baggage from our parents and hard times or good times we might have had with it.  Only you can decide how much money you need to live a skillful life.  And each of us, we have the capability, if we have the willingness, to spend our money wisely.

There’s sometimes this fantasy that we will find the perfect job for our skills, our interests and our desired lifestyle.  And, it is worthwhile to explore what makes your heart sing.  But, don’t let the fantasizing cause you to miss the magic to be found in each moment.  Sometimes, we will miss many of them when we only fantasize about something in the future that is “better” than what we’ve got in the now.  In my own life, I began my corporate career in love with my job, fighting the good fight, feeling delighted by the competition.  But slowly, my perspective changed, and I found myself stuck in what we lovingly would call the golden handcuffs of a good paying job that no longer brought me any joy.  With family obligations at the time, I felt selfish wanting to simply walk away.  So, I decided to uphold the Four Agreements, and worked at infusing loving-kindness and compassion into every moment of every workday as best I could.  It got me through another seven years of working there and got my daughter through college. We each have these decisions to make in our lives, some big and some small.

Daily, we each make a decision to stay where we’re at or try something new.  There are a myriad of options to consider.  First, if you love what you do, don’t take it for granted.  And you might ask yourself how could you serve others by helping them along as well.   Second, if you don’t love what you do, how could you begin to explore other options without causing financial disaster?

Third, if you don’t have a job, how can you choose wisely for the next one.  Doreen is an excellent role model for going through the tough process of 100 interviews to find the job that she truly loves.  And the people you interact with, the places you hang out, the attitude about getting a job that you have, these are the critical components to enabling the right job to appear.

Fourth, how do you make the most of each moment regardless of whatever situation you currently find yourself in?  Regardless of our job, we always have the opportunity to bring spiritual energy in daily life. 

Dogen was a 13^th century Zen master who said:

“Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to

Seeking the spiritual truth see no spiritual truth in everyday actions;

They have not yet discovered that there are no

Everyday actions outside of the spiritual truth.”

So dream, but also be present in each moment and appreciate what we have.

Eightfold Path - Wise Mindfulness

(For podcast, click here)  (For the ITunes version, click here)


We continue our series of talks from the book, Awakening the Buddha Within, by Lama Surya Das, and this morning I’ll talk about another key component of the Eightfold Path- Wise Mindfulness, or sometimes translated as Wise Meditation.  It is the primary practice in Buddhism for transforming your life.  It’s been found to be one of the most powerful tools for creating a change in both the way we respond to the world and how we experience the world.  It’s been tested by millions of people for 2600 years.  Lama Surya Das even describes it as “the escalator to enlightenment”!   So how come we all ain’t doing it every day?  How come it’s not a priority in our lives?  Let’s explore what it will take for each of us to make mindfulness a priority and a focus.  


First, what the heck is it?  To say “now be mindful” sounds a bit like my mom sending me out the door as a child “now be safe!” (I’m 55 years old, and she still says it to me every time I leave...)   What do we do with this information?  What does being mindful feel like?  What are we going to do differently because we know this fact?


Some describe it in the simplest terms:  when you eat, you just eat.  When you sleep, you just sleep.  When you walk, you just walk.  But, there is more going on than that.  Mindfulness is paying attention to three things:  

• what is going on inside of us
• what is going on outside of us and 
• aware of ourselves amidst all that is happening, moment by moment.  

For most of us, we mindLESSly react to stimulae in our lives with pre-conceived ideas about ourselves and the world and with sometimes unskillful habits.  Mindfulness creates a gap between stimulus and response, so we have time to choose more skillfully how to respond to life.  Mindfulness can sound a little harsh, so Pema Chodron prefers the term, “compassionate awarenesss” so we’re less likely to use Mindfulness as a weapon to bludgeon us over the head with one more item for our “to do” list that doesn’t get done.  We’re just doing the best that we can, moment to moment.


Sometimes it seems that one might think of mindfulness like going on a diet.  "I know it’s good for me, but it’s going to be difficult."  Anybody ever planned on having a super mindful day?  Before you go to bed, you set your alarm a little early, so you’ll have time to meditate first thing.  Then, when the alarm goes off in the morning, you feel sleepy, so you hit the snooze button a couple of times, and before you know it, you’re late and rushing out of bed and have barely enough time to get ready to get out the door, perhaps thinking, "I don’t have time to be mindful today!  I’ll try again tomorrow or next week."  If we think of it like a diet, we are doing ourselves a disservice.  We might think if we don’t meditate first thing in the morning, then the whole day is shot.  Is that true?


Each moment we get an opportunity to start fresh.  So many of you have told me that when you put your energy into being mindful, that the entire day goes more smoothly.  Mindfulness is simply focusing our energy on what we are doing in this exact moment.  We all have plenty of energy, but we often scatter it around with multi-tasking and distraction.  Energy is just being diffused all around us most of the time.  We’re distracted…We’re putting a little here and a little there, so there is no sense of what’s really going on.  
So, we rely on old habits and preconceived notions about ourselves and the world, a sort of shorthand for seeing things, because it SEEMS more efficiently, but upon reflection, these shortcuts we’re taking, THEY are what are causing our suffering!  


We have to make a conscious decision to focus our energy on mindfulness.  It’s like the power of a laser.  This practice is encouraging us to slow down, just enough, to see what is actually happening in each moment—inside yourself, in your world, and where you are in the midst of things.  We slow down by gathering up this massive amount of energy that every person has, even if you feel tired and depressed, there is energy all around and within you, waiting to be tapped into.  We gather up this energy, and become a laser on each moment.


Let’s figure out how we can think of mindfulness as something different than a diet.  Imagine that you thought about Mindfulness like some precious jewel that you were gathering up.  That there are jewels strewn throughout your life, and you are so busy hurrying past that you don’t even see them.  What if Mindfulness was an opportunity to collect all the precious jewels in our lives?


Ask yourself the question, “Fpr me, what is standing in the way of Mindfulness?”… Well, let’s be honest, sometimes, some moments aren’t very pleasant.  We are in pain, or we have a problem in our life that we can’t seem to solve or the stress of living feels overwhelming.  Being present in those moments might feel like throwing gasoline on a small fire that suddenly bursts into uncontrollable flames.  I agree that it’s probably easier to be mindful during the pleasant times—thinking I want to savor this moment—than it is during the difficult times.  So, let’s work on some tricks and tools to keep us present when the going gets tough.


For each of you, bring to mind a situation or emotion in your own life that you are struggling with right now.   It could be a job or family situation, it could be an addiction or stress, it could be depression, fear, anxiety, anger, resentment.  Let’s talk about the times when these situations and these emotions arise, and what we might do to stay present and see things and ourselves more clearly.


First, let’s find a way to recognize that the struggle is happening in the first place. This sense of struggling with life is so integrated into our culture and even into our reptilian brain, it’s not surprising that we focus on the negative.  When we were cave people, not being mindful of something positive, like your cave partner made you a nice dinner of dinosaur or something, did not have a huge impact to your survival.  Maybe you got the cold shoulder or had to sleep in the other part of the cave that night, that’s not too dangerous.  But, if you hear something in the middle of the night, and it might be a saber-toothed tiger coming to devour you, underestimating that sound could mean death.  That’s how we are wired.  But, there aren’t too many saber-toothed tigers running around these days, and in fact violent crime has declined dramatically over the last 50 years.  The FBI reports that violent crime is one third of what it was in 1994.  Our average lifespan has doubled in the last 100 years, but, watching the news, you’d think we were on the verge of an apocalypse.  Who knows?  May we are….but you yourself are safer than any human being has ever been in the history of mankind. 


So, researchers have found that we can counter this tendency of our reptilian brain to be negative, but balancing it with the positive.  Pro-actively being mindful of the blessings in your life.  When the going gets tough, look for the lessons learn, the positive outcomes that might arise out of the difficult times.  Look for the good.  This isn’t about walking out into traffic and assuming we will not get run over.  It is about BALANCING our need for safety with the mindfulness of all the goodness that is all around us.  We have within us everything we need to be free.  So, first we can stay present with negative situations and feelings, then look for the good, we can count our blessings. 


The last of human freedoms is the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.-  Viktor E. Frankl


Second, there’s a wonderful technique called worst case scenario.  What’s the worst that can happen?  This might seem counter to what I just said, but sometimes naming what we are most afraid of, enables us to deal with it in a forthright manner.  If you are afraid of something right now, what’s the worst that can happen?  Then, put a probability on that worst case scenario.  There’s a wonderful book called The Resilience Factor, by Karen Reivich, who has a great exercise about putting things into perspective, using this worst case scenario practice.  We see it, we name it, we prepare for it, we no longer fear it, and we move on.    


What is it that you are afraid of that you can’t stay present for? Name it, acknowledge it.  If you can do nothing to stop it, come to peace with it.  Mindfulness brings peace amidst the pain.


Third, Mindfulness can be a way to lighten up, to add some humor and lightness to our lives.  Pema Chodron says that when she realizes that she is distracted from her breath, she imagines this funny looking bird, like one of those that would sit on a pirate’s shoulder, sitting on her own shoulder and squawking, oops! Thinking!  The picture and the funny voice inside her head is enough to make her smile and return to the present.  How can we enfuse more laughter and lightheartedness into our live?


Lastly, Mindfulness doesn’t have to be perfect.  Just like thinking the diet is ruined when we fall off and eat a doughnut, we don’t have to give up mindfulness for the entire day or the entire week, just because we become distracted.  Each moment is the perfect moment to start fresh.  And in Buddhism, this middle way, this going easy on ourselves is an integral part of the practice.  There are five precepts/guidelines that we are to follow like don’t lie and don’t kill.  Have respect for human life.  Perhaps we not quite there yet where we can bless the mosquito that is biting us, but what small step could we take toward honoring life?   Jack Kornfied says, that if we only didn’t kill human beings that would make a big difference in the world.  


Here’s a recap of our tools and techniques:
1. Count your blessings
2. Face the worst case scenario
3. Add some laughter and humor to each day
4. It doesn’t have to be perfect.


Wise Mindfulness and Meditation are the cornerstones of the Buddhist practice.  If you don’t sit and meditate every single day, that doesn’t mean you’re a Bad Buddhist.  It means you are human.  This is a lifelong project.  We look for a moment here and a moment there, stringing together as many as we can.  And moment by moment, we will become enlightened.  So, join me on the escalator to enlightenment.  


Krishnamurti says, “Meditation and Mindfulness are not means to an end.  They are both the means and the end."