How to stop causing our own suffering

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

We are continuing a series of talks based on Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness:  A Guide to developing Life’s most important skill.    Today, we’ll take a look at some practical ways to untangle the power that we give to unskillful thoughts, unskillful emotions and unskillful actions. 

Last week, I talked about the ego, and how the protection of ego causes us suffering.  This week, we’ll get to the root of the “ego”, which is nothing more than a collection of inaccurate thoughts and emotions that “we” are some permanent, some separate thing, something that needs protected and defending, that needs to be soothed and satisfied.  Once we begin to see through the illusion of ego, we SEE MORE CLEARLY that we are just an amalgamation of ever-changing processes, an arising and falling away of cells and thoughts and bio-chemical reactions that create the opportunity in each moment to think and choose differently.

We’ve all heard that our thoughts create our reality, but today we are going to learn three practices to change our thinking. 

I want to reiterate that this series of discussions is NOT about the happiness of pleasure or avoidance of pain.  We are working towards something far more enduring and even blissful.  We are learning to strengthen an innate sense of well-being that we can all experience, which is beyond thoughts, beyond emotions, beyond our external circumstances .

The story is told of a Tibetan Buddhist monk who was imprisoned by China for 20 years.  When he was finally released, he was asked what was most difficult about his time there.  He answered that he saw three people most days: someone who brought him food, someone who tortured him and a doctor  who kept him barely alive.   He said that he practiced focusing his mind, he practiced seeing see each of these three people with loving-kindness, compassion and equanimity, and he practiced simply sitting in choiceless awareness.  These three practices were difficult at times, but he said these three practices are what enabled him to survive. 

As we explore these practices to change our thinking, there is some helpful research that is being done in the field of addiction recovery.   An excellent psychiatric study, entitled “Craving to Quit”  by Brewer, Elwafi and Davis, details the positive impact of mindfulness training on eliminating unskillful behavior.  They outline three contributors to addictive behaviors:

·         Over-ruminations (mind-states)

·         Internal sensations (emotions, bodily sensations) those uncomfortable feelings that we try to run away from or wallow in.

·         External cues: past experiences that were pleasurable, neutral or painful—Matthieu Ricard says that looking to blame others/the world for our own suffering is the surest way to an unhappy life.

We practice uncoupling thoughts/emotions of craving and aversion from action. We can even develop a tolerance for craving and aversion.   We can monitor unskillful thoughts. emotions and automatic behaviors and objectively observe them rather than being sucked into habitual unskillful behaviors.

Three Powerful Practices:

·         Concentration (strengthening our ability to stay present)

·         Loving-kindness (cultivating positive mind-states)

·         Choiceless awareness (not taking things personally)

We have many opportunities to practice! First, we can practice in a controlled environment, like our meditation time here and yours at home, and secondly and equally powerful, we can practice in the moment of an afflictive thought or emotion arising.  It is powerful to practice in the eye of the storm.  With time, these practices become a new default mode of simply being present to whatever is arising.

I was so fortunate this week to get to experience a series of afflictive thoughts and emotions.  I was on the phone this week about a medical insurance claim that resulted in my owing $2,000.  I’m sure many of you can relate to the challenges of understanding medical costs and insurance plans.  Our policy here isn’t very good, but better than some.  However, I was uninformed about a certain loophole in the policy which resulted in this $2000 bill.  I had already spoken with one insurance representative about the problem, was about to just let it go, when the insurance policy manager called me “to smooth things over”.  I’d like to tell you that I was “smoothed over” but there was something about the conversation that caused my blood to boil—I began to have such a powerful craving to feel validated.  Even if I still had to pay the $2000, I still wanted her to validated my feelings, that it was understandable that someone could have made this mistake.  This was a classic case of craving and aversion.  Stewing in my thoughts of her insolence and my righteous indignation, I ended the call with clarifying to her that I was not smoothed over and slammed the phone down not once but three times. Bam Bam Bam!  Luckily, I did not break the phone, but I did have a moment of clarity.  I was causing this suffering by my thoughts and my emotional reaction.  Oh, this is what Matthieu is talking about!  And I actually began to giggle.  I was causing my own suffering. 

I had gotten the facts, nothing in the situation was going to change, and I was suffering from being so attached to my egoic craving for validation.   I just sat there seeing clearly that I was the cause of my present suffering.  It was quite liberating.   Before my practice, I would have stewed about it for days, taken it out on anyone who came to interact with me, would have blamed many and probably tried to find some way to “get back” at this woman who had caused me this terrible suffering!

In the article on addiction, Brewer emphasizes that realizing our thoughts and emotions only have power because we give it them is the powerful step towards a greater happiness.  If we try to merely distract ourselves from them, or ignore them, we might find temporary relief, but we are not getting to the core, to the source of the suffering—this is why many addiction recovery processes fail.   We HAVE to become disenchanted with these afflictive thoughts and emotions, to realize that we have the power to see through them and beyond them, then practice taking away that power.  Be aware of the power you are giving your thoughts.  Recognize that there is a better way of dealing with them.  Lama Surya Das says that the first step towards awakening is realizing that enlightenment is possible.  With this possibility, we can practice having a sense of curiosity about what thoughts and emotions really are.  Being curious about them turns out to work much more effectively than trying to beat them down or wallow in them.  Brewer uses the example that we have choices in our lives:  to continue banging our head against a wall  because that is what we have always done, OR to realize that we can do something positive like cultivating loving-kindness and peace.  Another method of dissolving the power of unskillful thoughts is finding ways to serve others, instead of myopically focusing on ourselves.  One practice that works well in AA is when a newly sober person is given a job to make the coffee or set out the chairs, a simple job that serves others.  How might you serve others to get beyond your limited ways of thinking?  With this new understanding, we then practice again and again.  Through consistent practice, we strengthen the mental muscle of choosing the more skillful path.  We actually are re-wiring our brain.

To broaden our perspective, Matthieu uses the visualization of the ocean, imagining soaring above the ocean of afflictive thoughts and emotions, instead of being caught in a boat on the surface, in the midst of the storm.

Happiness - Ego

(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.    Today, we’ll take a look at this thing called Ego and how we relate it, and how that impacts our happiness. 

He has a great quote from the seventh Dalai Lama he said:

“If there is a way to free ourselves from suffering

We must use every moment to find it.

Only a fool wants to go on suffering.

Isn’t it sad to knowingly imbibe the poison?”

Matthieu puts it even more simply:

“Recognize the suffering

Eliminate the source

End it

By practicing the path.”

How many of us, how many times, we knowingly imbibe the poision of suffering, in the myriad of ways that we think, speak and act unskillfully in our lives?

Three kinds of suffering:

1. Visible suffering:  Easy to see; everywhere pervasive
2. Hidden suffering:  Concealed in pleasure, freedom from care and fun, that turns into suffering (eating a great meal that gives us food poisoning, etc.)
3. Invisible suffering: stems from the blindness of our minds, ego-clinging

Self-centeredness, thinking of ourselves as the center of world, is the source of most of our disruptive thoughts.  We pretty much see things from our own perspective and fit the world and ourselves into neat little boxes of identification.  We might look at a man or a woman and label them handsome or beautiful given our particular likes and dislikes, but to a hermit any person might be seen as a distraction, and to a wolf, any person is simply a good meal.  There is NO instrinsic  value in any object.  It is simply the value we assign to it. 

Just as water turns into ice, we freeze our labels and judgments about ourselves and others, which takes away the fluidity of knowing more clearly moment-to-moment.  Think about how you feel about yourself and the world.  Is there a sense of separation?   Most of us create some kind of separateness feeling from the world, in order to feel safer, more secure.  When we cannot see that our labeling of ourselves and others are what is causing our suffering, we logically pull away from the world, protect ourselves, in hopes of relieving our suffering.  But, this separateness is just an illusion we have created.  The fact that I appear to have a separate body from yours is of little importance in the world of interdependence.  If a nuclear bomb exploded in this room, we would quickly see our interdependence which each other and with our environment. 

We can begin to soften our sense of a separate solid self.  In Buddhism, the quality of self-confidence is turned on its head.  To be truly confident, one strives for egolessness.  Genuine confidence can come for our ability to see the power of our minds to be flexible in any situation, be flexible with any thought or emotion, be flexible with relationships with others.  That is the source of our inner strength, the paradox that letting go of ego-clinging is what relieves suffering and ends up fueling great inner well-being and happiness.

So we start to deconstruct this strangle hold that this concept of ego has on our thinking.  Let’s start with our name.  They say the sound of your own name is the sweetest thing anyone hears.  But are you really your name?  Are you really connected to a thing that is merely the sound of several letters formed together?

And who or what are we?  Are we our head or our heart or our arm?  Matthieu uses the example of if you cut a body up into pieces, which piece is the person?  Just like a river is not one drop of water, but rather the process of the water passing by.  So, just play with the idea that you are no body, no thing.  You are, I am just a process, arising and falling away in each moment.

A little releasing of concern for our own success, failure, hopes, anxieties, anger resentments, frees us up to look for and find a deeper sense of well-being just by being, not by some accomplishment or lack thereof.  And we can more easily become attuned to the suffering of others. 

“Recognize the suffering

Eliminate the source

End it

By practicing the path.”

Happiness 3

We are continuing a series of talks based on Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness:  A Guide to developing Life’s most important skill.    Think about how many of us learned about happiness as children.  Our parents or mentors had our best intentions at heart, but they may have thought that happiness was derived from some external set of circumstances.  When most of us were growing up, we were told that we needed to go to college, marry the right person, get the right job, have children—these things were supposed to make us happy, right?  Was there any encouragement or advice that happiness was an inside job?  If you did, please go home and thank your parents profusely!

 It's NOT the wound from our past that shapes our life; it's the choices we make in the present moment.  We each have a choice beyond continuing to re-injure ourselves by wallowing in our wounds or raging against them. We each have a choice in each moment to acknowledge the past, extract the lessons, and live in the present with a sense of curiosity and  deeper wisdom, exploring more skillful responses to our thoughts, our emotions and the world around us.

We each now have an opportunity to look more deeply into what will bring us happiness, a happiness that comes from deep sense of innate well-being.  Matthieu Ricard encourages us to look deeply into what is causing us to have a sense of struggle, a sense of suffering.  With these thoughts and emotions more clearly identified, we can then work to clarify, to see through and move beyond these old unskillful habits of thinking and feeling.  He calls these practices, antidotes.

What is an antidote?  A medicine taken or given to counteract a particular poison.  Something that counteracts or neutralizes an unpleasant feeling or situation.

We often think of our thoughts and our emotions as who we are.  “I’m mad”.  “I’m depressed”, or whatever afflictive emotions we might be feeling or thought we might be having.  Matthieu describes thoughts and emotions in an entirely different way.  A thought is just an electrical process, an emotion is something bio-chemical—the two are often inter-related.  We have a thought, and it triggers an emotion.  We have an emotion and it triggers a thought.  However, neither the thought nor the emotion is a solid, permanent “thing”.  They are NOT who or what we fundamentally “are”.  Thoughts and emotions are like paint on a wall, they are simply an outer covering.  We can strip away the paint to find the original surface.  From a Buddhist perspective, the truth of who and what we are is NOT our thoughts or our emotions at all.  We are no “thing”, just innate moment-to-moment awareness beneath and beyond it all.  

When we wake up each morning, we have a momentarily sense of this simple awareness.  Then, we quickly refill our thoughts and emotions with this sense of “me”, with a past and a certain present set of circumstances, and an anticipated future based on this illusion of “me”.  Illusion does not mean that “me” doesn’t exist, but imagine that we are not some solid, permanent self.  In fact, we are constantly changing, we are nothing more than a set of processes, continually arising and falling away, that creates this sense of being.   When we see “me” more clearly as this ever-changing process, we can more easily drop this coat of “self” that we’ve been wearing and thinking of as “me”.  Beneath the coat of assumptions and past experiences, lies a living/breathing, ever-changing experience of what it is to be alive.  That’s where the experience of inner happiness will be found.

Martin Seligman is a pioneer in positive psychology and has done quite a bit of studying of Matthieu Ricard and his Buddhist practices.  There is a website entitled, www.authenticHappiness.org that has a wealth of information about what scientists are learning about happiness.   There is also an excellent TED talk on his theories on happiness.

Martin breaks happiness down into three components:

• Pleasure (Savoring):  Buddhists are not anti-pleasure!  However, we recognize that pleasure is a fleeting emotion.  The first few moments of any experience of pleasure is wonderful, like the first three bites of chocolate ice cream.  Then, with the next few bites, the pleasure begins to diminish, slowly the pleasurable experience becomes neutral, then it actually becomes painful if we continue to grab on, long after the savoring moments have vanished. 
• Flow (Finding our strengths and increasing our use of them):  We each have some skill or activity that when we are doing it, we get lost in the process.  Time might even seem to stand still.  It might be some artistic pursuit or reading a book, or interacting with people, or riding a bike, or all the many possibilities for what we each do well.  Martin describes being in the flow as part of flourishing.  Matthieu describes it as being fully present in the moment.  Being in the flow increases our sense of deep well-being.  We can look for ways to incorporate moments of flow into each and every day.
• Purpose (Finding ways to serve a greater good):  Both Martin and Matthieu recognize that having a sense of purpose greater than ourselves leads to a deep sense of well-being.  Whether it’s helping abandoned animals at the shelter or feeding the hungry, there are a myriad of ways to find a greater purpose to our lives.  In Buddhism, cultivating a sense of compassion leads to discovering the many ways we can help others, which, by its very nature, gives us a greater sense of well-being.

Matthieu goes further to describe in great detail the practices and processes that can generate and expand savoring, flow and purpose.  These are the antidotes for the struggle and suffering that most of us experience each day, brought on by our reactions to our external circumstances, often based on our individual past experiences. 

Antidotes for afflictive thoughts and emotions:

Direct seeing:  Matthieu encourages us to “look” directly at the afflictive emotion/thought, not the perceived cause or extraneous musings that arise around it.  What does it feel like to just sit with the anger/fear/anxiety/depression/resentment/fear?  This is the starting point to sort out what is really happening when a thought or emotion arises.  Behind the pain, we will find a pristine awareness, an inner strength that we can tap into to see ourselves, the situation, others and the circumstance with more clarity.

Imagery:   I recently had an opportunity to hear a Dharma talk on loving-kindness by Khenmo Drolma, who is the head of the first Tibetan Buddhist nunnery in North America (www.vajradakininunnery.org).  She talked about the difficulty we often have experiencing an open heart when we think about another person—relationships, even great ones, include certain complications--we are complicated creatures.  So, it can be helpful to begin with an uncomplicated situation to create a sense of an open heart, like sitting by the ocean, or in the mountains, or by a babbling brook, or looking at a baby, a puppy or kitten. We can practice experiencing more fully what it feels like to allow our heart to be fully open.  Then, we can contrast that experience by bringing to mind some situation in the past that caused us to have a sense of struggle or suffering.  We can imagine in great deal what it felt like in that circumstance, perhaps to have a feeling of closing down, a sense of needing to protect our heart, to guard our emotions.  Visualizing that in great detail can help us experience the contrast of a closed heart.  If we then freeze-frame that moment in that past experience, and return to the open-heart experience, we can begin to tell the difference between when we are fully open or shut down.  Lastly, we can explore what it might feel like to allow our heart to stay open, even in the difficult situation that we recalled.  We begin to realize that we have the powerful tool of imagery to completely transform our experience of ourselves and the world around us.

Compassion:  When we are in the midst of an afflictive emotion/thought, it can often seem like we are more alone , more isolated.  That moment of shutting down can actually be the best time to practice finding compassion, for ourselves and for others.  Whatever emotion or thought you are experiencing, remember that others have felt/thought it as well, probably are feeling/thinking it in this exact moment somewhere on the planet.  Feel a sense of compassion for yourself and all others who are experiencing the suffering of the afflictive thought/emotion.  From this sense of connection to others, we can begin to widen our sphere of concern, beyond our internal struggle and suffering, to a greater sense of encouraging, supporting and being part of the entire human experience.