Turning The Mind Into An Ally - 4 – Taking Your Seat

(For Podcast, click here.  For ITunes version, click here) 

(If you'd like to make a donation to the Temple Buddhist Center, click here--thanks!)

This morning we continue our series of talks about the rich and profound book, Turning the Mind into an Ally, by Sakyong Mipham, the son of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the student of Pema Chodron—what a good lineage he has!  The fourth chapter might seem too simple, “Taking Your Seat”, how to begin and end your meditation sessions.  However, Sakyong points out some important details that will vastly improve the quality of your practice and the value you receive.  It’s worth a careful look!

He begins with how we begin.  Let’s reflect on how each of us enter the room here.  You look around and try to find your spot—maybe someone is already sitting in your spot, and that arises irritation.  Or, you find the perfect spot and sit down.  This might seem like a simple process, but you are encouraged to consciously, with great awareness, take your seat and make the decision to devote these next few minutes to sitting in an inspired way.  Sakyong gives far more specific instructions on how to sit than I do, but as I always encourage you, as long as you back is straight and if you are sitting in a chair that your feet on the floor, you are in good shape.  We want to open up our lungs so we can breathe freely.  So, often these days, we are in front of a computer screen, slowly scrunched down and solely focused on the screen and in our heads.  Meditation is about getting our full body involved.  We sit like a mountain, strong and upright. 

Next, we can begin with a reflection of the greater purpose that all this meditation stuff can have.  You come here because you might enjoy the experience of meditation, but you coming here is, in and of itself, serving a greater purpose by your very presence.  You are inspiring those around you to sit tall and give meditation our all.  I do believe that us sitting together each Sunday changes the energy of the world to a more peaceful and kind and loving place.  You do all this by your willingness to leave that warm bed on a Sunday morning and join us for this simple process!  Thank you for being here.

As I have often discussed, you can make a choice whether to meditate with your eyes open or closed, and I encourage you to explore the possibility of opening your eyes, if even for just for a bit, in order to more fully expand your awareness.  There might be distractive movement in and around you, but the sounds and the sights can become just like clouds in the sky.  We see and we hear but not in a focused way.  We continue again and again to return our attention to the sensation of breathing.  

I want to stop for a moment and recognize that all this straight sitting and eyes gazing, it might feel a little uncomfortable at first, a little contrived.  Do you remember how it felt when you first drove a car?  My goodness, I remember that I took out a few side mirrors off the cars park on the road that I first time drove down in the driver's seat!  How odd and weird it felt.  After much practice, and a few more minor accidents, I now feel comfortable and at ease in my car.  That is the experience that occurs over time with your meditation practice.  Taking your seat, finding what is the right way for you to sit, then doing it over and over again, until it begins to feel natural and at ease.  Whenever we realize that we are slouching, that is a moment of awareness, Oh Happy Day! Hurray!  And we sit up straight again and again.   This does wonders for your posture!

Another important point is that we are integrating Body and Mind.  In the Western culture, we spend a lot of time being in our head.  Meditation is a practice of balancing awareness of the body and the mind together.  We use the breath as our balancing point.  We are conscious of breathing in and breathing out, and we are aware of the mind and the body at the same time, the sensations, the emotions, the thoughts, the sights.  We practice finding a balanced awareness of both.  Right now, stop for a moment and just breathe with this sense of balancing body and mind.  This simple practice can over time become your natural way of experience yourself and experiencing the world. Little by little, we awaken. 

This last week, someone asked me a very important question.  “Was the original Buddha an over-achiever?”  The folklore is that he just sat down under a tree and BOOM, he was enlightened!  That’s a high bar of expectation set!  From my perspective that MAY have been what happened, but I think more likely, he worked at it.  First, he had been studying and practicing many different methods for six years.  He had trained in yoga and other meditative-type practices.  I also choose to believe that he most likely had this initial awareness of what it feels like to be fully awake, and then the story goes that he wandered around for a few weeks, letting it set in, exploring it, maybe falling back into his old way of thinking, then remembering and experiencing awakening again and again. 

In my Buddhist tradition, it is said that the initial awakening comes as a glimpse, just a simple glimpse, of the greater, more spacious, more interconnected and interdependent reality in which we live and have our being.  Then, we fall back asleep, back into our old patterns.  Then, we continue to practice so that those glimpses of awakening become more frequent.  In order to create these glimpses, we must courageously and consciously Take Our Seat.

Lastly, Sakyong encourages us to have a clear ending.  When we are here, we always end with dedicating the merit, dedicating any benefit that we received from being here for the benefit of all beings.  We spread it out, wishing all beings to be free from suffering and to experience happiness.  We do so, as so many Buddhists and meditation practitioners have done for thousands of years, ending by recognizing that we do this not only for ourselves but truly for the entire world.

When you are meditating at home, you might also end with a reflection of gratitude.  Even if they world seems to be crumbling around you, even if the meditation session feels awful, we can stop and reflect on how blessed we are in some way, even if it is the fact that we are still breathing at the end.

These little tiny steps that all add up to TAKE YOUR SEAT can transform our lives.  It’s not enough to read about or study it, we must all do it and experience the result. Join me in this simple commitment to sit for yourself and the world, and make a difference.

Turning The Mind Into An Ally - 3 – Peaceful Abiding

(For Podcast, click here.  For ITunes version, click here) 

(If you'd like to make a donation to the Temple Buddhist Center, click here--thanks!)

This morning we continue a series of talks based on the book,  Turning the Mind into an Ally, by Sakyong Mipham.  In the third chapter, he expands on this powerful practice of peaceful abiding, (shamatha in Sanskrit) practice that we began talking about a few weeks ago.  We start by simply concentrating on the breath.  This is the very first step in taming our mind. 

Just as an athlete prepares for his sport with practice, we prepare for living by finding time to practice meditation.  The concentration tool enables us to tame our mind and be more fully aware of what is arising moment by moment.  Often, when people first start meditating, they do so to relieve stress, and that is often a good side effect.  BUT, it is also important to know that meditation brings a quieter environment externally which sometimes brings more awareness of our internal frenetic thoughts, emotions and sensations.  We have been having all these thoughts, emotions and sensations before, but perhaps we didn’t realize them consciously.  Sometimes like a storm that has been brewing outside a window, meditation is like opening the window for the first time and experiencing the storm firsthand. 

This place of presence is where we incorporate the practice of peaceful abiding to weather the storm of our varying thoughts, emotions and sensations.   You might think that you have to artificially create a peaceful abiding, but the Buddhist teachings encourage us that human beings are at their core peaceful.  If that’s true, why have we fought ourselves and each other so much for so many years, decades, millennia?  I could jokingly blame it on too much testosterone, but I’m sure too much estrogen can be blamed as well.  It seems that all that conflict may have been part of our evolutionary process.  We fight when we are afraid.  We fight when we are not even aware of the possibility of peaceful responses.  It also seems we fight out of habit sometimes.  Now, right here, we can challenge this old notion that we are inherently angry, inherently at odds with the world.  Perhaps that is just what we have learned. If you are holding on to an assumption that human beings are inherently fighters, imagine if that were not true.  What if we could realize and tap into an innate ability to find peaceful solutions to whatever conflict arises? 

I want to stop and add a caveat.  I understand that there are times when aggressive tactics must be taken.  I often tell the Buddhist story that if you are able to save the lives of 200 people by killing one person, then you should do so, even going against the Buddhist guidelines of not killing.  However, I also offer that we often rush to judgment that the aggressive solution is always the best solution. 

If natural peacefulness is our birthright, how might we reclaim the experience, and find a way to respond in kinder, more skillful, ways?  Sakyong encourages us that there are several practices to rediscover our innate ability to peacefully abide in each moment.

First, we can decide to have a larger motivation than simply the comfort of our own mind.  Our selfish desires and distractions often lead to unskillful words and actions.  We can become more intentional in our motivation.  Ask yourself this question:  “Do I want to be a better person?”  “Do I want to be stronger, kinder, wiser and more focused?” "Am I willing to give up some old unskillful habits to see the bigger picture, to be of greater service to myself and to the world?"  We all need to be clear about our motivation and intentions in order to get through the dark night of the spirit when difficult times arise.  Are you willing to no longer put the simple comfort of your own mind as your first priority? 

We all know the feeling of giving in to our discursive thoughts and emotions, those fleeting desires and aversions that we all have. Sakyong describes this process as if we have an allergy to a certain food and eat it anyway, wanting so desperately that initial sense of pleasure that comes from the taste and the texture, but later experiencing the allergic reaction that causes us great suffering.  I really relate to this analogy!  I am allergic to dairy—I get terrible migraines after ingesting it, but I absolutely LOVE cheese.  There are times when I just want to smell, to savor, and to taste a glorious piece of cheese, and I succeed sometimes in ignoring the fact that I will have a severe migraine that will last for hours, if not days.  Ahhhh, but that desire for the taste and experience of cheese sometimes overwhelms me…..

We can choose to be aware of the desire for those things that are unskillful, and learn instead to tolerate the craving, then refocus all our energies on the feeling of peaceful abiding that can ultimately dissolve the unskillful thinking and emotions.  I learn to tolerate the desire for cheese, but not give in to the action (most of the time :-).

Second and third, there are two forms of thinking and emotions that often increase the likelihood of an allergic reaction:  expectations and preferences.

Our culture often encourages everyone to have lots of expectations.  Thinking we must decide in advance exactly what we want, we then feel disappointed, unhappy and discouraged when we don't get exactly what we want.  What caused the expectation in the first place?  Is it necessary to have expectations? You might find it valuable to reflect on these questions.  We can explore the possibility of practicing being so present in the moment that we don’t need to know exactly how things are going to turn out.  We learn through peaceful abiding, we show up fully and with kindness, and see what happens.  Imagine life unfolding through awareness and kindness—what might that look like?

Then, there are all the preferences we have about most everything.  I like sushi, but I hate creamed corn.  I like funnel cakes but don't like Mexican food.  We meet someone and often think "I like", "I don't like" or "I ignore".  On and on and on, we form these preferences and begin to dissect the world, the people around us, and ourselves into three categories:  like, dislike or irrelevant.  These preferences can strongly color our experience of each moment.   In Buddhism, we are encouraged to replace the need for preferences with the practice of curiosity.  We learn to get comfortable with not needing everything to be a certain way.

I am very much a neat-freak (I like to think of it as being very "zen").  I find myself liking my outer environment to be a very certain way.  (I especially love the smell of Windex.) When my daughter comes to visit, she has a VERY different perspective of "clean enough", and finds my "zen" habits very annoying.  So, we both practice compromising.  Every time I start to feel unhappy when my surroundings aren’t spic and span, I try exploring not needing things to be exactly the way I want them to be.  What am I feeling right now?  Is it really that important to clean everything in the house?  Sometimes the answer might be yes!  Other times, not so much. 

To sum up this beautiful chapter on Peaceful Abiding, we can look beyond our desire to simply make the mind comfortable and instead expand our motivation to a greater good.  We can use concentration to bring awareness to the presence of thoughts, emotions and sensations and begin to disentangle ourselves from our storylines, our expectations and our preferences.

Little by little, sitting in calm abiding, a little more joy arises for "no external reason".  There is joy within you right now, just waiting to be unleashed.  Through cultivating curiosity and non-preference, we give greater joy and happiness room to expand.   Let that joy and happiness come out and be.

Turning The Mind Into An Ally - 2 - The Bewildered Mind

(For Podcast, click here.  For ITunes version, click here) 
(If you'd like to make a donation to the Temple Buddhist Center, click here--thanks!)

This morning we continue a series of talks based on the book,  Turning the Mind into an Ally, by Sakyong Mipham.  This book is a rich overview of the basic Buddhist principles, but he approaches them in new and accessible ways. I highly recommend it!

In Chapter Two, he begins the explanation of the Four Noble Truths by drawing the link between a bewildered mind and suffering.  Each of you here today are somewhere on the spectrum of suffering.  Some of you may have some serious,s obvious struggle, illness, injury or issue that you are grappling with, maybe the kind that consume your thoughts. “How can I relieve this suffering?”  Or if it is about someone dear to you, “How can I relieve their suffering?”  Our minds are designed to pose questions and look for answers.  On the other end of the spectrum, you might not feel like you’re suffering at all today, feeling at peace with all things.  Nothing to change, nothing to fix, just resting in a moment when everything is okay.  Ahhhhh.  And the rest of us….we’re somewhere in the middle.  The Buddha discovered, that this sense of suffering or dissatisfaction is often lurking in the background--we might not even be aware of it most of the time--causing us to feel a little off-centered, not satisfied, some vague sense that things are quite right, that we should be doing something, and then if we did something, then maybe sometime in the future, everything will be okay. 

It is as if we are all living out the fairy tale about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  She goes into the Bear’s house when they are not home—first of all, what was she doing walking into a stranger’s house?  But that’s another issue,   She begins to try out chairs and porridge and beds.  She’s trying to make her external circumstances just right so that she feels happy. 

I was surprised to read that the initial telling of the tale had the main character as an old woman, who was a thief, and when discovered by the bears, she was taken to the town square and impaled on the steeple.  Somehow, along the way, that story got Disney-ized, so that the old woman became a young lovely girl, named Goldilocks, and she simply runs home and gets a strong reprimand from her mom.  The story was told about being safe and not messing with other people’s stuff!

But Goldilocks can also be a tale about the Four Noble Truths.  Number One:  life involves suffering and dissatisfaction.  We are tired and hungry or lacking in some way.  Number Two:  We often seek happiness in inherently dissatisfying ways, by craving other people’s stuff and other people’s lives—doesn’t it often seem like other people have something better going on than we do?  The grass is just a little bit greener on their side. We judge our situation, we judge our thoughts and emotions and sensations, and we often try to find relief in very unskillful ways (like Goldilocks breaking in and stealing).  We are trying to fix this feeling of something being wrong, by buying something or getting into a relationship or simply distracting ourselves with the many devices our environment has to offer.  In Buddhism, this constant cycle of grabbing at happiness and trying to avoid suffering is called Samsara, the  repetitive cycle of acting in ways caused by our ignorance about happiness.

When my family and I were in the ICU with my mom three weeks ago, there was a moment.  I was just sitting trying my best to be present and realizing that I was having this dissatisfying feeling that I ought to be “doing” something for my mom.  At that moment, I happened to look around the room and saw single one of my family members was engaged with their phones.  No one was paying attention to Mom, lying in the bed in the middle of the room.  Now, granted after three days in the hospital, it can wear anyone down, but it was as if I could feel the lure of the cellphones distracting everyone away from the extremely painful situation of watching my mom die.  I admit there was a moment I felt superior, just for that moment, that I wasn't on my phone and was trying to fully present.  A smugness arose silently inside me. 

Then, just a few nights ago, I went out to dinner with some friends and was walking home, and there was a moment when I felt an overwhelming sense of great peace, joy and happiness—what a beautiful night, the perfect weather, a great meal, good friends.  A few moments later, someone texted me, and before I knew it, I found myself lost in the distraction, completely oblivious to the beauty all around me.   Aargh! 

Perhaps we all have a little Goldilocks in us, that desire to try out other stuff to see if we can relieve this sometimes relentless feeling of suffering or dissatisfaction.

Number Three:   we have met the enemy, and it is us.  We can find a deep sense of happiness and well-being without anything, not one thing, in our outside word changing.  In the book, Sakyong says, “It’s not the place we are in that is samsaric, but our mind’s perspective of it.”   This is one of the most amazing lessons that Buddhism teaches.  Happiness can be cultivated as a positive mental state, regardless of external circumstances, regardless of whatever thoughts, emotions or sensations might arise. 

Number Four:  We can find this peace and happiness by following the Eightfold Path: Wise View, Intention, Speech, Action, Livelihood, Effort, Meditation and Concentration.  These eight practices lead one to experience more happiness in one’s life and less suffering.  It doesn’t mean that suffering and pain never arise again, but we now know that we can all, every single one of us, cultivate a sense of peace amidst the chaos of life. 

The last point made in the chapter is that most of us cling to a solid, separate, permanent sense of self, when that entity simply does not exist.  We are all this fluid, ever-changing, evolving, bundle of processes that we have come to identify as our “selves” but is really all an illusion.  You might have eaten something for breakfast or had a cup of coffee—at what point does the scrambled egg or coffee and milk cease to be them and start to be you?  We are breathing the same air right now, inhabiting the same space, very interconnected and interdependent and ever changing in this very moment.  Clinging to the illusion of a solid, separate, permanent self causes suffering.  This practice has proven that to be true for thousands of years.

When we learn to ride the waves of being, when we become a little less identified with our thoughts, our emotions and our sensations, an experience of peace ultimately arises.  Contentment, courage and curiosity arise naturally when we  loosen our grip on needing everything to be a certain way.  Don’t be so sure of who or what you are, and who or what anyone else is.  I encourage you to practice being curious like a young child—what is this experience in this moment?  What if you were experiencing this activity/event/person/feeling/thought/sensation for the very first time.  We can bring a fresh perspective to each moment, and find that peace is there waiting for us to discover it.

  

Come to Rest

“You do not need to change or fix whatever you are trying to escape from. Just recognize the patterns of escape.  Experience both the dynamics of the impulse to escape and the possibility of not following that impulse, of tolerating the impulse with no story, no strategy, and no preferred outcome. Simply be here, doing nothing. Give up every effort to escape, and recognize what truly holds you. Surrender and come to rest in the peace of your being.”

~ from: The Diamond in Your Pocket, by Gangaji

Turning The Mind Into An Ally - 1 - The Rock and the Flower

(For Podcast, click here.  For ITunes version, click here) 
(If you'd like to make a donation to the Temple Buddhist Center, click here--thanks!)

This morning we begin our new book series, entitled, Turning the Mind into an Ally, by Sakyong Mipham, who is the oldest son of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.  Trungpa was the wild man of Tibetan Buddhism here in the west—he was profoundly instrumental in creating a groundswell of interest in Buddhism starting in the 1960’s, including the first Buddhist University, Naropa, in Boulder, Colorado and many monasteries throughout the West.  His teaching style was iconoclastic, see say the least.  Pema Chodron was Trungpa’s student and even writes the foreword to this book—she was Sakyong’s meditation teacher when he was a young boy, but humbly says that she is now his student.  Pema is a rock star teacher in her own right, but always defers to others as her teacher—I admit that I bristled a bit when she talks so deferentially about someone younger than her as being her teacher, but therein lies a lesson as well.  We can humbly understand that everyone is our teacher.   Even in this small act of looking for the pecking order of who is a better teacher than someone else—this is the mind causing us suffering.    The very first sentence of the very first chapter is,

“Many of us are slaves to our minds. Our own mind is our worst enemy.”

How true.  We discussed last week in the Tuesday night group that most of us weren’t told growing up that we had the ability to train the mind so that we could choose how to respond to thoughts and emotions.  For me, I was told what was right and what was wrong.  “Do the right stuff and don’t do the wrong stuff.”  But, then, thoughts arose, and I felt the desire to do some of the wrong stuff—that which I was told was “wrong”, but that which my mind told me was desirable.  I’m thinking generally about sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but hopefully you can relate to this tug-of-war that we often have with our minds.  We know doing something won’t make us happy in the long term, but in the short term, we really really really want to do it.  And so the battle is waged.  We wear ourselves down, then sometimes give in to those desires that cause us or others suffering.

It was a surprise to me when I began studying Buddhism to find that there is this ancient, well-tested system for training the mind to respond to everything in more skillful ways.  It doesn’t have to be woowoo or through belief alone.  In fact, this process of mind training that is central to the Buddhist way of life, is only possible by trying it out, working with it yourself, trying it particularly when things get tough.  You can live in a cave and practice these teachings, and make great progress, but the real success comes from integrating the teachings into as many moments of each day as we possibly can, particularly those when the going gets tough.

So, where to begin?  In the first chapter, Sakyong compares the mind to a rock and a flower.  For most of us, we think of our mind as a rock—solid and unchangeable.  The flower represents the potential for our mind to generate wisdom and compassion.  So, instead of being knuckleheads and beating our head up against the same wall again and again, we instead can decide to create some fertile ground for planting our flowers of wisdom and compassion.  The analogy of preparing the ground for planting is a good one.

We can prepare the ground of the mind, first by taking away this false notion that the mind is unchangeable.  We know now from the neurological research being done that the mind is very malleable.  Once we realize and incorporate this truth into our reality, we can move away the “rock”, and begin to prepare the soil of the mind.

Perhaps we can take the analogy further by thinking about tilling the soil and fertilizing it as the preliminary meditation practice.  In Sanskrit, this initial practice is called, “Shamatha” or peaceful abiding.   We can calm the mind by concentrating on a specific object, like the breath, or a mantra, or word or candle flame—whatever tool works best for you.  This is the very first step in almost all meditation processes.

Buddhist concentration is not in the manner of intense stressful focus, but rather concentrating with calm or peaceful abiding.  We are calmly compassionately aware of our point of concentration, gently noticing when we stray away with distracting thoughts or emotions.  Then, like a puppy on a lease, we gently pull the mind back to the point of focus.  Again and again, just as we do at the beginning of each meditation session.

Another part of this planting process is cultivating more curiosity about exactly what is happening in each moment.  Cultivating the experience of curiosity is also the fertilizer that enriches the soil of the mind, preparing it for greater wisdom and compassion.  What am I really thinking?  Why am I reacting in this way?   We can focus less on judging our thoughts and emotions and more on examining and understanding. 

I also note that it is with great distinction that mind is referred to as “THE” mind, not “YOUR” mind.  Most of us, we feel a sense of ownership of the thoughts and emotions that arise within.  So much so, that we self-identify as OUR mind, as our thoughts, emotions and sensations.  This process of training THE mind is about dis-identify with whatever passing thought the mind might have.  We are not our thoughts, we are not our emotions, we are not our sensations.  WE are so much more.  YOU are so much more.  By looking at the mind and loosening its stranglehold on our identity, we can begin to see what is happening in a more open and honest way. 

There is no one to protect or defend, just the mind to be tamed and trained. 

The chapter ends with three ideas for encouragement:

• Love and belief in yourself; encourage and inspire yourself and others
• Don’t give up; none of us will do this perfectly; keep trying
• Leverage the spirit of those who came before us and were so kind to leave us these teachings

Being Love – 6 – The Myth of Unconditional Love

(No podcast this week, but feel free to click here for the new downloadables from SerenityPause.com.  Podcast to return in one week. For free ITunes of other talks, click here.) 

This morning we finalize our discussion about cultivating the quality of love in our life.  And it seems like perfect timing since I would like to dedicate this Dharma talk to my dear mom who passed away last week.  It’s been an profound process interacting with all my mom friends from an entire lifetime—from her sisters who she grew up with, to her friends from the suburb where I grew up, to her friends from the small town in East Texas where she and my dad retired, and lastly her friends she made just this last year in the memory care facility where she lived.  I had a lot of time this last week to reflect on this concept of how to infuse more love into our lives.  My mom was an expert at that.

Many of you met her last year when she lived with me for a few months. She loved this place so much!  There was several things I found irritating about my mom.  One habit she had was that she loved to meet new people and talk with them, often about what her three daughters were doing—which I found excruciating.  Complete strangers would compliment me on my achievements that my mother had shared with them.  She was always too slow to leave a party or church or a dance or any get together where she could interact with people.  As a child, I remember this trait of hers with great frustration--I wanted to go home, and she was never ready.  Another trait that bugged me was that she wanted to take my picture all the time, and I remember one skating party when I was eleven, I refused to pose for her—it seemed way too embarrassing—I just wanted to skate,  So, she took pictures of some other kid who she made friends with.  I still have the pictures of this strange girl who was more than happy to pose and make my mom happy.

My mom and dad had a great love affair and treated each other with such great respect, with roles clearly defined, they made marriage look easy.  That is the excuse I’m giving for why I was really bad at marriage. I didn’t realize that behind the scenes, they worked hard to get through the bad times together, and with three daughters, trust me, there were a lot of bad times.

In Buddhism, we often distinguish between the personal love between two people, and the loving-kindness that we can cultivate, but I am finding that these two kinds of love are more intertwined than we might think.  We talk about personal love as a love with expectations.  We talk about loving-kindness as love without expecting anything in return.  But as I reflect on the love that my mother shared with my father, with me and my sisters, with her family and friends, it seems that there is a mixture of these two loves that at the heart of how to create more love in one's life.

It seems that perhaps there is a myth of unconditional love.  This concept that if we were REALLY good people, we could love without any expectations at all, isn’t that what loving-kindness is supposed to be about?  But now, upon reflection, that kind of love seems too detached for me.  It seems that it might be easier to love someone unconditionally because we might use it as an excuse to keep them at arm's length, to not have those tough conversations when someone is being harmful to themselves or to others.

When I look at the love I was given by my parents, and the love that I try to cultivate in these practices, Perhaps expectation is not quite the right word.  it seems that there is a bit more "engagement".  If I truly want to extend love to someone, I cannot stand by if they are destroying their lives through addiction and destructive behavior.  Unconditional love is NOT about doing nothing.  It is sometimes about doing something while still recognizing and respecting the free will of others. 

One of my sisters is a lifelong smoker, and my mother was a nurse and health fanatic.  My mother loved my sister unconditionally, but never hesitated to share with her that she feared that she would bury her daughter before she herself would die because of this addiction. When my mom felt strongly about something, she could be relentless. She loved my sister in spite of her smoking and because of that love, did whatever she thought might help her stop.  My sister did not find this constant advice and encouragement (some might say badgering...) endearing at all.

I think we can all agree that smoking isn’t a healthy habit, but where does one person’s opinion about what is right become conditional?  Some criticisms we share with each other may not be so black and white.   Sometimes, we try to use our love as a bargaining chip for changing them.  "I will only love you if you are the way I want you to be."  Creating some wriggle room in the definition and expression of unconditional love might lead to some messiness.  Yet, isn't life messy?  Isn't love, any kind of love, often messy?  Finding the balance between conditional and unconditional love is not easy.  And yet, I would offer that somewhere in the middle of it all is the very sweet spot of life. 

Jim Parker sent me a great TED Talk by Brene Brown about how important it is be vulnerable in order to create more love in our lives.  We must risk being rejected in order to put ourselves out there, with a love that may not be returned.   For many of us, vulnerability is far too scary, so we choose to numb out with addiction or run away with distractions, anything to not have to feel the awful feeling of hurt, fear, rejection. Brene Brown calls vulnerability the magic potion for having love in our life.  When we allow ourselves to feel vulnerable, there is an unspoken arising of worthiness—it’s okay to be imperfect and still love, be loved and belong. Brene gives us the three C’s for increasing the love in our life:

·         Courage = to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart, the courage to be imperfect, and the courage to work on those parts of you that may be hurting yourself or hurting others.

·         Compassion = to begin with ourselves to then be able to have compassion for others, because none of us needs to be perfect to deserve love.

·         Connection= to explore making connections with others who are imperfect as well; it is connection with others that leads us to the greatest joy, gratitude and happiness in life.

What I found in my parents was a willingness to love others without expectations of love in return, AND they were both willing to express concern and offer suggestions when they felt someone were being hurtful to themselves or to others.  For me, that is what unconditional love is all about. 

As one by one, friends and family of my mom came to offer me their condolences, their stories were consistent.  My mom always had time for them, she always made them feel special and cared for, she never missed an opportunity to volunteer to help others, to give something away with love (many of you have her crosses that she crocheted with love.  Her last project was trying to learn to crochet a heart when she learned that maybe a cross wasn’t the best gift to give a Buddhist…)

I had a co-worker who had a sign in his office that has always stuck with me.  He had a wife and three children, and in the hectic stress-filled life of corporate work, I know it was often difficult to have work-life balance.  But he kept a sign in his office, that said “children spell love T.I.M.E.”  That is what I learned from my mom about cultivating unconditional love.  It is not about one heroic act or a grand gesture—it was about always having time to just be with me, to be with others, to be interested in their lives, to listen carefully to their hopes and dreams.  

I recommend that we shatter this old myth of unconditional love—it does not mean that we don’t care about what others are doing, but rather we care so much that we are willing to love them as they are and help them any way we can. We do NOT have to be a doormat, but be a loving supporter, a spiritual cheerleader, a caring coach, an accepting partner, and knowing when to give someone a second or third or fourth chance.

My mom and dad were not perfect, but they were experts at unconditional love.   They were comfortable with being vulnerable and examining what they themselves could do better, and they accepted themselves and others in all their imperfections.  I am grateful for this amazing gift.   

Being Love – 5 – Embracing Our Past in Order to Love More in the Present

(No podcast this week, but feel free to check out the new serenitypause.com website that has some downloadables.  Podcast to return in two weeks. For free ITunes of other talks, click here.) 

How can we expand the experience of loving-kindness in our life?  

Sometimes it requires reflecting on how we relate to our past, how we carry the past around with us in this present moment.   Today, I want to give us all permission to look at the things that scare us--those thoughts or emotions that might be embarrassing or shameful or unskillful in whatever way--depression, addiction, anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, guilt.  We can practice seeing them more clearly, no longer having to run away from them, but instead compassionately shining the light on these emotions and thoughts and using them as a learning tool for love.  

In Buddhism, we practice being compassionately aware of all of our thoughts, emotions and sensations, and this practice is a powerful tool to transform our everyday experience.  Making friends with our demons is a part of these practices, going all the back to the time of the Buddha.  The monks and nuns were given a task to spend the night in the “charnel grounds”.  This was worse than going to the cemetery.  This was the place where the vultures were eating the bodies, tearing them limb by limb.  That sounds terrifying to me, yet sometimes, for me, I have found that my own negative thoughts and emotions seem to be tearing me apart from the inside.

Sometimes, we can be fearful and even not be fully aware of the fear.  Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.  You will call it fate, or an accident, or misfortune. Invite your unconscious shadow material into the light of conscious awareness and everything will change, inside of you and outside of you.” 

You can begin this journey to the Truth in this very moment as you read these words, by accepting all the parts of you—the parts you are proud of and the parts that you are not, the parts that give you joy and the parts that the embarrass you.  

As tools for truth, consider making two practices your priority and focus:

• wise and compassion listening (both internally and externally), AND
• actively choosing more encouraging and supportive thoughts

By making these practices a priority, everything can be transformed.  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 love of living, the love that arises regardless of your external or internal circumstances. 

The first tool that we can cultivate is compassionate listening, to ourselves and to others.  It is difficult to fully love if we cannot be open to listening to ourselves and to others, listening not only to the easy stuff to hear, but even more importantly, listening to the tough stuff as well.  One of my favorite books is entitled, Crucial Conversations, which chronicles the value in having the conversations that are the ones we anticipate will be the difficult ones.  Those conversations left unsaid are the ones that often lead to the greatest misunderstandings, anger and resentment.    One of the eightfold steps of the Four Noble Truths is Wise Speech—I think that should include not only the one doing the talking but also the one doing the listening—Wise Listening is a helpful behavior to enlightenment. 

Wise and compassionate listening is not only about the words that are being spoken but also the reaction that is going on inside of us.  Words spoken, either external by someone else or internally to ourselves, can help or harm.  We are often assessing and analyzing, judging and opinionating, each and every moment of our lives.

This over-mental mastication is an obstacle to love.  However, do not underestimate the power you have to redirect your mind abd transform your experience of the world!    It helps to start with recognizing that you are capable of changing some of your thoughts.  I’m NOT saying all your thoughts.  This is a big distinction—there may still be thoughts we don't like that arise.  BUT, we can start to add more wise and compassionate thoughts in response to them.  Be more aware of how you talk to yourself, and experiment with changing the tone and texture of the conversation.

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 that lives within each and every person. 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 and thoughts. In Buddhism, they’re called afflictive emotions or mental states, because they can afflict us with this sense of unhappiness if we get caught up in the hurricane of their energy.  These afflictions can be both the painful pleasurable, and the obstacle is when we get stuck in pushing them away or clinging to them.

Dr. Aura Glaser wrote  “Into the Demon’s Mouth” in Tricycle Magazine, based on her book entitled, Call to Compassion, about how we often respond to these afflictions:

• Distraction:  "I’m so angry!  Let’s go have a cocktail" (or cigarette or cake...)
• Denial: "Me, Angry? No! I’m FINE….."
• Blaming:  "You are the one who is making me so mad!"
• Wallowing:  "I deserve this awful treatment.  I'm not worthy of anything better..."
• Spiritual bypassing:  "I’m Buddhist now, Buddhists 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 are shutting down
• Acknowledgement: learning to not appreciate who we are, warts and all
• Being Curious: seeing each thought and emotion as an opportunity for learning
• Taking away the fuel supply: No longer focusing our energy on fueling the storyline; instead you might ask the question, "How could I respond more skillfully to this thought/emotion?" and see what arises

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

We each have our own favorite top five affliction that keep coming up.  Pema Chodron describes it like having a radio that can only be tuned to a limited number of radio stations—worry, fear, resentment, frustration, whatever your common afflictive emotions or thoughts might be.  If I asked you to make a list of what makes you unhappy, you most likely 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? What are you afraid of?

With the knowledge of exactly what that voice inside of our head is saying and the emotion state of our bodies, we can now see the obstacles to our ability to love fully.  When we clearly see the obstacles, we can decide to change the response.

Lastly, optimism is a mental state that we can all cultivate:  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 13 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 affliction arise.   We practice listening with compassion, to see more clearly, to have more curiosity about what exactly these afflictions, then building a greater sense of the vast ocean of peace beneath and beyond, the pristine stillness, the depth of well-being within us all. 

Being Love - 4 - Looking for Love in all the Right Places

(For Podcast, click here.  For ITunes version, click here) 

This morning we continue our discussion of cultivating the quality of Love in our life.  I want to build on the quote from my Buddhist teacher that we discussed last week:

“What does it matter if everybody loves me or nobody loves me.  I am Love, and I can be Love expressing.

I always remember that great country and western song “Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places” by Waylon Jennings.  

"I was looking for love in all the wrong places
Looking for love in too many faces
Searching your eyes, looking for traces
Of what.. I'm dreaming of...
Hopin' to find a friend and a lover
God bless the day I discover
Another heart, lookin' for love."

I heard Waylon Jennings perform live one time.  I have a fond memory from my youth of going to Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July picnic in Gonzales, Texas, in 1975 and seeing him, Willie and another favorite of mine at the time, Leon Russell.  There were 80,000 people there, and I’ll just say that it was a very fun and memorable time.  (There was a cowboy named Buck involved....but I'll leave it at that....)   I googled it to make sure I got my facts straight and found out at that concert one person drowned, four were stabbed; there were 140 arrests, four kidnappings and three reported rapes.  I’d say there were a lot of people there looking for love in all the wrong places.

So, today, I thought we can look for love in all the right places, within our own hearts and all around us.  We can cultivate love, regardless of our situation or circumstances.

The word in Sanskrit for Loving-kindness is mettā, which means friendship and a desire for others' happiness, without expectation of anything in return.  Three behaviors we can cultivate that are components of loving-kindness are patience, receptivity/openness, and appreciation. 

Let’s begin with patience.  It is also one of the paramitas for transcendent wisdom.  How might cultivating patience also nurture a sense of love and compassion?  What would patience feel like?  We often talk about creating meditative moments throughout our day.  Consider how cultivating patience, when you are waiting in line, or being inconvenienced in some way, how the feeling of patience might transform the experience into loving-kindness, love without clinging.  Think back on this last week and consider where an application of patience might have created a different experience, might have transformed a difficult situation?

Next, we are encouraged to cultivate receptivity, being open to others, pro-actively acknowledging the innate goodness in ourselves and in others, regardless of their words or their actions.  Going further, how might we be open to others’ pain and suffering, not simply looking for how they are going to make us feel good, or how they might please us. We can practice being open to the situation, to the reality of each moment, compassionately aware of what might be the most skillful behavior for us. Reflecting on this last week, can you recall a time when you might have use receptivity/openness to explore an alternative response to a situation, circumstance or relationship?

Third, we can cultivate appreciation.   Imagine the possibility that we could practice NOT looking for what’s wrong with people, but rather to look for what’s right/good/skillful—whatever words work best for you.  We can catch someone doing good, being skillful, being loving and praise them for it. 

At a spiritual community I attended in Dallas, I remember the Youth Director reflecting on how to apply this practice with children.  When the kids came up on the stage each Sunday, there was a tendency for the some of them to jump off the stage at the end, instead of using the three small steps off to the side (it was only about two feet high or so, but could be dangerous for a three-year old…). The Youth Director found himself yelling at the kids, “don’t jump off the stage!”  He realized this sense of frustration that arose and reverberated with those words.  How could he achieve the same objective using patience, receptivity and appreciation?  He decided that he would demonstrate the joy of marching down the three small stairs, and praise each child who did it right.  At the end of each service, he would announce that now the children will joyfully march down the stairs putting at least one foot on each stair—how wonderful they are for their joyful marching!  This may seem silly or small, but think about the ways in our lives that we focus on what people are doing wrong, instead of what they are doing right. It was such a delight to see all the children cheerfully marching down the stairs, one by one.

Think about how much time you might spend focusing on what YOU are doing wrong instead of what you are doing right?  We can reflect and learn from our mistakes, but also move on, start fresh, explore a new, more skillful way.  When doubts arise, we can remember the truth of our being. The good you seek is right where you are. The love you desire is already present. Experience your own sacred worth, feel the blessings of Love within you. You and I and we all are worthy of love.

We can explore with delight applying patience, receptivity and appreciation to our cultivation of love within ourselves and in all situations.   

Lastly, we can cultivate all three of these practice with a sense of lightness and humor.  I would encourage us all to NOT take ourselves so serious in all these Buddhist practices!   The Buddha was about being joyful and playful.  Let’s incorporate play, let’s go out to the park and run and skip and not worry about looking foolish.  Let’s give each moment our all, and our all can be whimsy and silliness.  I proclaim that another Buddhist practice can be watching the old Monty Python shows and movies—one can’t get much sillier than that.  Imagine watching them as a Buddhist teaching.  When I watch Monty Python, I laugh and enjoy the silliest things.  I have laughed hard and long on something as simple as the Ministry of Silly Walks.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8&noredirect=1

Let’s support and encourage ourselves and each other to play more, to laugh more, to have more patience, receptivity, openness and appreciation.  And imagine the possibility that a feeling of love without clinging, Metta, will arise.

From the Pali Canon:

"Only friendliness can completely evaporate the poison of hate and anger!
Its characteristic is to promote the welfare of others, its function is to 
do only good, and its manifestation is kindness, sympathy, and gentleness... 
The cause of friendliness is seeing the good aspects of things!
The cause of understanding compassion is this very friendliness!"

So too, Bhikkhus, others may speak to you timely or untimely, truly or untruly, gently or harshly, beneficially or harmfully, based on kindness or on bitter hate!  If they abuse you verbally, you should train yourselves in this way:
"Our minds will remain unaffected, we shall speak no angry words, we will dwell friendly and understanding, with thoughts of kindness and no inward anger! We shall remain friendly and beam goodwill towards that very person, and we shall dwell extending it to the entire universe, mentally overflowing, exalted, measureless and infinite in friendliness, without any trace hostility or ill-will." That is how you should train yourselves. Even if bandits were savagely to cut you up, limb by limb, with a two-handled saw, one who harbors hate on that account, would not be one who carried out my teaching. Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta 21

Being Love – 3 – The obstacles between our experience and being love

(For Podcast, click here.  For ITunes version, click here) 

Today we continue a series of talks based on the book by Thich Nhat Hanh entitled, Teachings on Love.  This morning we will focus on identifying the obstacles that sometimes arise that diminish our ability to be love.  My Buddhist teacher has a beautiful quote about this topic.  He says,

“What does it matter if everyone loves me or what does it matter if nobody loves me.  I am Love, and I can cultivate Love expressing.”

We all want to receive love and give love, but why is it sometimes so difficult to do so?  And if enlightenment is so awesome, why don't we all do whatever it takes to stay in that enlightened state in each moment of each day?  

I have often wished that just reading a few books would enlighten me.  There are stories of people becoming enlightened by being hit on the head with a shoe (after much study and practice).  There are stories of people being enlightened who could not read nor write, but simply listened to the teachings with an open heart.  Today, I’m going to say some words, but words are not the experience.  My only aspiration is that together we create some fertile ground for simply being aware, beyond our old ways of "seeing" ourselves and the world, so that we can each perhaps experience an awakening.

This morning, I want to talk a bit about the Heart Sutra, which is one of the shortest Buddhist teachings, but said to be so powerful that in its short 14 lines, it is the Heart, the Essence, of Transcendent Wisdom.  The original writer is not known, but guessed to be a Chinese monk living about in the 3rd century CE.  The Heart Sutra is an elegant description of what stands between us and enlightenment.  First, we confuse knowledge with wisdom.  We all know that reading a book about riding a bike might be nice, but it is no substitute for getting on a bike and attempting to stay upright as you peddle.  One of the key components in the Heart Sutra is pointing out this distinction.  We need to practice meditating and being aware in order to transform the experience we are having of ourselves and the world around us.   

A second important point in the Heart Sutra is confronting our sense of duality, and how that gets in the way of enlightenment (in fact who or what is being enlightened?).  I feel so solid, separate and permanent.  I think I “know” who and what I am, and yet….Who or what am I?  In order, to break down our pre-conceived notions of this versus that, them versus us, the Heart Sutra challenges us to realize that we are not permanent, separate, solid beings.   It does so by going through what in Sanskrit is called the Five Skandhas (translated as aggregates or heaps or bundles), which attempt to break down this wholistic sense of self that we have built up and mentally hold on to.

For example, you may have had some breakfast or at least a cup of tea or coffee. At this very moment, you are digesting and absorbing that substance into your system.  You are becoming what you just ate and drank.  Or rather, what you just ate or drank is becoming you.  At what point, does it stop being a separate liquid or food, and become you?

In this way, we can reflect upon ourselves and the world around us to strip away these obstacles that cause us to not "see: ourselves and the world clearly.  The Five Skandhas are like a filter between our experience and being fully awakened.  

(From Wikipedia)  Sogyal Rinpoche wrote:

Once we have a physical body, we also have what are known as the five skandhas — the aggregates that compose our whole mental and physical existence. They are the constituents of our experience, the support for the grasping of ego, and also the basis for the suffering of samsara.

They are:

1. form (Skt. rūpa; Tib. གཟུགས་, Wyl. gzugs)

2. feeling (Skt. vedanā; Tib. ཚོར་བ་, Wyl. tshor ba)

3. perception (Skt. saṃjñā; Tib. འདུ་ཤེས་, Wyl. ‘du shes)

4. formations (Skt. saṃskāra; Tib. འདུ་བྱེད་, Wyl. ‘du byed)

5.  consciousness (Skt. vijñāna; Tib. རྣམ་ཤེས་, Wyl. rnam shes) 

When we look more closely at what it is that we call ‘I’, we can see that it includes several elements, not just the parts that make up our physical bodies, but also our various senses and our minds.  In Buddhism, we can examine the self and our experience more precisely, by using these five categories. Note that each category is not distinct but rather there is sort of a spectrum with some overlap.  We utilize the categories to help us understand experience from a different perspective.

1. Form/Matter:  Forms are the elements of earth, water, fire and wind, and then the resultant forms – that which is made from these elements.  There is a visual form, which means the various colors and shapes that appear to our eyes. Sounds may occur naturally or be man-made, or they may be a combination of the two, such as when a person beats a drum. A lot of sounds are just meaningless noise, but to some, we give meaning. Smells or odors can be natural or artificial.  Tastes are said to be of six kinds, roughly translated as sweet, sour, bitter, hot, astringent and pungent.  Textures, or tactile sensations, may be felt on the body’s surface or in its interior. Form means our physical bodies and the physical forms that we find all around us.
2. Feelings/Sensations: Although this is called the skandha of feelings, it does not mean emotional feelings, but something more like sensations.  We are always experiencing sensations.  In this moment, you might have a particular ache or pain, or perhaps a pleasant sensation somewhere in your body, or you may be aware of the sensation of your heart beating.  You might also experience drowsiness or restlessness in your body as a sensation.
3. Perceptions:  Perception means the recognition of identities or names, and on the sensory level it means the discernment of the five objects of sense.  Technically, perception is defined as ‘that which grasps or identifies characteristics’. Perception could be non-conceptual, in the case of the five physical senses, or conceptual, as in the perception of thoughts and ideas.  Perception is either just awareness of our reaction to a sensation (pleasant, unpleasant or neutral) as well as the moment we identify forms and feelings with names.  Perception can be non-discerning when you encounter something for the first time and therefore do not recognize it, just as a child does many times a day, or when someone hears a language that they do not understand.
4. Mental States/Formations:  This category refers to thoughts and emotions. These mental states include all the thinking and feeling we have created based on pre-conceived notions, judgments, biases, even including appreciation, mindfulness and concentration.  There are mental states like faith, whether it is what we call “blind faith” or “faith with doubt”.  We then make judgments about the goodness or badness, the skillfulness or unskillfulness, of these mental states, and that leads to more mental states.  Mental states also include the stories that we make up about what is happening to us and around us.
5. Consciousness: Consciousness, the fifth skandha, is the one where there are differing descriptions in the various Buddhist teachings.   We are conscious or aware in this moment, but some teachings categorize that as a mental state.  Some say this category is the ego, that which recognizes itself as separate from others based on mental activity.  Others use this category for all the stored memories that we have that cause us to create this persona—I am who and what I am because of my past experiences and my memories of those times.

We can explore the Five Skandhas using a simple example of burnt popcorn.

1. There is the form of burnt popcorn.
2. There is the smell of burnt popcorn.
3. There is a perception of the smell as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
4. There is a mental state, perhaps a judgment about who burned the popcorn, or about ourselves if we burned the popcorn.  
5. There is a memory of any time we have previously experienced burnt popcorn that has been incorporated into who we are. 

Now, who or what are we beyond these five categories?  Can you imagine or experience a sense of awareness that is beyond doing and not-doing, beyond dualistic thinking?  We can practice resting in this natural state of just being--no place to go, nothing to fix or change.  Just Awarenesss aware of Awareness.  Beyond our limited sense of self; "being" as part of the whole.  

In Buddhist teachings, we are all Buddhas by nature, it is merely covered by temporary obscurations.  We can have the experience or rather the experience can be had right here right now.  What are you holding on to, what is keeping you from slipping into the experience, the glimpse, the taste?   There are several practices that have been created to help us experience this awareness, an awareness that is beyond mindfulness or sensations or stories or perception or perspective.

Real love is created from recognizing our Buddha nature, the natural state of our mind.  By recognizing awareness again and again, we train our mind to rest in the natural state.  The Buddhist teachings call this our inheritance, our great glorious generous inheritance, the glory of the natural state.

It is the nature of our mind to build concepts, create labels and judgments, to create stories and have preferences. We spend out entire life creating this comfortable box for ourselves. Then, sometimes, the world messes with our box, or the way we see ourselves or the way we want to see ourselves. Or crappy stuff happens, and shakes the foundation of our mind's view of the world.

We are here to deconstruct our self concepts, we can practice not being so sure about who we are to how the world is.  When we are willing to stop hanging on to these old concepts, concepts that we think are holding it all together, we can begin to see and experience ourselves and the world in a radically new way.

We practice not being so concerned about the object and the labels but rather to recognize its true nature. Look all around us. Imagine your mind is empty yet cognizant.  Explore experiencing awareness before dualistic thinking kicks in.  In the glimpse of awareness, love will naturally arise.  It is our most natural state.  The love arises, knowing that we are all part of the same ocean, parts of the same whole.

 “What does it matter if everyone loves me or what does it matter if nobody loves me.  I am Love, and I can cultivate Love expressing.”