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.”