Getting Our Ducks in a Row

The first step on the Eightfold Path is Right View, Seeing things as they truly are, not through the filters of our past experiences. This first step is critical to the practice of all the other steps. It’s taught first because it’s an excellent place to start the journey. We begin by waking up to the fact that we are causing our own suffering. I think of it in the same vein as the first step of the 12-step program, when people admit that they are powerless over some old conditioned unskillful behavior.

This last week, someone said to me that they were waiting to do something until they got their ducks in a row. I’m so glad that they said it because I could really relate. No matter how many things are going right in my life, I’m often focused on the one or two things that aren’t going so well. Preparing for the holidays, my dear family has swerved into a familiar pattern of dysfunction and I along with them, and I have found myself frustrated trying to get them all in a row to no avail. I’m hoping that some of you can relate to this way that we see the world and our families and ourselves as a project, something to be changed and improved upon in some way.

Obviously dealing with our families is a lifelong journey, so we have plenty of opportunity to practice seeing things differently, seeing things with fresh eyes. I have started to see how my clinging to things being a certain way often ensures that I’m never completely happy. I’m subtly trying to get those ducks in some arbitrary row that I’ve made up. I make to do lists of all sorts, subconsiously feeling like once everything is done, then I’ll be happy. For me, the first step of the Eightfold Path, Right View, reminds me to honestly examine why I want things to be different in the first place.

In his teachings, the Buddha was trying to point out that getting the ducks in a row is not the purpose of life. If we do happen to get the ducks in a row, it will probably be fleeting because, before we know it, those pesky ducks will be running amok again OR we will desire new ducks or all the other ways that our thoughts and emotions can be scattered. So, before we start chasing after the ducks again, we could try a new approach. We can try using mindful awareness to examine more closely what is actually happening, seeing more clearly our thoughts, our motivation and our actions from a fresh perspective.

“If only…”

Lama Surya Das encourages us to identify those subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we hide from the truth, by identifying what we’re wishing for. “If only….” How would you finish that sentence?

If someone were to ask you about your childhood, what would you tell them? What is your story about that? Now how does that color the way you see the world right now? Don’t we all have this story that we’ve used to rationalize our behavior? How we all cling to our story about our past experiences…

Most of us, we continually consciously or unconsciously defend the stories that we repetitively tell ourselves…in Buddhism there is a Sanskrit word called, “Samsara” that is literally translated as “perpetual wandering”. It is the symbol of this cyclic conditioned existence that we find ourselves in. We often keep doing the same things, telling ourselves the same stories about it, and having the same frustrating outcome. So, Right View helps us get off the hamster wheel.

A Zen proverb says if you cling to nothing, you can handle anything. So, we can take this opportunity right now to be more honest with ourselves, to imagine being more Teflon that Flypaper.

Some exercises to practice Right View:

1. I don’t know. Even if you think you know, it’s extremely valuable to rest in the place of not knowing. Imagine yourself being in your situation for the very first time. What would it feel like to let go of our previously held beliefs about ourselves, others and start from a place of not knowing?

“We’ve enclosed ourselves in a relatively small space by thinking life is only one certain way. It binds us in, and we’re not aware that we’re living in a tiny, cluttered room. BUT With the practice of mindful awareness and quiet reflection, it’s as if the walls of the room are torn down, and you realize there’s a sky out there.” Larry Rosenberg, The Art of Doing Nothing (Spring 1998)

2. Self-inquiry. What am I holding on to?

What are you clinging to? What are you not being honest with yourself about? In this moment, finish this sentence, “If I were being completely honest, I would tell myself….” What would each of us say? How can we commit to dropping the old stories, dropping the old way of explaining things or people or past events or even ourselves.

If you are in an accident and you break your arm, ignoring it, not looking at it, will not fix it. It’s only when you face the reality of the wound, only then you can begin to take appropriate action to heal.

3. Let go of any sense of struggle

Who or what are we fighting with or against anway? How can we try to surrendering to the moment, the deep truth in the moment? Imagine, even for a moment, that life isn’t about struggling against something or someone. That life can be about being in the flowing of living. Letting go of this sense of struggle can be incredibly powerful.

4. Cultivate compassion

Sylvia Boorstein says that the practice of seeing clearly is what finally moves us toward kindness. Seeing, again and again, the infinite variety of traps we create for seducing the mind into a struggle, seeing the endless rounds of meaningless suffering over lusts and aversions (which, although seemingly urgent, are not where true happiness lies), we begin to feel compassion for ourselves. And then, quite naturally, when we feel compassion for ourselves, we feel compassion for everyone else. We can know as we have never known before that we are stuck, all of us, with bodies and minds and instincts and impulses, “all in a tug-of-war with our basic compassionate nature that yearns to relax into love. Then we surrender. We love. We laugh. We appreciate.”

With this first step of Right View, we commit seeing ourselves and others with insight and compassion. When we feel a sense of struggle, we can remind ourselves to take refuge in mindful awareness, from this sense of having a fresh, new experience. When we get lost, we need only pause, relax, open to what is here, what is now and re-arrive in the natural presence of just being. We can give up the struggle, embraced the ducks wherever they are, and allow ourselves to be at peace

This week, as many of us go through spending time with old friends and family, imagine that you are experiencing them for the very first time. Imagine that you truly don’t know. That we can ask ourselves honestly what we’re holding on to, and perhaps just a little we can let go of any struggle, and be at peace with and have compassion for whatever situation arises.

From Ananda Baltrunas, "A Prison of Desire" is a man that was in prison for 20 years and now is a Pureland Buddhist priest

"When I look for freedom today I find it not in fantasy or in dreams, but in simple awareness. What kind of freedom is it that exists in doing nothing? It is the freedom not to knee-jerk react. It is the freedom to merely observe. I don’t have to judge the trauma that arises in my mind. I don’t have to get involved with the hundred narratives that might try to occupy my mind during any given day. In not clinging to thoughts and ideas, wants and desires, hatreds and resentments, the prison of my most negative thoughts and emotions have faded into a haze that still arises but no longer dominates my life. I have found freedom: it is the freedom of nonattachment, the freedom to not cling and to not resist. It is the freedom to allow myself to surrender to each moment and be at peace."

John Corbaley Dharma Talk December 2010 Getting Sick

From John Corbaley (Thanks, John!)

A couple of weeks ago, I had a bout of illness. Nothing extremely serious; just some seasonal flu bug that had been making the rounds at work. It’s an occupational hazard when your workplace is 90% female abounding with young children. There seems to be quite a bit of this going around. I read in the paper the other day about a school in Overland Park that shut down last week because of this ailment. I also heard from someone about a retirement center in Johnson County that went on “lock down” because of it.

I have to start out by saying that I have been extremely lucky in avoiding the majority of these maladies over the years. It had been so long that I had been sick before that I really couldn’t even remember the last time I had been off work for illness, probably 10 or 12 years at least. And oh yes, I had had a flu shot over a month ago-a requirement for healthcare workers.

This bout, however, really hit me hard. I went to work on Monday, had an OK day; fixed dinner and had a nice evening. Then about midnight it hit. Visits to the bath facilities every half hour or so for the rest of the nite. I will spare you the gastro intestinal details which I am sure you can fill in for yourself. Suffice it to say, by the end of the second day of just lying there in the bed, unable to do pretty much anything, you just want someone to shoot you to make the pain and discomfort stop.

So thirsty, but the smallest sip of water makes you violently nauseated. And it just seems to go on and on. You really can’t take any medication, because you can’t keep it down. That sick. I thought of the Hungry ghosts in Buddhist cosmology, beings who populate one of the hell worlds, with stomachs the size of mountains and mouths the size of a needle’s eye, constantly yearning for something impossible to possess.

As this bout of illness strung out to the third, fourth, and fifth days, as you start to feel better by tiny increments, I began to develop a bit of perspective about what was happening to me. First off, I began to develop a bit of a realization about what it might be like for people with major health challenges from diseases that don’t go away, that they don’t ‘get better’ from, that are with them every day for the rest of their lives. An illness like the one I had gives you a flash-in-the-pan glimpse of how fundamentally that would change your perceptions, your outlook, and your life.

For one thing, it brings you into the moment like few experiences can. We are usually to numb to the processes of our bodies, when you’re in pain, you feel every moment. I really did come to view this as a gift; mostly because I knew that this was temporary, I knew that this eventually would stop, so I started to view it as a kind of gift, a gift of awareness of momentary phenomena.

This experience also gave me a fresh perspective on my relationship with food. For quite a few days, I had absolutely no appetite. For the first few days, of course, I couldn’t even think about food without feeling nauseated. Even after that, I still had that small momentary distance that kept hunger at arms length, and allowed me that ability to examine my perceptions of being hungry without being automatically sucked into the daily habit of being automatically hungry three times a day, as mealtime approached--That feeling, the three times a day one, wasn’t so much a sense of actual need for food, but more just a conditioned response to the time of day and anticipation of the habitual mealtime.

I still remember quite vividly that first time, in the middle of the night of the third or fourth day, when I took that first sip of water that I could keep down. I was vividly reminded of the mindful eating practices I had experienced on retreat. If you have never had the opportunity to try mindful eating, I highly recommend it. It really is quite easy to do, just bring your awareness in a careful, slow way, to the process of eating as you break it down step by step. I’ve been trying to do it in the days since.

Of course, your monkey mind works constantly against you, trying to pull your awareness this way and that, trying to get you out of the moment. It made me very aware of how unconsciously we do most things really, eating while we’re watching TV, driving, web surfing, whatever. What ever happened to just eating? We’ve become so programmed to just tasting and swallowing, tasting and swallowing. So easy to overwhelm our sensations of satiety, the feeling of enough, that overeating becomes the norm.

As I lay there in my sick bed those first days, I was reminded of the role of the early Buddhist monks as healers. For my dissertation, I had studied the voluminous sections of the Vinaya devoted solely to healing the sick, treating wounds and various medical conditions with a generous collections of herbs, ointments, and preparations. What a boon these simple monks would have been, traveling to new lands as mendicants, arriving at communities with this kind of knowledge among those who had never experienced it before.

How much they would have been welcomed and valued for these simple gifts of kindness and healing to relieve pain and discomfort. The Buddha was both wise and clever in carefully outlining these methods, recipes, and instructions for his bhikkhus, knowing how valuable they would be as the spread the dharma around the world.

The Buddha has always been viewed as a healer in the psychological sense, healing the illness of ignorance with the wisdom of the noble truths and eight fold path. But this role as healer has traditionally always been augmented in very practical ways with the knowledge of healing very physical ailments as well. The Bhaisaj Guru, the medicine Buddha, holds his urn of healing herbs and unguents, offering the gift of both bodily and mind bound deliverance from suffering.

This concept is best expressed in the words of an eighth century Indian monk Santideva, who described the quintessential healing role in his towering work, the Bodhicaryavatara, the Way of the Bodhisattva. I’ll close with a brief quote from it.

“May I allay the suffering of every living being,

I am medicine for the sick.

May I be both the doctor and their nurse,

until the sickness does not recur.

May I avert the pain of hunger and thirst with showers of food and drink.

May I become both drink and food in the intermediate eons of famine.

May I be an inexhaustible treasure for impoverished beings.

May I wait upon them with various forms of offering.

Abandonment of all is Enlightenment

And enlightenment is my heart’s goal...

I am the protector of the unprotected

and a caravan leader for travelers.

I have become the boat, the causeway, and the bridge

for those who long to reach the further shore.

May I be a light for those in need of light.

May I be a bed for those in need of rest.

May I be a servant for those in need of service, for all embodied beings.

For embodied beings may I be a wish-fulfilling jewel,

the pot of plenty, the spell that always works,

the potent healing herb,

the magical tree that grants every wish,

and the milk-cow that supplies all wants.

Just as earth and other elements

are profitable in many ways to immeasurable beings dwelling throughout space,

So may I be sustenance of many kinds for the realm of beings throughout space,

until all have attained release.”

--- John Corbaley, M.S., M.A.

What about reincarnation?

Is there such a thing as reincarnation? Do you have to believe in it to be a Buddhist?

Many Buddhist texts refer to it, but some Buddhist teachers don't believe that it is necessary to believe in reincarnation to follow the Buddhist path. Buddha himself is quoted, when directly asked about reincarnation, as saying that it’s irrelevant to enlightenment. In some Buddhist traditions, it's used as a description for how long it might take to become enlightened (some say lifetimes...) But other traditions believe that a person can wake up and be enlightened in an instant. A little confusing, yes?

Within the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, reincarnation is neither mentioned nor implied. We suffer because we seek happiness in inherently dissatisfying ways. We are often trying to change the external world to fit our selfish desires, which we think will make us happy. We want things and other people to be a certain way, and we discover that we can't control them, no matter what we do (at least not for long), and this makes us frustrated, resentful, angry, hurt, etc. We can only control our focus and our actions (the Eightfold Path).

Desire is the not the enemy. Skillful Desire can bring us deep happiness--when we desire to be loving, kind and compassionate AND make that a priority in daily life. Then, we naturally start to act in loving and kind ways. Mindfulness and meditation practices help loosen our old selfish habits. With practice, everyone can experience this deep happiness. It becomes liberating to rise above the daily drama in life and see each moment, ourselves, each person from a more compassionate perspective. We begin to see that we’re all in the same boat--we all have struggles, we all act unskillfully at times, we all get sick, we are all going to die.

Are there any facts? Clearly, we can’t definitively PROVE reincarnation until after we die, so who knows? In the meantime, there are some interesting occurrences worth discussing:

Pam Reynolds: Pam Reynolds was a woman who had brain surgery, was declared dead on the operating table, came back to life, and told a very interesting story about floating above her body. She was able describe things about the room that would have been impossible for her to know from her position on the operation table. The surgeons and nurses confirmed her description. There are many other examples of this kind. Here’s some interesting details about Pam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Reynolds_(singer)

A boy named James: Here is a link to an ABC news report about a young boy who claimed he was a World War II pilot that got shot down and was able to describe intimate details of the dead man’s life that were unlikely to be easily known, particularly by a five-year old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EWwzFwUOxA

For myself, I think it is possible, but I don’t linger on the issue. I try to have a positive attitude and be kind and loving in each moment. I assume that if I do that, it will all work out, regardless of whether there is a heaven, a hell, reincarnation or even nothing. With the Buddhist practices, I feel like I’m living the happiest life possible, after having tried many different methods along the way. There is incredible joy and peace that comes from understanding and the Four Noble Truths and following the Eightfold Path.

The Power of Intention

The second step on the Eightfold Path, is Right Intention. The power of intention is discussed in the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings by the Buddha,

The thought manifests as the word;

The word manifests as the deed;

The deed develops into habit,

And habit hardens into character;

So watch the thought and its ways with care,

And let it spring from love

Born out of concern for all beings…

As the shadow follows the body,

As we think, so we become.

So what is this thingl called intention? Of course, we’ve all heard the saying that the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, implying that our intentions are irrelevant and that our actions are the most important demonstration of our lives. Actions are important, but this common saying doesn’t take into consideration where actions come from in the first place. Imagine that you are standing over a person with a knife in your hand. Your intention is to harm them, you stab the knife into their heart and begin slicing into them, and they die. Now, imagine the very same action, but you are a surgeon and your intention is to heal them. Something goes wrong during the surgery, and they die anyway. The outcome is exactly the same, but the motivation for your action was extremely important to understanding the situation.

Jack Kornfield says that intentions are the seeds you plant in your heart that grow to become how you live your life. The stories you are telling yourself about your life are the foundation of how you experience life and how you react to any situation that you find yourself in. If you wake up in the morning, and something goes wrong, and you decide that it’s going to be a crappy day—then you’ve set your intention to find the crappiness in life. And we usually find what we’re looking for. Buddha recognized the power of intention. In the New Testament of the Bible, Paul said that we shall reap what we sow. And sowing actually begins with our thoughts and intentions.

In this moment, right now, ask yourself “What is my primary intention in life?” “Why do I get up in the morning?” When you think about getting older and reflecting back on your life, what do you want to see? In Buddhism, we are encouraged to start with a clear intention, not settling for just sleepwalking through life reacting in old conditioned ways.

“Breathing in, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our love and compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.”

-Pema Chodron, from Comfortable With Uncertainty (Shambhala Publications)

When we’re feeling stressed or depressed or anxious or happy or cheerful or silly or whatever state of mind might arise, in that moment we can recognize these states of mind, and we can ask ourselves: “What is my intention?” “What do I want out of life, and what do I want to put into life?” We can wake ourselves up. We can use the rising of any emotion or thought to better understand ourselves and to recognize the power of clarifying our intention. An emotion or thought is NOT who we are! We always have a choice about how to respond to anything and anyone in our life. Bring to mind a time in your life when you felt stuck in a bad situation, when you had that feeling of having no choices, feeling that there was no way to escape some particularly difficult situation. When you think about those times, even when things might seem at their worst, we still have the ability to set our intention towards waking up, to being curious about the situation, not judging ourselves for whatever we’ve done in the past, giving ourselves the gift of forgiveness and clear seeing. Waking up enables us to see the world with fresh eyes, to see new options that we might have missed before.

Naturally, there will be times when we have to admit we’ve fallen back asleep, that we didn’t act with good intentions, or even times when our intentions were kind and compassionate, but the outcome was still less than desired. Even in those situations, we have a fresh opportunity to set our intention to waking up and getting back on track.

Sometimes it might seem like too much effort. Our limited minds might tell us that it’s just easier to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. Living a life without any specific intention can at times seem very alluring. Let’s just smoke that cigarette or have that drink. Let’s watch TV until our brains turn to mush. Who cares? In those moments, when mindfulness seems like too much trouble, that is the most important moment for practice. That is the moment to remind ourselves of the deep, long-lasting happiness that can be found in waking up and staying awake. We can remind ourselves how wonderful life can be.

“Action isn't a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. More than some moral imperative, it's an awakening to our true nature, a releasing of our gifts. This flow-through of energy and ideas is at every moment directed by our choice. That's our role in it. We're like a lens that can focus, or a gate that can direct this flow-through by schooling our intention. In each moment our intention gives this energy direction.”

–Joanna Macy, from “Schooling Our Intention,” Tricycle, Winter 1993

So, First, in each moment, we can set our intention. And Second, in each moment, we can remind ourselves of why it’s worth making the effort. And third, we can identify the choices that we are making in our lives. It can often seem like there is just one answer, the old conditioned response, to whatever is happening in our lives. But that simply is not true. We live in arguably the free-est country on the planet—and yet we can fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have choices. The Buddhist teachings encourage us to use our intention as a litmus test against which choices can be evaluated. Then, we can choose consciously. We can decide what we want our life to be about, and can then choose our thoughts and actions based on that intention.

Last year, a friend of mine was facing some very difficult challenges in her life. I asked her if it was okay for me to share some of her story—she said yes. She had always been a good saver and smart financial planner, but then she found herself in financial crisis: she and her husband were both out of work, having a mortgage that they were struggling to pay, savings having been depleted, no end seemed to be in sight. As she and I talked about the dire circumstances, I was struggling to find a way to help relieve her pain. But my friend had found her own inspiration. She said that she was ready to explore all the options, even ones that had once seemed inconceivable to accept. She said that she knew bankruptcy and foreclosure were options, that she could live in her dad's basement and start her own business. She talked enthusiastically about the joy of moving in with her dad and starting fresh. She had taken the blinders off of what was possible and found there to be possibilities that, not only could she consider, but that she could even see as positive.

Our intentions color the stories we tell ourselves. In the face of the worst financial situation of her life, she knew she had choices, and that it was up to her to decide what to do, that life was not happening to her. She was creating the life she was living, and no matter how dire things seemed, she could set her intention on making new choices, set her intention on seeing the world as a place of possibilities and those new choices could include joy and happiness. That is the power of intention.

So each of us gets to choose, not once in a lifetime or once a year, but we are choosing in each and every moment, how we are going to live our life. We are choosing whether we live with clear intention or whether we allow ourselves to get dragged down in the mire of old habits and old ways of seeing the world and old ways of seeing ourselves. It is a choice. And no matter how many times we might think that we fail, we always, every one of us, have a new moment to start fresh.

There’s a wonderful William Blake quote that says, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it actually is—infinite.

So, we can be encouraged that the work of waking up is an opportunity to see the world come alive. We can wake up to this truth, we can recognize our unique gifts and manifest those gifts in our everyday actions. We can recognize the flow-through of energy from intention to action. We can recognize that every moment is a moment to start fresh. In each moment, we can set our intention to living our true purpose.