(For Podcast, click here. For ITunes version, click here.)
Today we begin our book series on Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh.
I love the title of his first chapter, “Suffering is not enough.” Doesn’t it sometime seem like suffering is
the objective of life? People we love
get sick. People we love die. We get sick. We die. Accidents and injuries occur. Doesn’t that sound like a whole lot of
suffering?
Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as he is often called, is challenging
us that we can choose to suffer or not suffer.
There is pain in life for sure, but only we can decide how to respond to
it. He begins by likening our situation
in life to watching a TV with a thousand plus channels, in fact most of us can watch a TV with a thousand plus
channels…and a phone and a computer and advertising and all the other ways that
this contemporary life as evolved into helping us not be fully present. Make
no mistake, you are choosing which channel to “watch”, you are choosing which
channel you are “seeing”. Your
experience is just reflecting what channel, what filter you are putting
on every thought, every emotion, every action that you have, see and do.
I think sometimes Thay’s teachings are misinterpreted as
being too simplistic -- “oh, just smile, and everything will be okay.” He makes an important statement early in
Chapter One, to drive home the deeper meaning of these teachings. He says,
“Life
is both dreadful and wonderful. To
practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects.”
Through the practice of mindfulness, we are not just
blocking out the icky parts and focused only on the nice parts. Instead,
we practice choosing more consciously our response to each situation that
arises.
I love the analogy of a TV with many stations. Thay encourages us that if we turn to the
Buddha channel, we are the Buddha. How
we show up in life impacts greatly how we experience life. At first, it might feel kind of fake—I don’t
really feel like smiling, Mr. Buddhist Monk.
Thank you very much for your sugary sweet message. Clearly you don’t understand MY life…
But….there is a middle way, as the Buddha taught. We can see clearly what is happening, then we
start to choose a different way of responding.
Being loving and kind to everyone might feel weird at first. Dropping our storyline and just being present
might feel really really weird. Who are we if we don’t cling to our past
experiences??? My encouragement to
you is to keep trying, keep imagining what it would feel like to be loving and
kind, to be compassionate, to be a Buddha. Eventually imagining turns into experiencing.
Thay talks about a woman who could only see her
sorrow. He suggested that she smile at
her sorrow because she is not just
her sorrow. We are much more than our
past or even our present. We are in a
constant state of becoming. We are building the future in this moment, and in
this moment we have an opportunity to experience ourselves and others and life on
a much grander scale. Why do we play
small? Why do we want to bury our heads
in the grinding overwhelm of external and internal distractions? Sometime life seems too hard to do, like it’s
too much. I know that feeling well. The Buddhist practices are designed to
encourage us to start with simply imagining the possibility that there is another way
of being. Slowly, we then become better equipped to weather the inevitable storms
that arise in life, more gracefully, more peacefully, more lovingly. I have
found this to be a radically better way of being.
THE DREAM OF CONSTANT OKAYNESS
(From Pema Chodron, “Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change”)
“It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing
we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught.
Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation.
Our discomfort arises from all of our
efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant
okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can
completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the
groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to
our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is
freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being
human.”
TNH suggests we try this
simple visualization:
Breathing in, I calm my body
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment.
Whoa, is he really asking us
to imagine that every moment is a wonderful moment? Some moments seem pretty sucky to me. But this
is our stretch objective—to find the wonderfulness in each moment. As many of you know, my mom has been living with
me for the last six weeks, and has dementia.
And in that time, there were a lot of moments that didn’t feel
wonderful, but I got an opportunity see how I was choosing how to respond. My mom was going to be who she was going to
be, regardless of my thoughts or emotions or desires. So, I got to choose how I was going to show
up. I was far from perfect, but in
hindsight, I can see that she was my practice—what a powerful tool our
togetherness was for me to practice these teachings, not just giving it lip
service, but deeply experiencing the power of the practice.
One morning, during breakfast,
as we sat across from each other eating, out of the blue, she began to recall
the first time she met my dad (they were madly in love for 56 years). I just sat in amazement as she recalled every
detail of that very first time she saw him, and said she knew that he was the
one she would marry. She described the
way he stood at the bottom of the dormitory stairs, his hat in his hand, wearing
a handsome gray wool coat over his suit, remembering that is was a Valentine’s
Day dance that they would attend. She
smiled as she remembered the butterflies in her stomach, and that she wished
that night would never end. Amidst the
awfulness of dementia, there are these moments of clarity. I just sat and let it pour over me like a
soothing balm. Then, the moment past,
and she was back to the worry and anxiety that often fills her head. For a few moments, there was simply wonderment
and awe. I cherish those moments even
more due to their increasing rarity.
Here’s what I discovered: when I was able to respond with
loving-kindness, regardless of what was happening, my own experience was
greatly enhanced. Amidst tears, and
worries and anxieties and fears and relentless questions, hers and my own, when
I responded with loving-kindness and compassion, my own experience, and at
times it seems that my mom’s experience as well, became more positive. I began to realize that I sometimes could change
the energy of the situation by focusing on peace and well-being for us
both. Who do
you have in your life that is helping you practice these teachings by being
difficult? I suggest that the hardest
parts of our life are in fact our greatest teachers. There is a pony to be found in any pile of
poop.
Each moment, we can practice
responding in a peaceful way, this is how we ultimately “be peace”. This is how we spread peace.
Breathing
in, I calm my body
Breathing
out, I smile.
Dwelling
in the present moment
I
know this is a wonderful moment.
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