Steve Goodheart Essay

It was an honor to join millions around the world in giving metta, loving-kindness meditation, to my fellow beings on World Day of Metta! Although, like most Buddhists, I do “formal” metta every day, as well as “metta in the moment,” it felt good to set aside a special time to give metta with so many others—I felt there was a really “good vibe” in my work today, similar to what one often feels in meditating (or praying) with a group of people, or sangha.

While there are many “formal” forms for the steps metta in various traditions, in general there is a basic expanding progression of attention: first giving metta to oneself, then a close or dear friend, then a “neutral” person (someone we know but don’t really have a relationship with), and then, the “difficult” person, and then all of these equally, and then in expanding spheres of loving-kindness, one eventually embraces all beings everywhere and finally, the entire universe.

A very important point: If you find it hard to give metta to yourself, as many of us in the West seem to, then start with metta for a beloved pet, or plant, or even a place—anything or anyone that evokes especially warm and loving feeling in you. Ajahn Brahmavamso talks about this skillful means of getting around stuck places, like the inability to love oneself, in a great talk you can read here:

“To Light a Fire, Start with “Kindling”—Someone or Something You Love.”

In general, when doing my metta, I follow the standard steps of expanding love, but sometimes my metta work is very free form, like a good jazz improvisation, and I listen to what is calling to me from the world and to what my heart seeks to address. Today, for example, I initially worked with the metta suggestions given for World Day of Metta.   This was good work and helped me give my loving intention and well-wishes specific  focus.  But after some time, I felt a shift, and my heart was drawn to new affirmations and intentions.

For example, while contemplating “May All Beings Be Free from Suffering,” I found new metta focal points arising in my mind.  Trusting my heart, I stayed with each until I felt I had established a clear sense of loving presence and embrace of the those involved.  Here is what arose:

May those struggling to be born, be born and live.

May those struggling to give birth, give birth safely and without pain.

May those in danger, find safety and see how to find safety.

May those struggling with death, be free of fear and feel loved.

May those struggling with death, let go of life and death, and find refuge in presence and being.

And so on….During the 2 hours, many more specific focal points came to mind as I opened up my heart, and there was often a tremendous sense of flow and feeling directed to where the loving attention was need. But sometimes, there was clearly a need to stop and really zero in on some place of resistance, or pain, or sorrow, or hurt. Often, when recalling some suffering in the world, I would be led back to giving loving attention to suffering in myself. And vice versa, often working through pain and “stuck” places in my own heart, I naturally moved outward to share that metta clarity and opening up of my heart with those in the world who might be having similar struggles.

The truth is, we can’t really separate our own happiness and well-being from that of others. To be human is to live in relationship. As my heart teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, likes to say, we have “interbeing” and we “inter-are” with all things and all things with us, for even as we are individual and unique, we are also individual and unique in relationship to what is not our self! Indeed, we are literally made up of “not self” elements, for that is the very nature of what the Buddha called dependent origination or co-origination. In my own practice, I have found that loving-kindness practice, metta, is every bit as skillful a means as meditation in helping to break down the painful barriers between self and other.

So, with metta, as with all of the multifarious facets of the Buddhadharma, the big idea is to practice, to just do it, and regularly. Like a good musician, to improve we will do a lot of formal hard work—what the great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis calls “going to the shed and “chopping wood.” There’s just no way around it!  On the other hand, in the practice of the metta, if you start with the formal sequence, be open, to some improvisation. Listen carefully to your heart and pay attention to where there is contraction and tightness, and where there is opening up and spaciousness.

Listen also to where you heart, or personal, or family, or world events may be calling you to give metta. You may want to go there—or you may not! Sometimes the monkey-mind wants to flit from object to object, with no depth, no feeling, no real heart. Giving metta is not a filibuster!  It’s not “positive thinking.” Nor is it a rote, mindless repetition of “may you be happy” or any other phrase or mantra. Metta is loving attention. It is in fact, meditation, wherein the “object” of mediation is not one’s breath, or other anchor, but the loving-kindness itself—the feeling of well-being and love being given to and embracing another.

The loving-kindness embracing its object is itself our focus of attention. And when our mind drifts off, as it surely will, countless times—no problems!—our mindfulness will eventually note that and help us bring our focus of attention back to our object of loving-kindness. And when you bring it back, bring it back with a smile to yourself, as the Buddhist teacher Bhante Vimalaramsi always says.  Smile and relax, letting go of any tightness or tension that may have arisen when we lost our attention.

See:

The Power of the Smile in Our Meditation and Lives 

This is how we  develop great metta “chops,” as musicians like to say. Practice and improvise, practice and improvise. Be creative; be disciplined.  Follow forms; allow creative play. Don’t get stuck in technique but don’t abandon what helps you unbind and open up, even if initially that discipline might seem limiting and tight.

Trust the process of learning how to love fully, freely, and without hindrances and without getting stuck.   The metta itself will transform you.  Unselfed love is the great liberator.  All we have to do is just do it.  The loving-kindness itself will transform us into agents, if not angels, of light and love in the world, and that is so very very needed!

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World Day of Metta

Today, March 20, 2013, the organizers of the World Day of Metta are asking people all around the world to open their hearts and from 12 PM to 2 PM, local time, to meditate on and offer the following metta to all beings of the world:

THE METTA

May all beings have fresh clean water to drink

May all beings have food to eat

May all beings have a home

May all beings have someone to share love with

May all beings know their true purpose

May all beings be well and happy

May all beings be free from suffering

Today, I shall do what I can to make this so.

The offering of metta, or loving-kindness, to others is a non-denominational act. You don’t have to believe in anything except the power of love to change the world! Compassionate hearts of all persuasions, or no persuasions, are invited to join others around the world in 2 hours of loving-kindness.

(If you can’t do the metta between noon and 2 PM your local time, obviously, just do it when you can to take part in the world-wide celebration. The time the metta is given is not nearly as important as taking time to give the metta!   And what may begin as a one-day mutual celebration of love and goodwill to another can become a daily part of one’s life.)

The goal of the World Day of Metta is to say this particular Metta offering at least once for each of the 7 billion plus humans on the planet, as well as all the sentient beings who share our amazing planet with us. Visit the Web site for more information about participating!

Here at Metta Refuge, those who are interested in learning more about the Buddhist practice of metta can find a wealth of information and dharma teachings on how to do loving-kindness, or metta, meditation.

A good place to start is the Basic Metta page, which gives beginning instruction explaining how to do metta, or loving-kindness meditation as taught by the Buddha:

At the Basic Metta page you can download free PDFs by experienced dharma teachers for your personal study. You will also find links to introductory articles by some outstanding Buddhist teachers:

Ajahn Brahmavamso Teaches Loving-kindness

Bringing Metta to Daily Life—A Talk by Bhante Vimalaramsi

Metta—The Healing Power of Visualizing and Radiating Love Toward Others
(Acharya Buddharakkhita)

May We All Be Happy—Beginning Metta
(Gil Fronsdal)

Here at Metta Refuge you will also find many articles about loving-kindness meditation that will help take your deeper into your metta practice. You might want to look into some of these articles:

Metta Phrases for Dealing with Self-Hatred and Self-judgment

The Karaniya Metta Sutta and Healing Through Loving-kindness (with Music)

Audio Dharma-An Introduction to Metta by Gil Fronsdal

Metta in the Moment

Goodwill—Not a Pink Cloud of Cotton Candy Covering the World

I look forward to joining my brothers and sisters in every nation in this great world-wide metta on March 20, 12 PM to 2 PM local time!  And of course, this one-day celebration of loving-kindness is just a beginning.  Giving metta, working with one’s mind and heart to open up to the world with compassion and wisdom is the way of the Buddha, and of good-hearted people everywhere.  What Buddhism offers is a way to take one’s loving-kindness all the way to awakening.

The Great Aspiration of Metta

As a mother, at the risk of her life,
Watches over her only child,
Let him cherish an unbounded mind
For all living beings.

Let him have love for the whole world
And develop an unbounded mind
Above, below and all around,
Boundless heart of goodwill, free of hatred,
Standing, walking, sitting or lying down,
So long as he be awake,
Let him cherish this thought,

This is called divine abiding here.

~ Karaniyametta (Metta) Sutta

Please enjoy listening to:

“Healing through Kindness” by Nawang Khechog from Music As Medicine (With Special Guest Artist R. Carlos Nakai)

POSTSCRIPT:

You might enjoy reading an essay I wrote after my two hours of metta for World Day of Metta.  I explain some of the ways I approached the metta and also share some insights I have learned over years of practicing loving-kindness meditation:

How Practice and Creativity Can Open Up Your Practice

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Pema Chodron

Don’t impose the wrong notion of what harmony is, what compassion is, what patience is, what generosity is. Don’t misinterpret what these things really are. There is compassion and there is idiot compassion; there is patience and there is idiot patience; there is generosity and there is idiot generosity.

For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, not to rock the boat, is not what’s meant by compassion or patience. It’s what is meant by control. Then you are not trying to step into unknown territory, to find yourself more naked with less protection and therefore more in contact with reality. Instead, you use the idiot forms of compassion and so forth just to get ground.

When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda. Many different people come in. Just when you think you have a little scheme that is going to work, it doesn’t work. It was very beneficial to Juan, but when you tried it on Mortimer, he looked at you as if you were crazy, and when you try it on Juanita, she gets insulted.

Coming up with a formula won’t work. If you invite all sentient beings as your guests while just wanting harmony, sooner or later you’ll find that one of your guests is behaving badly and that just sitting there cheerfully doing your tonglen and trying to cultivate harmony doesn’t work.

(For an introduction to the practice of tonglen, see: All-Embracing Compassion-The Heart-Practice of Tonglen)

So you sit there and you say, “Okay, now I’m going to make friends with the fact that I am hurting and afraid, and this is really awful.” But you are just trying to avoid conflict here; you just don’t want to make things worse. Then all the guests are misbehaving; you work hard all day and they just sit around, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, eating your food, and then beating you up. You think you’re being a warrior and a Bodhisattva by doing nothing and saying nothing, but what you’re being is a coward. You’re just afraid of making the situation worse. Finally they kick you out of your house and you’re sitting on the sidewalk. Somebody walks by and says, “What are you doing sitting out here?” You answer, “I am practicing patience and compassion.” That’s missing the point.

Even though you’ve dropped your agenda, even though you are trying to work WITH situations instead of struggling AGAINST them, nevertheless you may have to say, “You can stay here tonight, but tomorrow you’re going, and if you don’t get out of here, I am calling the police.” You don’t really know what’s going to benefit somebody, but it doesn’t benefit anybody to allow someone to beat you up, eat all your food, and put you out on the street.

So “Don’t misinterpret” really gets at the notion of the big squeeze. It’s saying that you don’t know what’s going to help, but you need to speak and act with clarity and decisiveness. Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and look at what’s happening. They come from opening your heart and not running away. Then the action and the speech are in accord with what needs to be done, for you and for the other person.

We make a lot of mistakes. If you ask people whom you consider to be wise and courageous about their lives, you may find that they have hurt a lot of people and made a lot of mistakes, but that they used those occasions as opportunities to humble themselves and open their hearts. We don’t get wise by staying in a room with all the doors and windows closed.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron (Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.)

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The song is called “Land of the Living” by the remarkable singer/songwriter Lucy Kaplansky from her great album “The Red Thread.”  It’s a deeply moving song.  It’s real.  It powerfully yet tenderly evokes that terrible day and touches our sorrow.  But it also reminds us that “this is the land of the living.”  I hope this song offers you comfort and hope on our day of national and international mourning and remembrance.

Click to listen: The Land of the Living by Lucy Kaplanksy

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Some Personal Thoughts on Dealing with Death and Loss

I’ve been reading a lot of the poetry of Wendell Berry lately, and this excerpt from his poem “Rising” came to mind this morning as I thought about life, death, and the precious lives of all those we have loved and lost.

Although the poem speaks of the burdens we carry in our hearts over loved ones lost, it also speaks of a “severe gift” that calls us to honor the dead by being true to ourselves and by courageously living in the light of what we learn from our losses.

This poem is probably not for everyone.  Each person deals with loss and grief differently.  The healing of grief takes time.  It can’t be forced or “magically” fixed.  If we deny it or try to bury our grief, it will eventually demand that we honor it with our full attention.

As painful as it is to endure, grief has something important to tell us that we have to learn, and for each of us, that lesson is different.  So, there are times to look at our grief square in the face, and there are times to quietly mourn and just be there with our hearts, comforting ourselves and others as best we can.

This poem is about dealing with our grief and honoring what it tells us about those lost loved ones—the poet’s “severe gift.”  I found the poem challenging, comforting, and strengthening.  It gave me hope and a sense of purpose to go forward and to honor this life and the lives of those I’ve lost by how I live my life.  I offer this poem as a gift, heart-to-heart, to those who are ready to hear its message.

Excerpt from Wendell Berry’s “Rising”

Any man’s death could end the story:
his mourners having accompanied him
to the grave through all he knew,
turn back, leaving him complete.

But this is not the story of life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.

For those who depart from it, bearing it
in their minds, the grave is a beginning.
It has weighted the earth with sudden
new gravity, the enrichment of pain.

There is a grave, too, in each
survivor. By it, the dead one lives.
He enters us, a broken blade,
sharp, clear as a lens or mirror.

And he comes into us helpless, tender
as the newborn enter the world. Great
is the burden of our care. We must be true
to ourselves. How else will he know us?

Like a wound, grief receives him.
Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep
as part of ourselves the severe gift.
By grief, more inward than darkness,

the dead become the intelligences of life.
Where the tree falls, the forest rises
There is nowhere to stand but in absence,
no life but in the fateful light.

From The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982

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Ajahn Brahmavmso Teaches Loving-kindness

Metta—The Healing Power of Visualizing and Radiating Love Toward Others

Bringing Metta to Daily Life—A Talk by Bhante Vimalaramsi

To help you understand how you can “personalize” your metta practice, I thought I’d share some of the approaches I use in my own metta practice.  One thing I’ve found to be very helpful in doing self-metta is to use “customized” phrases—that is, phrases of that speak directly to areas where I need to express and feel more compassion and understanding toward myself.

As you probably know if you’ve done metta practice, traditionally one starts out with loving-kindness directed toward oneself.  But as many Western dharma teachers have pointed out, because many of us here in the West have deep issues of self-hatred and guilt that we are working out, sometimes self-loving is not the best place to begin metta.

We may need to begin where we can generate and feel some genuine good-will and affection—maybe toward a friend, or even a pet.  Then, when we can actually sense what unconditional good will feels like, we can go from that good place to more difficult objects of affection—which may mean, ourselves!

Customize Your Metta to Address Your Particular Sense of Self

Typically, one may wish, “May I be happy.  May I be free of suffering” and similar phrases that reflect our desire that we be happy and know the causes of happiness.  What I discovered as my metta practice developed was that I could make those self-metta phrases very specific and very focused on areas where I was “caught” or “hung up” in terms of loving myself or letting go of false identifications and ego traps.

Over time, I developed particular particular phrases that were “Steve metta” phrases.  They we developed  by  by my noticing the specific kinds of feelings and emotions that indicated where I was stuck—my mental hang-ups.  An important adjunct to developing these self-metta phrases was working with psychology books that were grounded in Buddhist insights and practice.  You can find a list of these here, in this post:

The Problem of Egolessness

Another study that has proved to be extremely helpful in developing a customized “Steve metta” has been working with insights and practices from the Riso and Hudson Enneagram books, such as this: Understanding the Enneagram – Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson

Create Your Own Customized 3×5 Self-metta Work Cards

Developing specific phrases of self-metta may take some time. Maybe, at first, you just work with general phrases, such as “May I live joyfully and with ease.”  There’s plenty of instruction on this in the articles I’ve listed above. But, over time, if you watch what arises in your metta, and begin to notice with more insight the harmful patterns and effects of trauma in your life, you should start seeing your sticking points.  These may well be areas you don’t want to go!  It takes real courage to love, when we feel unlovely or unloved.

When you begin to identify these painful and unskillful place in your heart and mind—and in your life—consider what the antidote to that hurt and trauma might be.  What are the specific ways you could love yourself, or change the way you look at things, that would liberate your heart?  Write down  positive, self-affirming phrases, or aspirations, and then use them in your self-metta sessions.

It’s perfectly alright to stop your metta from time to time and refer to your customized metta phrases. I’ve my  phrases on a 3×5 card, and use them in my metta sessions when I’m “on the cushion” as well as throughout the day.  (Indeed, referring to them throughout your day can be very powerful and healing. We often need to be repeatedly reminded to love ourselves, and to let go, to break old habits and conditioning.

Whatever phrases or thoughts we may use, the big thing to keep in mind is that it’s not so much the words as the spirit of love, compassion, and wisdom behind the words that is the healer. In a way, what we are doing in our self-metta is mothering and fathering ourselves—maybe in a way we never were mothered and fathered as children.  Feeling this, we can bring a powerful aspiration to be the kind of courageous mother and father that the Buddha speaks of in the metta sutta:

“As a mother would risk her life to protect her child, her only child, even so should one cultivate a limitless heart with regard to all beings. So with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings; radiating kindness over the entire world.” The Buddha, Sutta Nipata I, 8

We should never forget that we are ourselves one of those very, very precious beings!

Some Examples of “Customized” Metta Phrases

Here are some of the self-metta phrases I have worked with and still work with regularly.  Although they are very personal, I’m sharing them to help give you an idea of what your own self-metta phrases might look or sound like.  I’ve found that the more specific the phrases are in terms of your self-love issues, the more powerful the healing, transforming effect.

Again, above it all, these cards and phrases are only skillful means.  The healing is in our use of them, in what goes on in our own thought and hearts as we say them and ponder them.  Metta is meditation. To be most effective, our metta well-wishes and aspirations need our full attention.  We need to notice and see what arises as we do the metta (whether for ourselves or for others) but not get hung-up in what arises.

Maybe even more than in breath meditation, because of the powerful emotions metta can bring up, we may find ourselves being caught-up in story lines and dramas and traumas from our past.  As in meditation, when we lose focus on the breath, just notice the story, notice the arising of feelings, and then just return to the metta phrase.  Breathe in, breathe out, and smile!  It doesn’t matter if we have to do this a thousand times, like “a mother protecting her child,” we resolutely and fearlessly return to love that “child” of loving-kindness that we are developing and cherishing in our hearts.

I hope you have found this sharing helpful.  And now, here are some of my personal phrases:

May I be free of anger and aggression against my self.

My I let go of all self-hatred and self-contempt.

May I let go of all feelings of hopelessness and despair.

My I let go of all self-sabotaging thoughts and actions.

May I let go of the feeling that I am inadequate and defective.

May I let go of the fear that I am unimportant and undesirable.

May I let go of feeling shameful and misunderstood by others.

May I let go of the feeling that people always let me down.

May I let go of all unrealistic expectations of myself and others.

May I let of all claims of needing to be treated differently.

May I let go of all self-indulgence in my emotions and behavior.

May I let go of all self-doubt and emotional vulnerability.

May I let go of wanting to protect myself by withdrawing from others.

May joy and warmth fill my heart. May I love myself!

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Steve Goodheart Essay

Recently, on Facebook, I posted a Photo to my Wall with a comment about working with “demons.” As I said at this Photo post: “Demons are not bloodthirsty ghouls waiting for us in the dark; they are the forces we find inside ourselves that fabricate around ego-clinging and that we project “out there” on others, because we can’t look at our own fears, angers, and dark places.”

I had such a good response to this Facebook post, I thought I would also share some other skillful dharma teachings on this important subject.

Whether we call these mental knots and wounded energies “demons,” or “mind parasites,” or “neuroses,” or harmful “memes,” dealing with them is at the very heart of liberation. In a certain sense, spiritual practice is all about dealing with the “shadows”—those aspects of being we have consciously and unconsciously blocked off and denied, even as they wreak havoc with our lives.

Here are some especially helpful articles I’ve shared here at Metta Refuge before. The first two posts are a pair and use the metaphor of a raging elephant for our untamed mental denizens, our “habit energies,” as Thich Nhat Hanh calls them:

Can the Power of Love Stop an Elephant?

and

Taming Elephants-How To Transform Negative Habit Energies

Another especially helpful post is:

How Insight and Loving-kindness Free Us from Mental Parasites

In “How Insight and Loving-kindness Free Us from Mental Parasites,”  I really get into specifics of practice and share some more skillful teachings from my heart teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as Zen teacher Cheri Huber. I also share some of what I’ve learned from my own practice of dealing with “habit energies” and “mental parasites.”

Another teaching that has been very helpful to me comes from the Tibetan tradition. I first came upon this skillful means in a great article in Tricyle magazine by Lama Tsultrim Allione.  In this article she said:

“In my own process of learning and applying the practice of Chöd, which was originated by the eleventh-century Tibetan yogini Machig Lapdrön , I realized that demons—or maras as they are called in Buddhism—are not exotic beings like those seen in Asian scroll paintings. They are our present fears and obsessions, the issues and emotional reactivity of our own lives. Our demons, all stemming from the root demon of ego-clinging, but manifesting in an infinite variety of ways, might come from the conflicts we have with our lover, anxiety we feel when we fly, or the discomfort we feel when we look at ourselves in the mirror. We might have a demon that makes us fear abandonment or a demon that causes us to hurt the ones we love.

Demons are ultimately generated by the mind and, as such, have no independent existence. Nonetheless, we engage with them as though they were real, and we believe in their existence—ask anyone who has fought an addiction or anxiety attacks. Demons show up in our lives whether we provoke them or not, whether we want them or not. Even common parlance refers to demons, such as a veteran who is home “battling his demons” of post-traumatic stress from the war in Iraq. I recently heard a woman say she was fighting her “jealousy demon.” Unfortunately, the habit of fighting our demons only gives them strength. By feeding, not fighting, our demons, we are integrating these energies, rather than rejecting them and attempting to distance ourselves from disowned parts of ourselves, or projecting them onto others.”

Artwork by Andrew Guenther from Tricycle “Feeding Your Demons”

If you find this idea of “feeding” your demons as intriguing as I did, then give this high skillful, imaginative practice a try.  The article explains the basics in some detail, but for a more thorough explanation, you might want to get Lama Allione’s wonderful book, “Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Dissolving Inner Conflict.”

I hope these articles I’ve shared here help you with your own personal demons—the really hard emotional and mental stuff that repeatedly defeats your efforts to express a full humanhood and be free from mental hindrances.

The fact is, we all have our “demons,” big and small, but the good news is that we also have the capacity to transform them and liberate our blocked energies for our own benefit and the benefit of all beings.  So, don’t be discouraged when things get hard—and, they will!  Sometimes it can feel like we may never break free of old mental patterns.

Don’t give up! Be compassionate and patient with yourself.  Just learning how to pay attention to what is going in our hearts and minds on is a huge step forward.  As we practice these skillful means, we will gain insight into our angers, our fears, our hurts. This compassionate, wise understanding opens up our hearts and frees us as nothing else can.

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Steve Goodheart Essay

The Buddha’s Second Noble Truth is that craving—desire, attachment, clinging—is the cause of suffering, unsatisfactoriness, stress. Anyone who has looked into the cause of suffering can affirm this great truth for oneself.

From this insight, one might conclude that the way to end suffering and find lasting happiness is to kill all desires. From that viewpoint, life becomes a battle to annihilate craving, a kind of war to-the-death with our very own humanity, which is certainly filled with desires, good and bad.

While we may want to remove suffering from our life, the apparent cost of losing our humanity may make us think that the Buddha’s path is only for those who are ready to renounce the whole world and become a recluse sitting in the jungle or some remote monastery someplace.

But I think this view is a misunderstanding of the Second Noble Truth and of the skillful means that bring about the end of suffering through a noble, happy path. If one investigates the skillful means that the Buddha gives for bringing about an end to suffering and the unsatisfactoriness of life, one will find that the Buddha actually uses desire—the desire to be happy—as a stepping-stone to freedom.

Far from calling all desire evil, the Buddha show us how to work with our desires in skillful ways that begin to remove the egotism, selfishness, and insatiable craving that cause suffering. As we gain intelligent insight into what we call desire, we can begin to free this life energy from what hinders its flow.

Suffering arises from our identifying with what arises in our experience as being “I” or “me” or “mine.” The ego grasps as the flow of life energy and crimps the flow into an “I” knot, a “me” obstruction, a “mine” hindrance, and this blockage causes inevitable suffering.

As we gain freedom from “I”-dentification through the insights that arise in meditation and metta, we become freer and freer. We begin to see that we don’t really exist the way we thought we did. We are so much more, and less, than what we identify with, as “self”—as “I” and “me” and “mine.”

We begin to see that if we don’t grasp, nothing can catch us, hold us, trap us, hinder us, snag us, limit us—we are not that which can be caught. We are not that which can be defined, or limited in any way. This is not annihilation, but freedom from all fabrications and limitations. And it not nihilism, but great, great joy—joy that passes all present understanding, because it is not contingent on anything.

Here’s a wonderful passage from J. Krishnamurti that I think speaks to these issues and that puts desire into a whole new light:

“Now desire, contrary to general belief, is the most precious possession of man. It is the eternal flame of life; it is life itself. When its nature and functions are not understood, however, it becomes cruel, tyrannical, bestial, stupid. Therefore your business is not to kill desire as most spiritual people in the world are trying to do, but to understand it.

If you kill your desire, you are like the withered branch of a lovely tree. Desire must keep growing and find out its true meaning through conflict and friction. Only by the continuance of the conflict can understanding come. This is what most people do not see. As soon as the conflict comes, and the sorrow born of conflict, they at once seek comfort. Comfort, in its turn, breeds fear. Fear leads to imitation and the sheltering behind established tradition.

From this come rigid systems of morality, laying down what is spiritual and what is not spiritual, what is the religious life and what is not the religious life. It is the fear of life which produces guides, teachers, gurus, churches, religions. Please, I know. None of these things are going to satisfy a mind which is really enquiring, which is really in revolt. As soon as you fear, you have the desire to conform, to listen to everybody, to become a machine, a type. And all this is but contraction, and contraction is slow death. It is not in this way that desire can ever fulfill itself.

Growth can only come by the liberation of desire, and liberation here means freeing it from all fear, and so from the cruelty and exploitation which results from the quest of comfort, which is the refuge of fear. And this, in its turn, can only come about through the wearing down of the egotism in desire by contact with life itself.

Only in this way can the reality be reached which is the true consummation of desire. And so, truly to grow is to learn to love more and more, to think more and more impersonally, through experience.”  ~ J. Krishnamurti

“Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more
complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment”
  ~ T.S. Eliot “Four Quartets”

♥♥♥

Steve Goodheart Essay

Each meditation is so different. Today, as I settled into my breath, I was immediately aware of a great deal of mental pain. The pain didn’t seem to be tied to anything in particular, but was more an existential kind of pain—just “being” felt painful.

One I got mentally quiet enough to feel its full intensity, this background pain wanted all of my attention. I knew that if I just ignored it, or tried to push it away, it would only get worse, making concentration and insight impossible.  Also, I’ve come to understand more clearly that ignoring pain is not only unskillful but is itself a sign of emotional damage. So, what to do?

When existential or emotional pain is crying out for attention, I’ve found that it’s both wise and compassionate to just stop trying to “meditate” and to turn one’s whole attention to the pain. In other words, the pain itself becomes the object of meditation.  Sometimes this means just exploring the mental pain—seeing what its nature is and, especially, what it feels like in the body. The goal is to look into the mental pain or stress with a non-judgmental curiosity and openness. You just want to see what’s going on, so to speak, and you want to do it with as much compassion and loving-kindness as you can.  If you’d like to learn more about what involved with this kind of mediative investigation of pain—any kind of pain—this post should be a big help:

Using Meditation to Get Acquainted with Pain-Are You Serious?

When Mental Pain is Extreme, Consider Doing Metta

If the pain really roars when you look into it with gentle curiosity and interest, and if you don’t seem to be getting a handle on its causes, then it may be well wise to step back and begin doing metta, loving-kindness, meditation for oneself.  Just stop and give your attention to some specific loving and kind phrase, like this: “May I be free of this pain, and the causes of this pain. May I have peace of mind and know the causes of peace of mind.”

Or, you may want to address the pain directly, as if dealing with a crying baby—a skillful way of dealing with pain and other emotions that my heart teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, often talks about.  You might work something like this:

“My dear pain, I hear you crying! I do not reject you! I will not lock you away in some room of my mind and let you wail! (I would hear you anyway!) I am here for you, dear pain. I will hold you tenderly in my heart, even though it hurts.  I want to know what you are all about, and set this painful energy free.  For you and I, dear pain, are not different, but the same. The pain is me, and I am the pain. I will not reject myself, but look deeply into myself, with love and compassion, so that I may be free.”

Giving some mental pain all one’s attention, like this, can be very skillful—or very unskillful! It all depends on whether we can hold the pain in thought and in our heart without getting sucked into the pains’ story line or getting so overwhelmed by the emotions and images that may arise as we pay attention that we just re-traumatize ourselves.

Give Yourself Mental Space When You Need It—Take a Break from the Work

If one feels overwhelmed, by the “crying baby,” then it’s usually skillful to just stop, mentally take a step back, and give oneself and the pain some space.  Getting in touch with one’s breath is always a skillful thing to do, and after working with the breath for a while, one may well be able to return addressing the big pain with loving-kindness work.  But if not, it just might be wise to just turn one’s thought entirely away from the pain and go do something else—take a walk, do some housework, listen to some music you love, or mabye talk to a friend.

Is this “abandoning” the baby? Not really. It’s not like you probably won’t notice the mental pain wailing in the background! But the fact is, if you are utterly overwhelmed by some mental pain or emotion, grimly trying to push on will probably only increase your stress and anxiety and just make matters worse!  There are, however, times to really hang in there, and only you will know what’s skillful.  And yes, you will make mistakes as you learn, so don’t judge or condemn! At every step along the way, have the willingness to stop and listen to see what the best course of action, or non-action, might be.

After giving yourself some mental space, you may find that you can return to giving yourself metta—loving and embracing yourself in heartfelt well-wishes and the aspiration that you be free of mental entanglements and emotional knots—the kilesas of Buddhism. If you find you can return to mindfulness of the pain, and begin to investigate again with fearless, non-judgmental curiosity, that’s great. But if not, then my experience has generally been that working with the metta—with the loving-kindness work—is the most skillful thing you can do.  Again, only you can know.  This skillful path of self-examination and boundless love is as much an art of the heart as a kind of science of the mind.

The Power of Working with the “Not Self” Teaching to Deal with Big Mental Pain

My experience is that loving-kindness meditation can heal the mind and heart as effectively as deep meditative insight.  Indeed, I’ve found that cultivating a deep, unconditional, unselfed love for oneself and others always brings liberating insight, unbinding of the mind and heart.  There are times, however, when working with the “not self” teaching of the Buddha seems to be the most effective way to deal with powerful pain and mental trauma.  Again, there’s no general rule about what is “best” to use. What is “best” is what works!  Sometimes that might be loving-kindness meditation.  Another time it might be insight meditation that helps us see how suffering arises, the impermanence of something we think is so real, and how what we identify with as “self” causes suffering.

Meditative insight into “not self”—the “not me,” “not my”, “not mine,” “not I” nature of the mental things that plague us—is powerfully healing.  It develops equanimity.  What we don’t identify with as “my, “me,” or “mine” cannot cause us pain.  This non-identification isn’t dissociation, spiritual by-passing, psychological denial, or numbing ourselves out!  Looking into “not self” actually helps unbinds our hearts from limited views of self and the self-imposed limitations that deny the our essential freedom, clarity, goodness, and luminosity.

As we unbind by letting go of our painful clinging to an fabricated, dependent, illusory “self,” we at the same time gain the wisdom and compassion that come from deeply understanding the true nature of things. Deep understandin often leads to forgiveness of ourselves and of others.   But when there is great pain and trauma, full healing usually takes plumbing the depths of our hurt and seeing through the pain and various self-identifications that bind us to the past and to a suffering, fabricated sense of self.

What About Dealing with “Ordinary” Mental Pain and the Relentless Monkey Mind?

Though I’ve mainly focused in this essay on what to do when one is overwhelmed by big mental pain or some overwhelming emotion, much of the time, the minor discomforts and pains that arise in meditation don’t need a tour de force to be skillfully handled. Thank goodness! Many times one can simply note some lesser pain, some uncomfortable thought  or feeling or memory that would snag us, and then just smile at it and gently return to the “anchor” of our concentration, whether that’s the breath, a koan, a mantra, or some metta phrase.

You’ll have to see for yourself what works best, and each meditation session is different. There are times to diligently resist the tug of some thought or emotion by noting it, letting it go, smiling to the universe, and resolutely returning to the breath or the object of concentration. If we have to do that a thousand times in a sitting, that’s OK! What’s important is the process itself, the development of skills through own through mindful practice and loving-kindness.

Of course, the infamous “monkey” or “wild ox” mind feels that everything that arises in our thought is important and that everything we can think or feel should be pursued and chased after!  But I can happily report that as I have stuck with meditation practice, and as I’ve gained a better understanding of how my mind works, I’m far less likely to chase after some tempting “banana” of the “monkey mind”  But, it’s still work, I’ll be the first to admit.  Meditation is indeed a discipline.  Biologically speaking, it takes time and repetition for the brain to be create new pathways through the process called neuroplasticity.  Liberation takes “right effort,” one of the skills of the Eightfold Path, and the Buddha spoke highly of  the need to cultivate an ardent desire to be free from the monkey mind’s endless need to feed, its endless entanglements, and ceaseless illusions and delusions.

If we investigate mental pain with the tools of insight and loving-kindness, each time we do meditative work, we will find fresh, new ways to heal ourselves and to gain our freedom.  We will begin to see, not theoretically, but experientially, how the ceaseless chasing after thoughts and feelings creates a “self” from moment to moment.  The stopping and staying with the breath, or object of concentration, are how we begin to break down the wheel of fabricated becoming and its attendant suffering.

With each day’s practice of mindfulness, whether on or off “the cushion,” we will learn how to live life more freely and more skillfully.  We break down our habitual clinging to self-views and tired old story lines about ourselves.  It’s all a matter of learning how to pay attention, even when our “monkey mind” wants to swing from thought to thought and chase after some tempting “banana!”

Everything is Practice, Everything Can Teach Us, Healing is Possible

Meditation is truly an adventure!  As I said in the beginning, one never knows what will show up when one sits down to meditate. A big part of the practice is learning how to deal skillfully with what arises.  If meditation ever seems boring, it’s probably a sign one is not really paying attention!  Even boredom and dullness are something to look into, because they reveal something about the state of our minds.  In meditation everything—everything—is grist for the mill of mindfulness.  Indeed, everything we experience in life has something to teach us—when we give life our our full attention and open-minded curiosity—Zen’s wonderful “what is this?”

I hope what I’ve shared here from my own practice about dealing with pain and trauma has been helpful to you. Learning how to embrace our pain and our traumas with great compassion and loving-kindness does take practice and patience. But my friend, I can testify from my own struggles and efforts that this skill is something one can learn how to do it!  No matter how big our mental pains or how long we’ve had our traumas, we can always apply the medicine of the Buddha—mindfulness, attention, insight, wisdom, and loving-kindness—with great healing effect.

♡♡♡

Dr. Thynn Thynn

The following excerpt if from Living Meditation, Living Insight: The Path of Mindfulness in Daily Life by Dr. Thynn Thynn.

Dr. Thynn Thynn is a Burmese born retired physician and Dhamma teacher. She is mother of two and is the resident yogi at the Sae Taw Win II Dhamma Center in Northern California.

She is the author of many articles on Buddhism, childhood education and health related issues, published in Thailand and Burma.  She is the lineage holder of the Shwe Baw Gyun Burmese Buddhist tradition and teaches Classical Buddhism and Vipassana (Insight Meditation) for daily life.

Her book,Living Meditation, Living Insight: The Path of Mindfulness in Daily Life is a unique presentation of traditional Theravada teachings for lay people, and shows a strong flavor of Zen and Krishnamurti.

Letting Go and Picking Up

by Dr. Thynn Thynn

Why is “letting go” so important in Buddhism?

Thynn: The term “letting go” has become a catchword in Buddhist circles. It is true that “letting go” is crucial for arriving at self-realization of inner freedom, but you have to understand how to let go.

What are we supposed to let go of?

Let go of your clinging. Let go of the motivating desire behind whatever you’re doing. It may be a desire to succeed, to be perfect, to control others or to glorify yourself. It doesn’t matter what it is specifically; what matters is the desire behind your act. It is easy to mistake the act for the desire.

To let go is to let go of clinging to desire,

not to let go of the act.

We have been talking about stopping and looking at emotions. Try to stop and look at an act; see if you can identify the desire propelling it. When you see the desire, you can also detect the clinging to the desire. When you see the clinging, you see it resolve and you spontaneously let go.

There are so many things in life I don’ t want to renounce or let go of.

Of course not. We don’t let go for the sake of letting go. There is a parable about a Zen master who was approached by a pupil. The pupil asked, “I have nothing in my mind now; what shall I do next?” “Pick it up,” replied the master. This is an excellent example of the negation that comes with proper understanding, as opposed to pure nihilism.

If we are bound to the concept of letting go, then we are not free. When we are not free, understanding — pañña — does not arise. But if we truly see the clinging to desire and let go of it, our act becomes a pure act, without any attendant tensions or frustrations. When the act is pure and simple, we can accomplish more with less stress. At that point, you are “picking up” just as you are “letting go.”

Why is letting go so difficult? I can watch my other emotions like anger and hatred, but it is much harder to see desire and clinging.

That’s because desire and clinging precede anger and hatred. In any fit of emotion — and our mental formations occur so very fast — we can only identify gross emotions like anger and hatred. Desire and clinging are much more subtle, so it takes stronger samadhi to be able to see them.
You have been conditioned since you were very young to relate everything to yourself. As soon as you learn to recognize people and things, you’re taught how to relate these to the “I” and “mine”— my mom, my dad, my toy, etc. As you grow up you’re taught how to relate ideas and concepts to yourself. You have to learn that so that you can function properly in society.

But at the same time, this process slowly and unconsciously creates a concept of selfhood, and you build up your ego. This buildup is strengthened by the values of society. You learn to compete, to achieve, to accumulate knowledge, wealth and power. In other words, you are trained to possess and to cling.

By the time you are grown up, the concept of ego-self has become so real that it is difficult to tell what is illusion and what is reality. It is difficult to realize that “I” and “mine” are temporary, relative and changeable. The same is true of all that is related to “I” and “mine.” Not understanding that “I” and “mine” are temporary, you struggle to keep them permanent; you cling to them. This desire to try to keep everything permanent is what makes it so difficult to learn to let go.

I have trouble accepting the Buddhist idea of self as an illusion.

You have become so used to functioning with the “I” and “mine,” so used to thinking your “self” is real, that it is naturally difficult to understand the Buddhist way of thinking. The “I” and “mine,” being illusions themselves, survive only by clinging to illusions of their own making. They cling to all kinds of mental possessions — be they power, wealth, status or whatever — which are themselves conceptual creations of the mind with no substantial reality. In short, they are also illusions.

If “I” is an illusion and not reality, how can “I” get rid of the “I”?

How can you get rid of something that never was?

I feel that if I let go of “I” and “mine,” I would lose my identity. How can I exist if I let go of everything? Won’t I become cold and unfeeling? It sounds scary, like living in a vacuum.

You have to understand that what you lose is merely an illusion. It never was. You empty the mind of illusion about self. Just let go of the illusion.

In fact, you are not losing anything. You just remove an imaginary screen before your eyes. In the process you gain wisdom, or pañña. From this wisdom unfold the four virtues of unconditional love, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.

These virtues manifest themselves as concern, humanness and sensitivity to others. When you have pañña you can fully experience the beauty and warmth that is within all human relationships.

That is why letting go is not losing your illusory ego. You are actually uncovering a great treasure.

♥♥♥

Chris Smither

And here, for your listening enjoyment, is a light-hearted approach to the subject of Buddhist holding on, letting go, and attachment, by one of my favorite singer/songwriters, Chris Smither.

The song is called “Hey, Hey, Hey” and is from a great live recording called “Chris Smither: Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop.” Let go—and enjoy!

Amazon and iTunes don’t carry the album, but you can buy it here:

Chris Smither: Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop

♡♡♡

John Daido Loori

A hazy autumn moon, solitary and full,

falls as it may on the winding river ahead.


There are those who seek perfect clarity,


yet sweep as you may, you cannot empty the mind.

(The Capping Verse to Dongshan and Shenshan Cross the River)

“You can’t teach someone to walk a tightrope wire by telling them to move their muscles a certain way. The only way to learn is by doing it. Somehow your body acclimates to it, your mind learns, and it seeps into your subconscious. It happens all at once. Is the Dharma any different? Of course you’re going to fail; step after step after step. Yet you will learn every time you fail. You say you’re going to stay with the breath, and pretty soon you start chasing after thoughts. You acknowledge your distraction, you let it go, and you come back to the breath. You keep doing this until you’re able to stay with the breath. After a while you get pretty good at it, but all of a sudden you seem to be back to square one and you can’t stay focused for even five seconds. Your mind is all over the place. Then it comes back.

Repeated practice creates learning. Repeated mistakes create learning. That is why Mistake is in reality called learning. The state of no-mistake is called nowness. It is called “now.” It is called “thus.” In nowness there is no before; there is no after. There are no goals, no agendas, no fixed direction. There is just the moment. It arrives as it departs, simultaneously. It has no before or after. It is so difficult for us to grasp this truth. We need goals. We want agendas. We crave direction. The notion of wandering aimlessly is very frightening for most of us…

The state of no-mistake is called nowness. In nowness there is no before or after, no goals, agendas, or fixed direction. Like the meandering river, it twists and turns in accord with circumstances, but always knows how to find its way to the great ocean. When you are on the river, you may be paddling north for an hour, and suddenly there’ll be a bend up ahead. When you look at your compass, you see you’re going south. You may have to go the same length, except now you’re paddling in the opposite direction. Then you go east, then you go west, then north again. Is the river making a mistake on its journey to the ocean?

Should the river be like a pipeline, one straight channel without bends or curves? Think of a river flowing through the forest. It is all curves and bends. It changes from season to season. When trees fall down and block it up, it rises up behind them, opening a new path. It twists and turns in accord with circumstances. It responds spontaneously, dealing with each moment as it comes up. Ultimately, the river will make its way to the great ocean.

If you wish to travel like this you must go alone. Alone. Not lonely, but alone. All one, containing everything. And not carry any baggage. Put down the backpack, take off the blinders. Whatever you are carrying will affect what you do. Most importantly, You must trust yourself implicitly. Give yourself permission to be yourself.

The capping verse: A hazy autumn moon, solitary and full, falls as it may on the winding river ahead. It falls as it may, randomly. In its haziness, it is not controlled. The hazy moon of enlightenment is imperfect. Anuttara-samyaksambodhi is imperfect. It has pimples and bumps.

It is the Tenth Ox-herding Picture with the old sagely guy stumbling through the marketplace with a bag on his back. He is laughing at falling leaves, playing with children. This is a step beyond the crystal-clear moon of enlightenment. Dogen says, “No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment continues endlessly.” There are those who seek perfect clarity, yet sweep as you may, you cannot empty the mind. Keizan Zenji said that. Sweeping itself can sometimes fill the mind. The simple activity of emptying fills it.

Remember, the whole thing is hopeless. Taking care of the environment is hopeless, but we’ll do it. Achieving enlightenment is hopeless, but we’ll do it. Clarifying the mind, emptying the mind — impossible. We’ll do it. Just like the Four Vows say: “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” How in the world are we going to do that, if they’re numberless? “Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them. The dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them. The Buddha Way is unattainable, I vow to attain it.” Utterly hopeless. Yet we’re doing it.

We are Don Quixotes, jousting with windmills. That is our practice. The apparent impossibility does not make one bit of difference in our resolve. What is required is the kind of tenacity, the kind of vow that comes out of this practice. Imperfections notwithstanding, we will ultimately take care of this earth, and of each other. That is our vow.”

From Commentary from a Dharma Discourse by Roshi John Daido Loori on Dongshan and Shenshan Cross the River

♥♥♥

Steve Goodheart Essay

The ego has many traps, but one of the worst is self-identification with one’s talent. If one self-identifies with one’s artistic or creative talent, this inevitably leads to suffering as the ego’s unquenchable needs and desires can never be satisfied by that talent.

Indeed, the world is filled with “hungry ghosts” whose attachment to their talents makes them ravenous for recognition, for success, for adulation. Starved for what their talent can never bring them—a genuine self-love that is not based upon talent, performance, or success—their talent becomes a curse that dries up their humanity and makes them hate others for not recognizing their talent and meeting their emotional needs. Because such people lack compassion for themselves, they inevitable have little compassion for others.

The thing is, our talents are a gift; we did nothing to deserve or earn them, though we may sometimes think we can take personal pride in how we practice or utilize that talent. But even this pride of practice is an illusion of the ego, another false way to identify ourselves. Why? Because no matter how much we practice our talents, it will never be enough, it will never be good enough, to fill the hole in one’s heart.

Even worse, we have now identified ourselves as the “talented person” who should, indeed, must, succeed because he “paid his dues,” or was the dutiful son or daughter who used his God-given gift, his talents, and thus deserves to succeed. The delusion is that one is still seeing one’s worth as something one creates by his or her actions, by his or her relative success. There is no compassion in this ruthless view. It is suffering itself.

Worth Does Not Come from What We Identify Ourselves With

The problem is, genuine worth and value can never be found by self-identification with anything, no matter how good or great. Genuine worth and value are a priori to all conditions. True worth and value are not a fabrication. They are not dependent upon anything. Worth and value just are. We discover they are the very condition of our being—when we let go of all false identifications, grasping, and clinging, and just open ourselves up to what’s already there.

When we own our talent, instead of being owned by it, then we are like a beautiful rose. The rose is just what it is. It doesn’t practice to be a rose. It’s very nature is rose-ness! Letting go our egotistical self-identification with whatever talents we have, we are then free to discover the full potential of our talent. To the world, from the outside, this sometimes might look like “practice” or “paying one’s dues,” or damn hard work! But in reality, if one is truly free and unattached to the talent one has, then what one is really doing is honoring the gift one has been given without seeking taking self-worth or identity from one’s gift.  One is then not driven by talent but takes care of it with wisdom and compassion.

The Buddha’s teaching on “not self” is so very helpful in freeing ourselves from attachment to anything, even wonderful things that we may admire and love. If we can really get what “not self” is about—and it’s not about self-annihilation or self-obliteration—then we discover a happiness that circumstances, successes or failures, cannot take from us. We can have genuine compassion on ourselves, not judging or condemning ourselves or others for human weaknesses or failures.

Success and Failure are Fabrications—Don’t Be Fooled!

Success is a fabrication—sometimes a mighty fabrication, but a fabrication nonetheless. Failure is also a fabrication—and yes, at times, a mighty big fabrication—but a fabrication nonetheless. Neither human success or human failure define us unless we make the mistake of self-identifying with that success or failure.

Always remember this: We are more than our human successes and failures!  And we are more than our talents, even talents that may seen little less than “divine.” How much more we can never know until we let go stop identifying ourselves with things we have no control over and talents we did not create or originate. At best, we are simply caretakers of our gifts, but we do not own them, and we certainly should not allow them to own us!

I love the great teaching in yoga that whatever one does, one does it “as unto God” and then lets go of attachment to results or outcome. The outcome is left to God, to the unfolding of the divine, to the cause and effect of right actions. I think this profound wisdom is the flip-side or positive complement of the “not self” teaching of the Buddha.

Doing Things for Love and with Love

To do things selflessly, for Love itself, and to let go of all attachment to what we want, to what we think should happen is a true sādhanā, or spiritual practice. It requires letting go of ego and ego needs. It means letting go of the idea that we deserve success—or failure—because of our efforts or lack of effort.

It means putting aside all of that, and entering in to the joy of Being itself, without reference to a small self or ego and its limited wants and desires.   Yes, it can feel like death to let go of the ego’s most-cherished dreams, but dreams they are, because they lack a realistic sense of what we truly are. Letting go and trusting the process, trusting Love itself, what we gain is a true life and more genuine self-fulfillment that we can now possibly imagine.  Nothing good will ever be lost in letting go this way.

Awakening to what is, we find that self-expression is no different than Self-expression, and not-self is no different than Self. This  is indeed bliss, release, and undying happiness. This is the way to take care of ourselves and our talents on a compassionate path of liberation.

♥♥♥

Everyone is Just Trying to Get Born Before They Die

I found these passages very helpful in understanding how we identify with our pain and suffering and how letting go liberates our hearts.

“Turning Toward the Mystery” by Stephen Levine

“Shut away alone in an upstairs in those early years and feeling sorry for myself tend to make one rather narcissistic. The whole world shrinks to the size of your pain, a very tight fit. Only you alone are left to protect yourself and the world from catching fire…

With the theology of ego-as-center-of-the-universe numbing my pain, I became indifferent to the pain of others. With my heart so often like a stone, I acted in such a hurtful manner that considerable apology is due.

When I came to see from a place other than the pained consciousness, I knew that somehow I had to heal this narcissistic pain and complete my birth. I had to find out who I was beneath all the fear and confusion, to heal the mind into the heart, to find peace.

At times in meditation that confused child that I was would crawl into my arms and tremble with feelings of abandonment, until meditation floated away the fear that no one could love him.

Indeed, that child might have stayed submerged in a kind of emaciated self-pity if I had not cared so much for him, nurtured him, and begun slowly to unwrap his cocoon.

Releasing a child’d grief from its binding is a work of self-mercy so tender and subtle it purifies the air you and your loved ones breathe. But we need to be very mindful, because we are so attached to our suffering. It makes up a large part of our identity. Narcissus often uses pain to define, even outline, the image he find reflected on the murky surface of the mind…”

♥♥♥

“There are ten thousand stepping-stones on the path of healing. They gloat like galaxies in the mind. Each takes us one step farther into the mystery. None tell what’s next. We honor the mystery with trust in the process.

We are mesmerized by our wounds and unfulfilled desires. We find it difficult to define ourselves without them. They are among the first often-repeated confidences we share.

We will not let go of fear and hatred, no matter how badly they make us feel, because we just don’t believe we could ‘be ourselves’ without them. We identify so with our suffering that it is difficult for us to imagine who we would be without it.

Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do, and among the most fruitful and gratifying….The heart become restored when we surrender our pain and begin to release the grasping that turns the open palm to a closed fist.

When the heart peels back those once supple fingers that have gradually become frozen into a fist around its fears and attachments, it is at first surprisingly painful to open that cramped closeness. But it is, as the teachers say, ‘the pain that ends pain.’

When the mind sinks into the heart, the common ordinary grief that misdirects and limits us daily beings to let go of its holding, and lifelong tension in the belly is noticed to be softening. The armoring melts to plowshares, and peace at last becomes possible.

These are Herculean labors of love to be accomplished in order to break free of the ordinarily lost, small, and grieving mind.

As our personal pain eventually gets our attention, we awaken to the universal pain as well and gradually begin to participate in the hurt and healing of all sentient beings.

Slowly we begin sending compassion into our frightened Narcissus. How long will it take to bring our Narcissus off the cross?”

Stephen Levine

♥♥♥

Right now, I am reading his spiritual autobiography, Turning Toward the Mystery. From the very beginning, Levine had a deep spiritual hunger, and yet like most of us, he struggled to find his way to a deep, meaningful understanding of the life—a path with heart.

Levine recounts his troubled youth, being a drug addict who lived and worked with the seminal figures of the Beat poetry and jazz scene in New York. He describes his life in the psychedelic sixties in San Francisco, and explains how his spiritual seeking eventually led him to spiritual teachers like Ram Dass, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and the Dalai Lama.

I have found his story so moving, and so deeply helpful to understanding my own struggles that I can hardly put the book down. Almost every page has something that illuminates something I’ve been struggling to understand in my own life. His depth of compassion and his understanding of the human heart are so very healing.

As I slowly work through the book—it’s the kind of book that you makes you stop and ponder your own life—I will share some passages that stand out to me.

Here’s a passage that really struck me today:

“Healing is a clearing of the path ahead for what used to be called purification before Freud and those frightening images of hell projected from so many ancient holy books made us even more frightened and distrusting of ourselves.

Purification does not deal in heinous sin or colorful fetish, but simply in letting something more merciful than frightened judgment embrace whatever we fear is impure, whatever remains yet unloved.

Some refer to this process as “opening the lotus,” because the lotus must rise above often dark and fetid waters before it can bloom.

Indeed, in this process, I had to remind myself more than once not to think in terms of perfection, but instead of liberation. Watching how feelings of imperfection were drawn toward the “perfection” of the religious ideal (which gives rise to so much judgement and so many holy wars), rather than the liberation of the spirit from such conceptual encumbrances.

Everyone is just trying to get born before they die.”

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Trungpa Rinpoche once said, “Renunciation is realizing that nostalgia for samsara is full of shit.” Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited petty world is insane. One you begin to get the feeling of how big the world is and how vast our potential for realizing life is, then you really begin to understand renunciation.” Pema Chodron – The Wisdom of No Escape.

Pema Chodron on “Renunciation” from The Wisdom of No Escape

“When we sit in meditation, we feel our breath as it goes out, and we have some sense of willingness just to be open to the present moment. Then our mind wanders off into all kinds of stories and fabrications and manufactured realities, and we say to ourselves, ‘It’s thinking.’ We say that with a lot of gentleness and a lot of precision. Every time we are willing to let go at the end of the out-breath, that’s fundamentally renunciation: learning how to let go of holding on and holding back.

The river flows rapidly down the mountain, and then all of a sudden it gets blocked with big boulders and lots of trees. The water can’t go any farther, even though it has tremendous force and forward energy. It just gets block there. That’s what happens with us too; we get blocked like that. Letting go at the end of the out-breath, letting the thoughts go, is like moving one of those boulders away so that the water can keep flowing, so that our energy and our life force can keep evolving and moving forward. We don’t, out of fear of the unknown, have to put up these blocks, these dams, that basically say no to life and to feeling life…

When we meditate, we’re creating a situation where there’s a lot of space. That sounds good, but actually it can be unnerving, because when there’s a lot of space you can see clearly: you’ve removed your veils, your shields, your armor, you dark glasses, your earplugs, your layer and layers of mittens, your heavy boots. Finally, you’re standing, touching the earth, feeling the sun on you body, feeling its brightness, hearing all the noises without anything to dull the sound. You take off your nose plug, and maybe your going to smell lovely fresh air or maybe you’re in the middle of a garbage dump or a cesspool.

Since meditation has this quality of bringing you very close to yourself and your experience, you tend to come up against your edge faster. It’s not an edge that wasn’t there before, but because things are so simplified and clear, you see it, and you see it vividly and clearly.

How do we renounce? How do we work with this tendency to block and to freeze and to refuse to take another step toward the unknown? If our edge is like a huge stone wall with a door in it, how do we learn to open that door and step through it again and again, so that life becomes a process of growing up, becoming more and more fearless and flexible, more and more able to play like a raven in the wind?

…Whenever you realize you have met your edge—you’re scared and you’re frozen, and your blocked—you’re able to recognize it because you open enough to see what’s happening. It’s already a sign of your aliveness and that fact that you’ve shed a lot, that you can see so clearly and vividly. Rather than think that you’ve made a mistake, you can acknowledge the present moment and its teaching, or so we are instructed. You can hear the message, which is simply that you are saying, ‘No.’ The instruction isn’t then to ‘smash ahead and karate-chop that whole thing;’ the instruction is to soften, to connect with your heart, and engender a basic attitude of generosity toward yourself, the archetypical coward.

The journey of awakening—the classical journey of the mythical hero or heroine—is one of continually coming up against big challenges and then learning how to soften and open. In other words, the paralyzed quality seems to be hardening and and refusing, and the letting go or the renunciation of that attitude is simply feeling the whole thing in your heart, letting it touch your heart. You soften and feel compassion for your predicament and for the whole human condition. You soften so that you can actually sit there with those troubling feelings and let them soften you more.

The whole journey of renunciation, or starting to say yes to life, is first of all realizing that you’ve come up against your edge, that everything in you is saying no, and then at that point, softening. This is yet another opportunity to develop loving-kindness for yourself, which results in playfulness—like learning to play like a raven in the wind…”

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Steve Goodheart Essay

The path of awakening, of liberation, always includes self-observation and self-inquiry. Without them, we tend to repeat the same unskillful ways of thinking and acting over and over again. That’s what is called samsara in Buddhism.

In this essay I’m sharing my thoughts and observations on something I’ve struggled with much of my life: a compulsive need to please others in order to feel good about myself. Using what I’m learning from the Buddha’s teachings, I am developing the skill of catching myself right at the moment I begin to do this habitual behavior so I don’t act it out.

Part of me knows that unless I feel genuinely good about myself, it will finally make little difference if I feel good about myself because someone else likes what I did. This sense of self-worth is ephemeral, dependent on another, and can vanish in a moment if another rejects, ignores, of disapproves of the effort to please or make them happy. (And often, if the other person senses you are doing something merely for approval, or to look good in their eyes, they will consciously or unconsciously have aversion to that motive.  They will sense the clinging and attachment involved in what is being done “for” them, but that is really, for ourselves, to make ourselves feel good or approved of.)

Catching  Yourself in the Moment An Urge Arises

So here’s what I’ve been practicing. The Buddha points out many times how important it is to catch the beginning or arising of some thought or feeling and to arrest it and look into it, bringing it to a halt before it mindlessly cascades into actions.  (This is what kamma, or karma, is all about.)

So first, I establish the intent and aspiration to catch my habitual pattern of wanting to please others. (And I try to love and cherish this aspiration with all my heart.  Also, I want to stop suffering!)  Cherishing this aspiration, when I notice the urge arising to do something for another, I stop. I get in contact with my breath and center and smile to myself.

When I am quiet and present, I then look and see what is really going on. I look to see if there is the desire to please another, to placate another, to deflect another, perhaps because we are afraid of them. I look to see if my desire to do something is selfless, open, and free, or if it comes from a lack of self worth, or nervousness about being myself, or just for stimulus and response, like a kind of drug.

See What Arises But Don’t Judge or Condemn Yourself

If through mindfulness and attention, I see these other motives, I do not reject them, or fall into self-condemnation or self-loathing. Rather, I see them just as they are—as something arising out of my present sense of self and the past conditioning that created this present sense of self. These motivations are not inherent; they are not a permanent part of my nature. They are fabrications that come as “me,” as “I”, as “mine,” that are truly not-self. They do not really say anything true about me or real about me other than I am habitually identifying with them as myself.

If I can see this not-self nature of my less-than-healthy motivations to feel good about myself, then usually a great compassion arises in me. This compassion is for myself—for my humanity, my frailty, my inexperience, for my hungry needs that I can’t take very good care of much of the time. I see that I need to stop hating and condemning myself for the things in me I don’t like, or even despise, and to start truly loving myself, right where I am, warts and all, so to speak.

This kind of love, which in a certain sense is impersonal, because it’s not dependent on anything, and just is, does not ignore what needs to be let go of or unidentified with. Rather this kind of love holds the whole human being in its arms, without question and without objection. Like a mother tenderly holding a child, this self-less love hold one in compassion, with a great wisdom that deeply understands how hard life is, how much we suffer from thoughts and feelings we identify with, and how hard it is to just be a human being.

The Importance of Metta, Loving-Kindness in Deep Self-Inquiry

This kind of love is called metta or maitre in Buddhism, and is rightfully called one of the divine abidings. To abide in selfless or unselfed love is truly divine, a taste of release from the suffering that comes from what we ignorantly or willfully cling to as “I” and “me” and “mine.” While metta, or loving-kindness meditation is a practice of its own, I have often found that the deep concentration and insight of Buddhist meditation often brings such pain and suffering to light, that I have to stop and do this loving-kindness work for myself. There’s nothing wrong with this if you have to do it!

You aren’t spoiling your meditation by stopping to do metta, nor are you spoiling your loving-kindness work if you stop to really look deeply to something that arises while doing metta. I see metta and meditation as two wings of the dharma, so to speak. You need both wings to fly, to soar. If one neglects, or resists, either wing, our progress will not be as swift, and we will tend to flutter around and wonder why we aren’t doing better.

Finally, to me, the distinction between love and wisdom, between loving-kindness and insight, is artificial, even bogus. Distinctions are of course important in order to learn a skill or understand how something works. But the deeper one goes into the dharma, the more one sees the unity of these various skills. You see how they all inter-are, as my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh likes to say. Love has inter-being with insight. Compassion has inter-being with wisdom. Equanimity has inter-being with generosity of spirit. Sympathetic joy in the happiness of others has inter-being with selflessness.

Doing for Others Skillfully and with Love and Wisdom

This sharing of mine has broadened out from the initial problem of doing things to please others, but I hope this discussion shows how these skills and this loving, mindful approach could be used for anything we do that is causing us suffering in our lives. The big thing is to pay attention, to notice what we do, and then to stop, breathe, get quiet, and look into what’s going on. As we do this, arising compassion and loving-kindness help us “un-self” ourselves from what we identify with.

Doing good for others, I want to add, is a very natural and good thing, and is an integral part of the Buddhist path.  Another one of the “divine abidings” is dana, or generosity, and the ways of being generous, with wisdom, are endless.  What I’ve been talking about is motivation for doing good, and how to purify it and set it free from needfulness and lack of self-worth.

On this mindful, loving path, we can never really lose or fail. Everything teaches us, even what we see as failures.  And remember, the kind of unselfed love I’m pointing to never, ever, gives up on us. It just is. Through mindfulness and presence, this unselfed love can grow and grow, taking us all the way home to freedom.

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