Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (13 page)

This practice takes us to the edge, the point beyond which
we think we can’t go. Breathing into the center of the chest, taking that one breath directly into the heartspace, opening to the pain that feels as if it’s going to do us in, teaches us that it won’t do us in. We begin to experience the spaciousness of the heart, where our hard-hearted judgments soften and our darkest moods lighten up. We begin to understand that awareness heals; and to open to this healing, one more breath into the heart is all that’s required.

The four basic reminders for practicing with emotional distress are:

1. Awakening aspiration
   : seeing our distress as the path to awakening
   
2. Awakening curiosity
   : experiencing the physical reality of the moment by asking “What
   is
   it?”
   
3. Awakening humor
   : seeing our difficulties from an enlarged perspective as simply the “stuff” of our conditioning
   
4. Awakening loving-kindness
   : allowing the spaciousness of the open heart to heal our deepest shame and darkest states of mind
   
 

Working with these four reminders entails revisiting some fundamental practice questions: “What are the thoughts?” “What are my pictures, my requirements here?” “How do I think it’s ‘supposed’ to be?” We have to label our thoughts again and again to clearly see all the ideals and expectations out of which we live. And along with uncovering our deep beliefs, we must repeatedly return to residing in the physical reality of the moment.

To willingly reside in our distress, no longer resisting what is, is the real key to transformation. This means learning to welcome our difficulties. What does it mean to welcome a difficulty? It’s not that we seek out our deep fears, humiliation, or longing, but that, when we meet them, we open fully to their searing power. To find the way to the open heart, we
must work with whatever blocks the path. As painful as it may be to face our deepest fears, we do reach the point at which it’s more painful not to face them. This is a pivotal point in the practice life.

In the movie
Say Anything
, a high school senior wants to ask the most beautiful, intelligent girl in the class out on a date. After listening to his friends’ repeated admonishments that he is a “nerd” who is just going to be hurt, he flings his arms out wide and shouts, “I
want
to be hurt!” He understands that to be truly open, he has to risk being vulnerable.

In the midst of our drama, it’s sometimes helpful to consciously remember how it’s keeping us from living our genuine life. Feeling the limitation of our fears, shame, and suffering and breathing it into the heartspace allows us to penetrate the protective barriers that comprise our substitute way of being. As we begin to move beyond the artificial construct that we call a “self”—the seat of all our emotional distress—we enter into a wider container of awareness. We see that our emotional drama, however distressful, is still just thoughts, just memories, just sensations. Who we really are—our basic connectedness—is so much bigger than just this body, just this personal drama.

Seeing this bigger picture one time, two times, or even a dozen times doesn’t mean we’ll no longer have emotional reactions. But keeping the bigger picture in view does help us avoid getting lost in our distress as quickly, as intensely, or for as long. We begin to understand and even believe that all our stuff is workable. We can finally know that no matter how messy or painful our emotional state may be, it’s still, at bottom, just deeply held thoughts combined with strong or uncomfortable physical sensations. All that’s required of us is the willingness to be with what is. When we finally allow ourselves to be with what we’d rather avoid—which is simply not feeling good—then our very drama becomes the path to freedom.

12

Work and Practice

D
URING MY MIDTWENTIES
I worked in traditional white-collar jobs, first as a teacher and then as a computer programmer. But I was not happy. I hated what I was doing and anguished for more than a year over finding my “real lifework.” I was just beginning to practice, and a fellow practitioner suggested that every time anxiety arose over what kind of work would be right for me, I refrain from thinking about it and instead attempt to feel the physical reality of my life in that moment. At the time his approach made no sense to me, but I was desperate enough to try it anyway. After practicing this way for a few months, even though I didn’t get any insights into what work to pursue, I sensed something genuine about the quality of awareness that was apparent when I put thinking aside and focused on the “whatness” of the moment. Then one day, almost out of the blue, I realized that “my path” was to become a carpenter. Even though I had no experience in carpentry, it was clear that in learning to be a carpenter, I would have to address many of the fears and self-beliefs that I knew were holding me back.

In trying to make an important decision such as what direction our work should take, it helps to be willing to drop the endless weighing and measuring of pros and cons. The spinning mind will just continue to spin. The genuine answers can only come from having a clear understanding of who we are and what our life is. But this type of understanding will be clouded until we drop our mental obsessing and enter into the
physical experience of the anguish of not knowing what to do. As the light of awareness penetrates through the layers of tension and disease, we encounter a clarity of purpose that would forever elude us if we worked solely on trying to unravel our mental world.

The attachment to figuring out our decisions through thinking is based on the all-too-human tendency to seek ground beneath our feet. When contemplating what our lifework might be, our attachment to security and a sense of safety is what drives us. We gravitate toward thinking in the belief that we can avoid experiencing the sense of groundlessness inherent in change. But entering into groundlessness itself is the key to resolving our problem. Our willingness to experience the physical sense of no ground is what will eventually bring us to clarity, because it will allow us to see through the roots of our fear. But we can do this only when we’re finally willing to give up our addiction to subjective thinking. I’m not suggesting that we throw all our thinking aside. There will always be practical considerations—money, education, and so on—but these logistical factors cannot be our main focus in settling on what our work will be.

Perhaps the one question that we don’t ask often enough is “What do I have to offer?” We are so intent on analyzing what we can get from a job or an occupation that we rarely consider the sense of satisfaction that comes from offering our unique contribution. We could take the question “What do I have to offer?” as a koan, leaving the world of mental analysis in order to enter into the experience of not knowing. Simply raising the question and focusing on the gestalt of the moment may not bring any immediate answers. Nor is it particularly pleasant, since it brings us once again face-to-face with the experience of no ground. However, there is something about being in the moment that is compelling, real, and far removed from the confused spinning of the mental world.

• • •

A more common difficulty that arises around work is finding ourselves in a situation in which we feel stuck, anxious, or simply unhappy. We don’t necessarily want a different occupation, but we constantly question whether to change jobs. In the context of practice, this is an interesting question. Our conventional response to an uncomfortable job situation is to believe that something is wrong and look for a way out. But in the practice life, we don’t measure the value of something by how much pleasure or comfort it brings. We do, however, recognize the value of distress, in that what we learn from our distress can transform us. We know through practice that just because something requires an effort that feels uncomfortable doesn’t necessarily make it undesirable. That a situation feels bad doesn’t make it bad. From a practice perspective, the case is often just the opposite.

If you’re having a strong emotional reaction to your job, it’s a given that from the practice point of view, there is something of value to be learned. The problem is not simply the job. Of two people doing the same job, one may feel satisfaction while the other feels nothing but distress. Our emotional reaction is primarily based on what
we
bring to the job rather than the job itself. Our reactions are always tied to the baggage we bring in—expectations, needs, and agendas.

It’s not that we should stay in a job just in order to practice. But we should at least consider what we can learn from a job before we decide to leave. It’s helpful to remain in a job as long as you’re having strong emotional reactions, in order to see through your believed thoughts and conditioned fears. Because one thing is certain: if you leave to go to another job, you will take the same beliefs and fears with you. If staying in a particular job is unrealistic, you can set a time limit on how long you’ll stay, aspiring to learn as much as you can within that time limit.

Even if we like our work, or at least have no intention of leaving our present job, there are always ways in which we can
make awareness practice a greater part of our workday. Perhaps more than anything, this requires a shift from how we normally relate to our work—as separate from practice—to seeing our work as our path. We often forget what our real job—our life job—is. Our life job is to become awake to who we really are. When we remember this, we will be less likely to separate our work from our practice. We’ll begin to understand that it’s possible to practice with
everything
we encounter, even at work. To make this shift challenges our long-standing conditioned views and habits; consequently the best way to transform the relationship with our workday is by taking small steps. This is where mindfulness practice, in which we bring attention to the texture of the present moment, can be particularly helpful.

Applying mindfulness is the blue-collar work of practice. There is nothing romantic, mystical, or even exciting about dealing with the nuts and bolts of our mundane daily routine, beyond the subtle satisfaction that comes with beginning to understand that it’s possible to practice with everything. We see that picking up a ringing phone, closing a door, becoming aware of sounds, or even going to the bathroom can all be used as reminders to be awake in the moment. Our work then becomes an opportunity to wake up.

One of the keys in practicing with work entails looking at the emotional dramas that keep repeating themselves in the work environment. Whatever core beliefs we’ve developed, whatever our particular behavioral strategies are, they’re sure to muck things up at work as much as they do in our relationships. The less personalized environment of work can be helpful in reflecting back to us the patterns we’re repeating in every other aspect of our lives.

Beginning when I was eleven, I worked for my father during the summer for ten years. My brother and sisters and I were the sales force for his souvenir store on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Although we were pretty aggressive salespeople, when
my father perceived that business was not going well, he would sometimes explode in anger. Unfortunately the anger was usually directed at one of his children; most often, it seemed, at me. My father was quite powerful when he was angry. He would shout about how I wasn’t trying, how I was unappreciative, how I was just going through the motions. When he’d shout like this, everyone in the store would freeze. Then, when he stomped out of the store, the nervous customers, especially the customers I was waiting on, would start buying like crazy. Looking back, this seems almost comical, but at the time good humor was far from my mind.

As angry as I’d get when I felt I’d been unjustifiably picked on, I was nonetheless your typical good boy and would proceed to try harder. At one point I started listing all my sales and adding them up at the end of the day. I’d show this list to my father to prove to him that I was measuring up. For many years, in a variety of contexts, I continued this strategy of “making a list” to prove that I was worthy. I felt that if I could tangibly demonstrate my success, my productivity, my value, it would ward off the core fear of being judged unworthy.

Of course, this strategy, like all strategies of behavior modification, never really worked. Perhaps it allowed me to achieve external success in that it drove me to excel, but it never addressed my core fear that I was not measuring up. The core fear, and all the day-to-day anxiety that arose out of it, could only be held at bay temporarily. As long as we don’t see clearly that we are just acting from pictures, and as long as we don’t open up to experiencing the layers of protection and fear that underlie most of these pictures, any meaningful transformation will elude us. When I finally started seeing this dynamic for what it was, I was able to approach my deeply ingrained behavior pattern quite differently. Instead of trying to live out of the picture that I had to measure up, instead of following the behavior of “making my lists,” I learned to bring awareness to the fear itself.

Each of us has to see our own version of “making a list.” Is your style to get hooked into the “child” identity, needing to please and get approval from someone whom you blindly identify as an authority? Or is your pattern to be busy, busy, busy, with the anxious feeling that you’re trying to juggle at least one too many plates? Can you see the addictive quality of the busyness, how you use it to validate your own worth, to distract yourself from the underlying fear of being “nothing”? Although we believe that we have to do everything on our plate, all it takes is a prolonged bout of illness to show us that this is not true. We are not indispensable, and much of what we think we have to do can be delegated, put on hold, or even deleted from our agenda. The problem is not how much work we have to do but how we’re using that work to bolster and solidify our identity. Living the practice life is about becoming free of
any
restricting identity, especially those based primarily in fear.