Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (12 page)

Whether we do tonglen as a formal practice or on the spot, does it take time to get used to? Yes, it does. Does it take getting accustomed to the rawness of pain? Does it take patience and gentleness? Yes, it does. There’s no need to get discouraged when the practice seems too hard. Allow yourself to ease into it slowly at your own pace, working first with situations that are easy for you right now. I always remember what Chögyam Trungpa used to say when I was losing my confidence and wanted to give up. He’d sit
up tall and smile broadly and proclaim, “You can do it!” Somehow his confidence was contagious, and when I heard those words, I knew I could.

I once read a poem about practicing tonglen in a time of war. The imagery was of breathing in bombs falling, violence, despair, losing your legs and coming home with your face burned and disfigured, and then sending out the beauty of the earth and sky, the goodness of people, safety and peace. In the same spirit, we can breathe in hatred and jealousy, envy and addiction—all the sorrow of the human drama—using our personal experience of that pain and extending tonglen to all others caught in the same way. Then we can breathe out flexibility, lightheartedness, nonaggression, strength—whatever we feel will bring comfort and upliftedness and relief. The pain of the world pierces us to the heart, but we never forget the goodness of being alive.

Chögyam Trungpa once said, “The problem with most people is that they are always trying to give out the bad and take in the good. That has been the problem of society in general and the world altogether.” The time has come for us to try the opposite approach: to take in the bad and give out the good. Compassion is not a matter of pity or the strong helping the weak; it’s a relationship between equals, one of mutual support. Practicing tonglen, we come to realize that other people’s welfare is just as important as our own. In helping them, we help ourselves. In helping ourselves, we help the world.

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The Catalyst for Compassion

S
OMEONE SENT ME
a poem that seems to capture the essence of the warrior commitment—empathy for other beings. Called “Birdfoot’s Grampa,” the poem is about a boy and his grandfather who are driving on a country road in a rainstorm. The grandfather keeps stopping the car and getting out to scoop up handfuls of toads that are all over the road and deposit them safely at the roadside. After the twenty-fourth time he’s done this, the boy loses patience and tells his grandfather, “You can’t save them all / accept it, get back in / we’ve got places to go.” And the grandfather, knee deep in wet grass, his hands full of toads, just smiles at his grandson and says, “They have places to go too.”

What a clear illustration of how this commitment works. The grandfather didn’t mind stopping for the twenty-fourth time, didn’t mind getting wet to save the toads. He also didn’t mind the impatience of his grandson, because he was very clear in his mind that the frogs had as much desire to live as he did.

The aspiration of the second commitment—to care for all beings everywhere—is huge. But whether we’re making this commitment for the very first time or we’re renewing it for the umpteenth time, we start exactly where we are now. We’re either closer to the grandson or closer to the grandfather, but wherever we are, that’s where we start.

It’s said that when we make this commitment, it sows a seed deep in our unconscious, deep in our mind and heart, that never goes away. This seed is a catalyst that jump-starts our inherent capacity for love and compassion, for empathy, for seeing the sameness of us all. So we make the commitment, we sow the seed, and then do our best to never harden our heart or close our mind to anyone.

It’s not easy to keep this vow, of course. But every time we break it, what’s important is that we recognize that we’ve closed someone out, that we’ve distanced ourselves from someone, that we’ve turned someone into the Other, the one on the opposite side of the fence. Often we’re so full of righteous indignation, so charged up, that we don’t even see that we’ve been triggered. But if we’re fortunate, we realize what’s happened—or it’s pointed out to us—and we acknowledge to ourselves what we’ve done. Then we simply renew our commitment to stay open to others, aspiring to start fresh.

Some people like to read or recite an inspiring verse as part of renewing their commitment. One we could use is the verse from Shantideva that is traditionally repeated to reaffirm the intention to benefit others:

Just as the awakened ones of the past

Aroused an awakened mind

And progressively established themselves

In the practices of the Bodhisattva,

So I too for the benefit of beings

Shall arouse an awakened mind

And progressively train myself in those practices.

We repeat these words or something similar to renew our commitment; then it’s a new moment and we go forward.
We will stumble again and start again over and over, but as long as the seed is planted, we will always be moving in the direction of being more and more open to others, more and more compassionate and caring.

The commitment to take care of one another, the warrior commitment, is not about being perfect. It’s about continuing to put virtuous input into our unconscious, continuing to sow the seeds that predispose our heart to expand without limit, that predispose us to awaken. Every time we recognize that we’ve broken this commitment, rather than criticize ourselves, rather than sow seeds of self-judgment and self-denigration—or seeds of righteous indignation, rage, or whatever other frustrations we take out on other people—we can sow seeds of strength, seeds of confidence, seeds of love and compassion. We’re sowing seeds so that we will become more and more like that grandfather and the many other people we know—or have heard about—who seem to be happy to put their life on the line for the sake of others.

When you do feel bad about yourself for your rigid and unforgiving heart, you can take consolation from Shantideva. He says that when he took the vow to save all sentient beings, it was “clear insanity,” because even though he was unaware of it at the time, he was “subject to the same afflictions” as others—he was as confused as anyone else.

Our confusion is the confusion that everyone feels. So when you think that you’ve blown it in every possible way, that you’ve broken the commitment irredeemably, Shantideva suggests that instead of becoming mired in guilt, you view it as an incentive to spend the rest of your life recognizing your habitual tendencies and doing your best not to strengthen them.

Making the warrior commitment is like being on a sinking ship and vowing to help all the other passengers get off the boat before we do. A few years ago, I saw a perfect example of this when a U.S. Air plane went down in the Hudson River in New York City. Shortly after the plane took off from LaGuardia Airport, birds knocked out the engines, and the pilot had no choice but to ditch the plane in the river. The landing was so skillful that all 155 people aboard the aircraft survived. I can still picture them standing on the wings until they were rescued by a flotilla of small boats that rushed to the scene. The story is that the pilot stayed on the plane until everyone was safely out, then searched it again twice to make sure that no one was left behind. That’s the kind of role model who embodies the warrior commitment.

On the other hand, I’ve also heard stories from people who were in similar situations but fled for safety without giving a thought to anyone else. They always talk about how bad that makes them feel in retrospect. One woman told me about being in a plane crash many years ago. The passengers were ordered to evacuate right away because the plane would probably blow up. The woman raced for the exit, not stopping to help anyone, not even an old man struggling to undo his seatbelt and unable to get free. Afterward, it weighed pretty heavily on her that she hadn’t stopped to help him, and it has inspired her to reach out to others as much as she can, whenever she has the chance.

Shantideva says that the only way to break this vow completely is to give up altogether on wanting to help others, not caring if we’re harming them because we only want to make sure that Number One is safe and secure. We run into trouble only when we close down and couldn’t care
less—when we’re too cynical or depressed or full of doubt even to bother.

At the heart of making this commitment is training in not fearing fundamental edginess, fundamental uneasiness, when it arises in us. Our challenge is to train in smiling at groundlessness, smiling at fear. I’ve had years of training in this because I get panic attacks. As anyone who has experienced a panic attack knows, that feeling of terror can arise out of nowhere. For me it often comes in the middle of the night, when I’m especially vulnerable. But over the years I’ve trained myself to relax into that heart-stopping, mind-stopping feeling. My first reaction is always to gasp with fright. But Chögyam Trungpa used to gasp like that when he was describing how to recognize awakened mind. So now, whenever a panic attack comes and I gasp, I picture Chögyam Trungpa’s face and think of him gasping as he talked about awakened mind. Then the energy of panic passes through me.

If you resist that kind of panicky energy, even at an involuntary, unconscious level, the fear can last a long time. The way to work with it is to drop the story line and not pull back or buy into the idea, “This isn’t okay,” but instead to smile at the panic, smile at this dreadful, bottomless, gaping hole that’s opening up in the pit of your stomach. When you can smile at fear, there’s a shift: what you usually try to escape from becomes a vehicle for awakening you to your fundamental, primordial goodness, for awakening you to clear-mindedness, to a caring that holds nothing back.

The image of the warrior is of a person who can go into the worst of hells and not waver from the direct experience of cruelty and unimaginable pain. So that’s our path: even in the most difficult situations, we do our best to smile at
fear, to smile at our righteous indignation, our cowardliness, our avoidance of vulnerability.

Traditionally, there are three ways of entering the warrior path, three approaches to making the commitment to benefit others. The first is called entering like a monarch—like a king or a queen. This means getting our own kingdom together, then on the basis of that strength, taking care of our subjects. The analogy is,
I work on myself and get my own life together so that I benefit others. To the degree that I’m not triggered anymore, I can stay present and not close my mind and heart.
Our motivation is to be there for other people more and more as the years go by.

Parents get good training in this. Most mothers and fathers aspire to give their children a good life—one free of aggression or meanness. But then there’s the reality of how infuriating children can be. There’s the reality of losing your temper and yelling, the reality of being irritable, unreasonable, immature. When we see the discrepancy between our good intentions and our actions, it motivates us to work with our minds, to work with our habitual reactions and our impatience. It motivates us to get better at knowing our triggers and refraining from acting out or repressing. We gladly work on ourselves in order to be more skillful and loving parents.

People in the caring professions also get plenty of training in entering like a monarch. Maybe you want to work with homeless teenagers because you were once one yourself. Your desire is to make a difference in even one person’s life, so that they can feel that someone is there for them. Then before long, you find yourself so activated by the behavior of young people that you totally lose it and can’t be there for them anymore. At that point, you turn to meditation or to the first commitment to support you in being
present and open to whatever presents itself, including feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, or shame.

The next way to approach the warrior commitment is with the attitude of the ferryman. We cross the river in the company of all sentient beings—we open to our true nature together. Here the analogy is,
my pain will become the stepping-stone for understanding the pain of others.
Rather than our own suffering making us more self-absorbed, it becomes the means by which we genuinely open to others’ suffering.

A number of cancer survivors have told me that this attitude is what gave them the strength to go through the physical and psychological misery of chemotherapy. They couldn’t eat or drink because everything hurt too much. They had sores in their mouths. They were dehydrated. They had tremendous nausea. Then they received instruction in tonglen. Their world got bigger and bigger as they opened to all the other people who were experiencing the same physical pain that they were, as well as the loneliness, anger, and other emotional distress that goes along with it. Their pain became a stepping-stone to understanding the distress of others in the same boat.

I remember one woman telling me, “It couldn’t have gotten any worse, so I had no problem breathing in and saying, ‘Since the pain is here anyway, may I take it in fully and completely with the wish that nobody else will have to feel like this.’ And I had no problem sending out relief.” It’s not as if your nausea goes away, she said. It’s not as if you can suddenly eat and drink. But the practice gives meaning to your suffering. Your attitude shifts. The feeling of resistance to the pain, the feeling of utter helplessness, and the feeling of hopelessness disappear.

There’s no way to make a dreadful situation pretty. But we can use the pain of it to recognize our sameness with other people. Shantideva said that since all sentient beings suffer from strong, conflicting emotions, and all sentient beings get what they don’t want and can’t hold on to what they do want, and all sentient beings have physical distress, why am I making such a big deal about just me? Since we’re all in this together, why am I making such a big deal about myself? The attitude of the ferryman is that whatever usually drags us down and causes us to withdraw into ourselves is the stepping-stone for awakening our compassion and for contacting the vast, unbiased mind of the warrior.