The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (9 page)

We can practice the first step of the aspiration by learning to rejoice in our own good fortune. We can train in rejoicing in even the smallest blessings our life holds. It is easy to miss our own good fortune; often happiness comes in ways we don’t even notice. It’s like a cartoon I saw of an astonished-looking man saying, “What was that?” The caption below read, “Bob experiences a moment of well-being.” The ordinariness of our good fortune can make it hard to catch.

The key is to be here, fully connected with the moment, paying attention to the details of ordinary life. By taking care of ordinary things—our pots and pans, our clothing, our teeth—we rejoice in them. When we scrub a vegetable or brush our hair, we are expressing appreciation: friendship toward ourselves and toward the living quality that is found in everything. This combination of mindfulness and appreciation connects us fully with reality and brings us joy. When we extend attention and appreciation toward our environment and other people, our experience of joy gets even bigger.

In the Zen tradition, students are taught to bow to other people as well as ordinary objects as a way of expressing their respect. They are taught to take equal care of brooms and toilets and plants in order to show their gratitude to these things. Watching Trungpa Rinpoche set the table for breakfast one morning was like watching someone arrange flowers or create a stage set. He took such care and delight in placing every detail—the place mats and napkins; the forks, knives, and spoons; the plates and the coffee cups. It took him several hours to complete the task! Since then, even though I usually have only a few minutes, I appreciate the ritual of setting the table as an opportunity to be present and rejoice.

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world. We can do this even at the most difficult moments. Everything we see, hear, taste, and smell has the power to strengthen and uplift us. As Longchenpa says, the quality of joy is like finding cool, refreshing shade.

The second stage in learning to rejoice is to think of a loved one and to appreciate his or her good fortune. We start with a person we feel good about. We can imagine the loved one’s face or say the person’s name if it makes the practice more real. Then in our own words, we rejoice—that a person who was ill is now feeling healthy and cheerful, that a child who was lonely has found a friend. We are encouraged to try to keep it simple. The point is to find our spontaneous and natural capacity to be glad for another being, whether it feels unshakable or fleeting.

In the next three stages of the practice, as we practice with people less dear to us, our ability to appreciate and rejoice in their good fortune is frequently blocked by envy or other emotions. This is an important point for the bodhisattva in training. Our practice is to become aware of our kind heart and nurture it. But it is also to get a close look at the roots of suffering—to see the way we close our hearts with emotions such as jealousy. I find the rejoicing practice an especially powerful tool for doing this.

What happens when we make the gesture to rejoice for the good fortune of our neighbor? We might say the words “I rejoice that Henry won the lottery,” but what is happening in our hearts and minds? When we say, “I rejoice that Tania has a boyfriend,” how do we really feel? The aspiration to rejoice can feel feeble compared with our resentment or envy or self-pity. We know how easy it is to let emotions hook us in and shut us down. We’d be wise to question why we hold a grudge as if it were going to make us happy and ease our pain. It’s rather like eating rat poison and thinking the rat will die. Our desire for relief and the methods we use to achieve it are definitely not in sync.

Whenever we get caught, it’s helpful to remember the teachings—to recall that suffering is the result of an aggressive mind. Even slight irritation causes us pain when we indulge in it. This is the time to ask, “Why am I doing this to myself again?” Contemplating the causes of suffering right on the spot empowers us. We begin to recognize that we have what it takes to cut through our habit of eating poison. Even if it takes the rest of our lives, nevertheless, we can do it.

When we work with neutral people, what happens to our hearts? We say the words in our practice or out on the street, “I rejoice for that man sitting comfortably in the sun.” “I am glad for the dog that was adopted at the pound.” We say the words and what happens? When we regard others with appreciation, do the barriers go up or do they come down?

Difficult people are, as usual, the greatest teachers. Aspiring to rejoice in their good fortune is a good opportunity to investigate our reactions and our strategies. How do we react to their good luck, good health, good news? With envy? With anger? With fear? What is our strategy for moving away from what we feel? Revenge, self-denigration? What stories do we tell ourselves? (“She’s a snob.” “I’m a failure.”) These reactions, strategies, and story lines are what cocoons and prison walls are made of.

Then, right on the spot, we can go beneath the words to the nonverbal experience of the emotion. What’s happening in our hearts, our shoulders, our gut? Abiding with the physical sensation is radically different from sticking to the story line. It requires appreciation for this very moment. It is a way of relaxing, a way to train in softening rather than hardening. It allows the ground of limitless joy—basic goodness—to shine through.

Can we now rejoice for ourselves, our loved one, friend, the neutral, the difficult one, all together? Can we rejoice for all beings throughout time and space?

“Always maintain only a joyful mind” is one of the mind-training slogans. This might sound like an impossible aspiration. As one man said to me, “Always is a very long time.” Yet as we train in unblocking our basic goodness, we’ll find that every moment contains the free-flowing openness and warmth that characterize unlimited joy.

This is the path we take in cultivating joy: learning not to armor our basic goodness, learning to appreciate what we have. Most of the time we don’t do this. Rather than appreciate where we are, we continually struggle and nurture our dissatisfaction. It’s like trying to get the flowers to grow by pouring cement on the garden.

But as we use the bodhichitta practices to train, we may come to the point where we see the magic of the present moment; we may gradually wake up to the truth that we have always been warriors living in a sacred world. This is the ongoing experience of limitless joy. We won’t always experience this, it’s true. But year by year it becomes more and more accessible.

Once a cook at Gampo Abbey was feeling very unhappy. Like most of us, she kept feeding the gloom with her actions and her thoughts; hour by hour her mood was getting darker. She decided to try to ventilate her escalating emotions by baking chocolate chip cookies. Her plan backfired, however—she burned them all to a crisp. At that point, rather than dump the burned cookies in the garbage, she stuffed them into her pockets and backpack and went out for a walk. She trudged along the dirt road, her head hanging down and her mind burning with resentment. She was saying to herself, “So where’s all the beauty and magic I keep hearing about?”

At that moment she looked up. There walking toward her was a little fox. Her mind stopped and she held her breath and watched. The fox sat down right in front of her, gazing up expectantly. She reached into her pockets and pulled out some cookies. The fox ate them and slowly trotted away. She told this story to all of us at the abbey, saying: “I learned today that life is very precious. Even when we’re determined to block the magic, it will get through and wake us up. That little fox taught me that no matter how shut down we get, we can always look outside our cocoon and connect with joy.”

11

Enhancing the Training in Joy

To make things as easy as possible to under stand, we can summarize the four boundless qualities in the single phrase “a kind heart.” Just train yourself to have a kind heart always and in all situations.

—PATRUL RINPOCHE

H
OW DO WE MAKE THE TEACHINGS REAL?
In the midst of our overscheduled lives, how do we discover our inherent clarity and compassion? How do we develop trust that openness and maitri are available even in the most frantic moments? When we feel left out, inadequate, or lonely, can we take a warrior’s perspective and contact bodhichitta?

Sharing the heart is a simple practice that can be used at any time and in every situation. It enlarges our view and helps us remember our interconnection. A version of tonglen on the spot, it is also a method for enhancing our ability to rejoice.

The essence of this practice is that when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this. It’s a way of acknowledging when we are closing down and of training to open up. When we encounter any pleasure or tenderness in our life, we cherish that and rejoice. Then we make the wish that others could also experience this delight or this relief. In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others. If this is the only training we ever remember to do, it will benefit us tremendously and everyone else as well. It’s a way of bringing whatever we encounter onto the path of awakening bodhichitta.

Even the simplest of things can be the basis of this practice—a beautiful morning, a good meal, a shower. Although there are many such fleeting ordinary moments in our days, we usually speed right past them. We forget what joy they can bring. So the first step is to stop, notice, and appreciate what is happening. Even if this is all we do, it’s revolutionary. Then we think of someone who is suffering and wish that the person could have this pleasure to sweeten up his or her life.

When we practice giving in this way, we don’t bypass our own pleasure. Say we’re eating a delicious strawberry. We don’t think, “Oh, I shouldn’t be enjoying this so much. Other people don’t even have a crust of bread.” We just fully appreciate the luscious fruit. Then we wish that Pete or Rita could have such pleasure. We wish that anyone who is suffering could experience such delight.

Discomfort of any kind also becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing that our pain is shared; there are people all over the earth feeling just as we do right now. This simple gesture is a seed of compassion for self and other. If we want, we can go further. We can wish that a specific person or all beings could be free of suffering and its causes. In this way our toothaches, our insomnia, our divorces, and our terror become our link with all humanity.

A woman wrote me about practicing with her daily misery in traffic. Her resentment and her uptightness, the fear of missing an appointment, had become her heart connection with all the other people sitting fuming in their cars. She’d begun to feel her kinship with the people all around her and to even look forward to her daily “traffic jam tonglen.”

This simple way of training with pleasure and pain allows us to use what we have, wherever we are, to connect with other people. It engenders on-the-spot bravery, which is what it will take to heal ourselves and our brothers and sisters on the planet.

12

Thinking Bigger

Train without bias in all areas. It is crucial always to do this pervasively and wholeheartedly.

—MIND-TRAINING SLOGAN OF ATISHA

B
Y PRACTICING MAITRI,
compassion, and rejoicing, we are training in thinking bigger, in opening up as wholeheartedly as we can to ourselves, to our friends, and even to the people we dislike. We are cultivating the unbiased state of equanimity. Without this fourth boundless quality, the other three are limited by our habit of liking and disliking, accepting and rejecting.

Whenever someone asked a certain Zen master how he was, he would always answer, “I’m okay.” Finally one of his students said, “Roshi, how can you always be okay? Don’t you ever have a bad day?” The Zen master answered, “Sure I do. On bad days, I’m okay. On good days, I’m also okay.” This is equanimity.

The traditional image for equanimity is a banquet to which everyone is invited. That means that everyone and everything, without exception, is on the guest list. Consider your worst enemy. Consider someone who would do you harm. Consider Pol Pot and Hitler and drug pushers hooking young people. Imagine inviting them to this feast.

Training in equanimity is learning to open the door to all, welcoming all beings, inviting life to come visit. Of course, as certain guests arrive, we’ll feel fear and aversion. We allow ourselves to open the door just a crack if that’s all that we can presently do, and we allow ourselves to shut the door when necessary. Cultivating equanimity is a work in progress. We aspire to spend our lives training in the loving-kindness and courage that it takes to receive whatever appears—sickness, health, poverty, wealth, sorrow, and joy. We welcome and get to know them all.

Equanimity is bigger than our usual limited perspective. That we hope to get what we want and fear losing what we have—this describes our habitual predicament. The Buddhist teachings identify eight variations on this tendency to hope and fear: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disgrace. As long as we’re caught in one of these extremes, the potential for the other is always there. They just chase each other around. No lasting happiness comes from being caught in this cycle of attraction and aversion. We can never get life to work out so that we eliminate everything we fear and end up with all the goodies. Therefore the warrior-bodhisattva cultivates equanimity, the vast mind that doesn’t narrow reality into for and against, liking and disliking.