The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (7 page)

Number six, ‘pacifying,’ is further instruction on how to deal with negativity. Taming basically gave the view, which is so crucial, that meditation is cultivating nonaggression and a good relationship with ourselves. Pacifying acknowledges that when we’ve really committed ourselves to practice, when we have some passion for practice and we put our whole self into it, a very curious thing always happens: we get fed up, we lose heart, and we get discouraged. We might say, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ and just long to put on our backpack and hike down to the end of the point, or get into a boat and sail out to sea, or have longer breaks and more to eat, and ‘Let’s get a good night’s sleep for once!’ Pacifying is a teaching with a lot of good humor in it. It recognizes what it’s like for all of us (and apparently, since these teachings are over two thousand years old, it’s always been like this). It says, ‘First of all, recognize that a let-down feeling accompanies good practice, that this is the experience of someone who is very committed and has started on a journey, and pacify yourself. When that happens, see that there’s some humor in it, and just talk to yourself, encourage yourself.’ You can say things like, ‘Oh! Here it comes again. I thought I had gotten rid of this one,
but here it is. Oh, my goodness! I had never experienced this, but this is just what she was talking about.’ You can actually talk to yourself about how precious our human life is and how uncertain the length of it is, and realize that it’s a rare and precious opportunity to be able to make friends with yourself so completely and thoroughly. You can sit down in silence with yourself and simply see who you are and, in a gentle and precise way, continually be with yourself, learning how to acknowledge fully who you are and to let go of the tendency to fixate and dwell. So pacifying is realizing the human condition with a lot of heart and a lot of sympathy, and appreciating the rareness and preciousness of being able to practice and make friends with yourself. You can also realize that, at a time like this, when there’s so much chaos and crisis and suffering in the world, we are actually needed. Individuals who are willing to wake up and make friends with themselves are going to be very beneficial, because they can work with others, they can hear what people are saying to them, and they can come from the heart and be of use. So you can encourage yourself in that way, which is called pacifying.

‘Thoroughly pacifying,’ number seven, gives specific instructions about the obstacles and antidotes. It talks about passion, aggression, and ignorance, which we consider to be obstacles to practice. It says that if you are experiencing extreme aggression in your practice, first you can take that sense of fresh
start, and then you can emphasize the airy, windy, fresh quality of your breath. You have learned the meditation technique, you have posture and labeling and all kinds of tools, but if aggression has its claws in you and you can’t let go of those resentful, bitter, angry thoughts and plans, then you should emphasize the windy, airy, fresh quality of the breath as it goes out, which helps you connect with freshness and spaciousness.

If it’s passion or lust that has taken hold of you – you can’t stop thinking about that person or that thing that you want so much – then the instruction, interestingly enough, is to flash back to your sense of body, emphasize your posture. The antidote to being completely caught by lust and passion, wanting so much that it hurts, is your posture. Just resettle and have this sense of mindfulness of body. Just emphasize feeling your hands on your thighs and feeling your bottom on the cushion. You could even mentally go through your whole body from the top of your head all the way down. Come into your body completely to ground yourself.

The antidote for ignorance or drowsiness is connecting with spaciousness, the opposite of the antidote for passion, which is connecting with sense of body. If ignorance of drowsiness is a problem, then you can sense your breath dissolving into space; you can sense your body sitting in this room with all this space around you, all the space outside the abbey and all the space of the whole of Cape Breton Island:
lots of space. You connect with a sense of big space to wake yourself up, brighten things up. Rather than having your eyes somewhat lowered, you can raise your gaze, but without starting to look around.

Number eight, ‘one-pointedness,’ has two parts, with the main emphasis on this notion of fresh start. If your mind is all caught up and driving you crazy, you can just stop practicing altogether. Just stop practicing. Give up the whole struggle. Give yourself a break. For a while, don’t practice. Keep your posture, so you don’t become too loose, but on the other hand let your mind relax and just think about things or look out. Relax, and then start fresh. The second part of this particular teaching is realizing that you’re not a victim of anything, and neither are you a patient that some doctor has to cure. You’re actually a sane, healthy, decent, basically good person, and you can find your own balance. This sense of fresh start can be applied not only to formal meditation, but throughout your whole life. This teaching, one-pointedness, means that you can be thoroughly present. If you find yourself feeling distracted, you can simply come back and wake up and give yourself a fresh start. There are ways of doing what you want to do and ways of being who you want to be. You don’t have to feel like a victim of your own mind.

The last of the nine ways is called ‘resting evenly.’ It is also sometimes called absorption. However, Rinpoche made it very clear that this is not some kind of absorption state that blocks everything else out.
Resting evenly just stresses the basic attitude that meditation is about developing a thoroughly good friendship with oneself, a completely honest, open-hearted relationship with oneself. Traditionally there’s a little verse that goes with this teaching, which says, ‘As swans swim on the lake and vultures roam in the charnel ground, you can let your mind rest in its natural state.’

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A three-month-long program for qualified students interested in pursuing systematic training in the three yanas, or ‘vehicles’ (hinayana, mahayana, and vajrayana) of Tibetan Buddhism.

eleven
renunciation

W
hen people take refuge in the formal ceremony of becoming a Buddhist, they receive a name that indicates their main path, how they should work, their main vehicle. I’ve noticed that when people get the name ‘Renunciation,’ they hate it. It makes them feel terrible; they feel as if someone gave them the name ‘Torture Chamber,’ or perhaps ‘Torture Chamber of Enlightenment.’ People usually don’t like the name ‘Discipline’ either. But so much depends on how you look at these things. Renunciation does not have to be regarded as negative. I was taught that it has to do with letting go of holding back. What one is renouncing is closing down and shutting off from life. You could say that renunciation is the same thing as opening to the teachings of the present moment.

It’s probably good to think of the ground of renunciation as being our good old selves, our basic decency and sense of humor. In Buddhist teachings and in the Shambhala teachings, as well as in the teachings of many other contemplative or mystical traditions, the basic view is that people are
fundamentally good and healthy. It’s as if everyone who has ever been born has the same birthright, which is enormous potential of warm heart and clear mind. The group of renunciation is realizing that we already have exactly what we need, that what we have already is good. Every moment of time has enormous energy in it, and we could connect with that.

I was recently in a doctor’s office that had a poster on the wall of an old Native American woman walking along a road, holding the hand of a little child. The caption read: ‘The seasons come and go, summer follows spring and fall follows summer and winter follows fall, and human beings are born and mature, have their middle age, begin to grow older and die, and everything has its cycles. Day follows night, night follows day. It is good to be part of all of this.’ When you begin to have that kind of trust in basic creativity and directness and fullness, in the alive quality of yourself and your world, then you can begin to understand renunciation.

Trungpa Rinpoche once said, ‘Renunciation is realizing that nostalgia for samsara
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is full of shit.’ Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited, petty world is
insane. Once you begin to get the feeling of how big the world is and how vast our potential for experiencing life is, then you really begin to understand renunciation. 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 minds wander 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 the story line go, and 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 a lot of trees. The water can’t go any farther, even though it has tremendous force and forward energy. It just gets blocked 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 going 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.

So renunciation is seeing clearly how we hold back, how we pull away, how we shut down, how we close off, and then learning how to open. It’s
about saying yes to whatever is put on your plate, whatever knocks on your door, whatever calls you up on your telephone. How we actually do that has to do with coming up against our edge, which is actually the moment when we learn what renunciation means. There is a story about a group of people climbing to the top of a mountain. It turns out it’s pretty steep, and as soon as they get up to a certain height, a couple of people look down and see how far it is, and they completely freeze; they had come up against their edge and they couldn’t go beyond it. The fear was so great that they couldn’t move. Other people tripped on ahead, laughing and talking, but as the climb got steeper and more scary, more people began to get scared and freeze. All the way up this mountain there were places where people met their edge and just froze and couldn’t go any farther. The people who made it to the top looked out and were very happy to have made it to the top. The moral of the story is that it really doesn’t make any difference where you meet your edge; just meeting it is the point. Life is a whole journey of meeting your edge again and again. That’s where you’re challenged; that’s where, if you’re a person who wants to live, you start to ask yourself questions like, ‘Now, why am I so scared? What is it that I don’t want to see? Why can’t I go any further than this?’ The people who got to the top were not the heroes of the day. It’s just that they weren’t afraid of heights; they are
going to meet their edge somewhere else. The ones who froze at the bottom were not the losers. They simply stopped first and so their lesson came earlier than the others. However, sooner or later everybody meets his or her edge.

When we meditate, we’re creating a situation in which 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 very clearly: you’ve removed your veils, your shields, your armor, your dark glasses, your earplugs, your layers and layers of mittens, your heavy boots. Finally you’re standing, touching the earth, feeling the sun on your body, feeling its brightness, hearing all the noises without anything to dull the sound. You take off your nose plug, and maybe you’re 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?

The wilder the weather is, the more the ravens love it. They have the time of their lives in the winter, when the wind gets much stronger and there’s lots of ice and snow. They challenge the wind. They get up on the tops of the trees and they hold on with their claws and then they grab on with their beaks as well. At some point they just let go into the wind and let it blow them away. Then they play on it, they float on it. After a while, they’ll go back to the tree and start over. It’s a game. Once I saw them in an incredible hurricane-velocity wind, grabbing each other’s feet and dropping and then letting go and flying out. It was like a circus act. The animals and the plants here on Cape Breton are hardy and fearless and playful and joyful; the elements have strengthened them. In order to exist here, they have had to develop a zest for challenge and for life. As you can see, it adds up to tremendous beauty and inspiration and uplifted feeling. The same goes for us.

If we understand renunciation properly, we also will serve as an inspiration for other people because of our hero quality, our warrior quality, the fact that each of us meets our challenges all the time. When somebody works with hardship in an openhearted humorous way like a warrior, when somebody cultivates his or her bravery, everyone responds, because we know we can do that too. We know that this person wasn’t born perfect but was inspired to cultivate warriorship and a gentle heart and clarity.