Confidence in our real selves

As philosopher Alain de Botton points out, our work has become so closely tied up with our identity that the first question we often ask new acquaintances is not where they come from, but what they do. We invest our energy in our work, and it nourishes our heart, to a greater or lesser extent, and gives meaning to our lives. At the end of the day, our outer life is where we grow in our inner life. When we work in an area that touches other people, we can find that there is a harmony between our outer selves and the inner work we are doing. All of us look to be coherent and not fragmented in our relations with the world. We strive to find the role in life that nourishes the sources deep inside us, makes us feel complete, and where we can be our true selves. Unfortunately, many people can underdevelop their talents and potential, or even deny parts of themselves out of fear of what others may think. Sometimes we need to be daring and believe. Our life's mission is to bring all the key aspects of our being into our daily life or else we will not be fulfilled. We know when that happens because we feel alive, and real energy begins to flow. The question comes down to what we want to create with our lives.

Life is not easy for any of us.
But what of that?
We must have perseverance
and above all confidence in ourselves.
We must believe that we are gifted for something
and that this thing must be attained.

Marie Curie

The Second Arrow

The Buddha once asked a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow is it painful?” The student replied, “It is.” The Buddha then asked, “If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student replied again, “It is.” The Buddha then explained, “In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional.

We do not have to wait long for life to bring us moments of difficulty or challenges. These can give rise to difficult emotions of greater or lesser intensity, such as sadness, anger or hurt. For as long as we live we will encounter such moments. Therefore, one of the most useful skills we can develop is how to work with such events and the subsequent emotions.

The Buddha's teaching, quoted above, is a useful strategy to remember. He distinguishes between the pain we naturally feel in life, and the pain that we shape ourselves. For example, we may naturally fall ill by picking up a virus or some illness that is doing the rounds. However, we may then add to our problems by the way we respond to the illness or the way the illness gives rise to a host of negative thoughts about ourselves or how our life is going. In other words, the pain is natural, but we create suffering by how we perceive the event and the physical sensations, how we judge them, and how we respond to them.

When something difficult happens to us, we have a tendency to commence a whole bunch of mental processes that can lead to more difficulties and create suffering — often thus adding more pain than there was originally. We dont like what is happening, and then start finding fault in ourselves or others, blaming, judging, and generally feeling sorry for ourselves.

This teaching is grounded in our mindfulness practice. We are trying to develop the skill to be able to open up to these strong emotions without either letting them discharge themselves in blame or self-pity, or running away from them or distracting ourselves from them as is easy in today's society. In doing this we just try and let the moment be, without adding. Because life is complex we will encounter many situations in which elements are not ours to control, or in which things happen without malicious intention. Paradoxically, sometimes it is right and appropriate just to be sad.

Two modes

I've discovered there are only two modes of the heart. We can struggle, or we can surrender. Surrender is a frightening word for some people, because it might be interpreted as passivity, or timidity. Surrender means wisely accommodating ourselves to what is beyond our control. Getting old, getting sick, dying, losing what is dear to us, is beyond our control. I can either be frightened of life and mad at life - or not. I can be disappointed and still not be mad. Stopping being mad - when I can - translates, for me as being compassionate - to myself as well as to other people.

Sylvia Boorstein, That's Funny you don't look Buddhist

Happy

The purpose of life is to be happy

The Dalai Lama

Spring has arrived and with it a new sense of life and of joy. We see the signs of growth all around, buds on the branches, birds building nests, spring flowers in bloom. Seeing all that this week has made it easy to feel joy, that inner experience that is deeply refreshing. It liberates us from our fears. It allows us to be content.

This has been a strange week, with news of sadness and with success in other areas. And as such it is the stuff of which life is made. We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that joy is only to be found in a life without difficulties. We can think that happiness will only come if the circumstances of our lives change a lot. However, as the phrase reminds us, difficulties - ups and downs - in life are inevitable but suffering is not. It depends on how we work with the difficulties. We discover joy in the midst of the ups and downs of each week, of a life. All things change constantly, even those which are most precious to us; it is just the nature of this life.

And in the midst of life we discover that each one of us has inside ourselves a natural deep joy that we can access. We can drop into it and let it bloom. This allows us to celebrate our lives - the small and large things in each day - and not get caught up in complaining and resenting what happens. As nature blooms we can see that we are connected to a wider life and come to realize that our own personal story is unfolding in a much larger context. It leads us to practice gratitude for all that is happening, which helps the mind expand into a fuller sense of life. We then can notice that we frequently have a choice - to celebrate what is happening or to reject it. Mindfulness practice is a type of training that allows the mind develop an inner narrative that leans towards acceptance, kindness and joy and away from rejecting, from fear and from sadness.

We learn in our guts, not just in our brain,
that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness,
but in experiencing and simply being
the circumstances of our life as they are;
not in fulfilling personal wants,
but in fulfilling the needs of life;
not in avoiding pain,
but in being pain when it is necessary to do so.
Too large an order?
Too hard?
On the contrary, it is the easy way..

Charlotte Joko Beck

Walls

We may never find ourselves in situations of such danger that our lives are endangered; yet anguish and pain are undeniable aspects of our lives. None of us can build walls around our hearts that are invulnerable to being breached by life. Facing the sorrow we meet in this life, we have a choice: Our hearts can close, our minds recoil, our bodies contract, and we can experience the heart that lives in a state of painful refusal. We can also dive deeply within ourselves to nurture the courage, balance, patience, and wisdom that enable us to care.

Christina Feldman

Ups and downs

We can notice our mind changing hundreds of times in the day, from liking to disliking, being content to being unhappy, calm to agitated. We can start the day being nervous about an upcoming meeting. Then find ourselves delighted as the meeting goes well, leaving us feeling very positive about ourselves and the future. Then afterwards we can get into a misunderstanding with a friend or colleague after which we find ourselves feeling very negative about ourselves and about the future. Up and down, down and up.

The mind can move quickly from being spacious to being narrow when it encounters something which is negative. However, what we label as "negative" often just means that we think that reality will not fit into the way that we want, or we can’t have something we think we need. We find that the mind contracts and feels tight, and then normally starts immediately to work on a story to defend that tightness, exaggerating negative aspects of people or situations, or other objects of our bad feelings. If we are focused on other people, it normally starts with statements about other people - "They are in the wrong, they cannot listen" and then moves on to statements about the future - "There is no point trying, this will never work out"

If we can become aware of this dynamic, the heart can move from its defensive pattern to pausing, then to being open and appreciative. The normal sequence for these changing mind states goes something like this: "This is the way I want things"..... "I like it".... "If I cannot have it like this, I am sad, I am angry"....and then through practice...."this moment is just like this". This pattern is the same whether the matter is great or small, although the intensity can vary hugely. It can sometimes flare out strongly as jealousy or anger if we allow ourselves be convinced that we are missing out on something that we really want.

In the end, we quieten down in two steps. The first is that the mind stops struggling with reality and says, “I wanted something different, but this is what I have.” The second is when we can rejoice in the new situation and be genuinely happy that it has turned out like this, for ourselves or for other people. One of the greatest antidotes for the feeling of hurt is to cultivate positive feelings or blessings towards others. This works against the mind's tendency to think that someone else's joy is actually taking away from our joy. Instead, we find that when the mind is relaxed, it does not feel needy, and does not need to defend itself.

We have two kinds of fears. One is a fear that whatever is going on is going to go on forever. It’s just not true - nothing goes on forever. The other is the fear that, even if it doesn’t go on forever, the pain of whatever is happening will be so terrible we won’t be able to stand it. There is a gut level of truth about this fear. It would be ridiculous to pretend that in our lives, in these physical bodies, which can hurt very much, and in relationships that can hurt very much, there aren’t some very, very painful times. Even so, I think we underestimate ourselves. Terrible as times may be, I believe we can stand them.

Because we become frightened as soon as a difficult mind state blows into the mind, we start to fight with it. We try to change it, or we try to get rid of it. The frenzy of the struggle makes the mind state even more unpleasant.

The familiar image is a children’s cartoon character, like Daffy Duck, walking along freely and suddenly stepping into toffee. In a hasty, awkward attempt to extricate himself, he might fall forward and backward and eventually be totally stuck in the toffee. The best solution would be the nonalarmed recognition, ‘This is toffee. I didn’t see it as I stepped into it, but I felt it after I got stuck. It’s just toffee. The whole world is not made out of toffee. What would be a wise thing for me to do now?'

Sylvia Boorstein, It's Easier Than You Think

Losses

One of the more important things for our psychological health is how we have to cope with disappointment. Losses are present in our lives from infancy onwards. Indeed, as Winnicott reminds us, a certain amount of disappointment is necessary as infants in order to allow a secure sense of self to develop. The parent has to gently "disappoint" the child in order to allow the child develop the independence to take on certain tasks for itself, to face the world without relying totally on the parent. This allows the infant have the resilience for facing the ups and downs of this world, as well as understanding that there is nuance in every person, that we cannot expect anyone to perfectly satisfy all our needs.

If established well, the person can be comfortable on their own and have the space in later life to deal with the inevitable ways in which others let them down. If not, then one can struggle when a partner changes, a parent disillusions, a relationship goes sour or a job turns out to be unfulfilling, because one has looked to them to give life meaning. Another negative aspect could be that the child feels responsible for the loss and may pick up the mistaken idea that negative emotions are wrong, and to admit them is to show weakness or a lack of self-control.

Over the years all these losses add up. Some we have time to acknowledge, some not. Stephen Levine reminds us that grieving that has to go on for all the little losses and disappointments that happen throughout our days. He calls this "our ordinary, everyday grief" which builds up following the "disappointments and disillusionment, the loss of trust and confidence that follows the increasingly less satisfactory arch of our lives".

One thing we can do in response is try to avoid feeling this grief, by hardening our hearts or denying to ourselves that the loss had any real meaning. However, although this provides a momentary feeling of safety, it can either lead to a gradual deadening of our experience of the world or reappear in our unconscious as anxiety or repeating behaviours. A better option is to stay open to life and acknowledge its inevitable losses, even the little ones. Ultimately, being open to feel the fear of loss is the only way to integrate it. It’s also the only way to a genuine relationship with others, because closeness to others cannot be founded on neediness or on the fear of being alone. Before we can be in relationship with others, we need to be able to accept a certain type of aloneness in ourselves. If we do not see that we will always be disappointed in the things that we think will fill it.

Seasons

You begin to see that there are seasons in your life
in the same way as there as seasons in nature.
There are times to cultivate, when you nurture your world
and give birth to new ideas and ventures.

There are times of flourishing and abundance,
when life feels in full bloom
energized and expanding.

And there are times of fruition
when things come to an end.
They have reached their climax and must be harvested
before they begin to fade.

And finally there are those times that are cold and cutting and empty
times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream.

Thiose rhythms in life are natural events.

They weave into one another as day follows night
bringing, not messages of hope and fear
but messages of how things are.


Chogram Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule

On not blaming.

We erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us. It is a very common, well-perfected device for making us feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself.

Pema Chodron, In the Gap Between Right and Wrong.

When things go wrong we have a natural tendency to protect ourselves, even when it is our own fault. One way to do this is to look to blame. Sometimes we blame ourselves; more often we blame others. However, whenever I blame others I notice that it tends to harden my heart and makes me focus on myself. Remaining in that frame of mind tends to lock me in a state of victimhood, making me almost dependent on the perpetrator. It too easily simplifies the complexity which marks relationships in this world. In other words, it does not allow that things in this world can simply go wrong and that it does not always have to be someone's fault.

Real relationships challenge us to stay open to the soft centre of the heart. How often do we form an opinion of another only to meet them and realise that our opinion was based on defending ourselves rather than what the person was really feeling. Fear makes us close down. At the end of the day it costs us precious energy. I find increasingly I ask myself: "Am I willing to waste my energy further on this matter?" and that helps me to move on.

All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him or her, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming them, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy.

Wayne Dyer.

Being Grateful

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands,
because if we are not grateful,
then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -
because we will always want
to have something else or something more.

Br David Steindl-Rast

How our work has meaning

I came across this nice story set in the Middle Ages: A man sees a worker passing by with a wheel barrow and asks what he is doing. “Can’t you see, I’m pushing a wheelbarrow,” the man replies. Another wheelbarrow man comes by doing the same thing and he too is asked: “What are you doing.” He replies, “Can’t you see, I’m building the Cathedral at Chartres.”

The same activity, but with different levels of insight.

The second man has connected his work to something inside himself or beyond himself – has understood the difference between purpose and meaning – and thereby made his life meaningful.

Worrying

The roots of the word "worry" comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word, Wyrgan. It originally meant to strangle, choke, or tear at the throat with teeth. It was used of animals who would attack other animals, such as dogs biting the throat of sheep. We can still see this use when we speak of a cat worrying a mouse. Cats play with their prey before they kill it, sometimes throwing it up in the air or slapping it back when it seems about to escape.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, our cat Barney proudly brought a big mouse into the house and let it free in the hall. Having safely confined Barney in another part of the house I was surprised to see the mouse sitting on a shoe, licking itself, apparantly unbothered. Without too much difficulty I managed to catch him in a plastic container and release him outside, much to Barney's disappointment.

Our modern use of the word worry started out life in a similar way to this animal meaning, as "to cause mental anguish". It later developed into its more common modern days sense of "to feel mental anguish". Reflecting on the early morning cat and mouse tale, I felt that the original sense has much to tell us. We frequently worry ourselves, cause ourselves mental anguish. We have a lot of input into the process, and can sometimes return to an issue, just like a cat playing with a mouse. We can generate negative thoughts, imagine catastrophies, increasing our anxiety by developing scenarios which may never actually occur. In this way we "play" with a situation which may be simply registering in the body as a physical feeling and refuse to let it just be that.

As one meditation teacher reminded us, we should always notice the "add-ons" - the stories we bring to an experience. We may be feeling nervous about starting out on a new process, but then we add on stories about our worth or how our past has developed. We may be shy making friends, but then we add on a commentary as to how we will never be happy. We may have made a mistake and then exaggerate it into something that reflects our whole life and conduct.

One way to do this is to try and stay in the present, with the raw experience of the situation, and not add to it by remembering past qualities or mistakes, or move to the future by picturing certain outcomes. We can try and stop "playing" with our problem, like the cat does with the mouse, stop returning to it again and again, stop worrying it. We can try and let the situation just be, rather than returning to it, mistakingly thinking that this is a better way to "fix it". We can let it go free.

We need to examine that notion of “fixing” ....... We need to question our concepts about how we want things to be and what we want people to become. If we can let go of some of that, we can see more clearly what we can and cannot do. We can learn not to obsess about all the problems we cannot solve, but to sort through them to find the one or two things we can actually do that might be helpful. It is better to do one small helpful thing than punish yourself for the many things beyond your power and ability to change or affect. Some problems can be solved, some cannot, and some are best left unsolved.

Judy Lief, The problem with problems

Internet generation

There is no doubt that the internet brings the capacity for connection with others; however, there is an equally important downside of this phenomenon:

If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. When we live exclusively in relation to others, what disappears from our lives is solitude."

William Deresiewicz, "The End of Solitude", The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Happiness in our own hands

Whether we are on the busy streets of New York or in the solitude of a mountain cave in Nepal, our happiness and contentment are completely in our own hands. Sitting meditation enables us to rest our mind in a present and cheerful way. When we sit, we make a direct relationship to the source of happiness. At the base of that experience is a quality of happiness, which is not a sense of giddiness, but of relaxation. Wherever we are, life is going to be coming at us. But if we use our lives as an opportunity to develop and enhance our mind, we will always be able to acknowledge that we are in a precious situation.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

A fresh start

Abba Poemen said Abba Pior
made a fresh start every morning.

Sayings of the Desert Fathers


Each Morning we are born again.
What we do today is what matters most

Jack Kornfield

Plan to be surprised

Sometimes things don't go quite like you anticipated them.

Watched a movie the other evening in which the main character has a chance encounter in a bookstore opening up for him a chance of love and a new direction in life. At the end of the movie this line came up: "So instead of asking young people, what do you plan to do with your life? Maybe we should tell them this: plan to be surprised". It is probably better to cultivate the capacity to be surprised by life rather than think we can control it. Certainly I could never have anticipated the turns in my life which have led me to this day, or encounters which have happened along the way. You just do not what may lie around the corner, and often the things you find yourself hoping for, do not work out.

Despite this happening so often, however, we still find ourselves planning and hoping. It is almost too difficult to not seek things which we perceive at the time to be good for us. It is hard to distinguish the things which lead to genuine happiness or the things we should continue to fight for. And so all of us get disappointed once in a while? We live in an imperfect world and bad things happen. And despite our practice and our life experience, it still can take a lot of energy to cope.

Our practice can help. There are some types of disappointment which come from us leaning too far into the future, imagining a certain development which never really had the potential to emerge. Developing the capacity to live in the present is a counter-balalnce to that. Another thing which can give hope is the understanding that we are just seeing part of the picture. The end of the story is not written yet. We try to stick simply to the feeling of disappointment without adding a fully ended story.

All the major wisdom traditions state that growth can come from working with pain and disappointment. It can help us develop compassion for others, patience with ourselves and, most of all, wisdom about the fragility, unpredictability and mystery of this life. Keeping an ability to be surprised leads to openness to this mystery and lets us receive growth from places where we probably would not go freely.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

Woody Allen

Ring the Bells

Watched the Hope for Haiti Concert last night. It was, on the whole, a dignified restrained affair. I found that the songs most suited to the tragedy were the older ones - John Legend's rendition of the Gospel song Motherless Child and Mary J Blige's gospel version of the incredible Hard Times Come Again no More. Justin Timberlake sang a nice version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. These simple, sparse, songs spoke powerfully to the human condition when faced with difficulty. Let us hope that the Concert prompted people to give.

While listening I was reminded of Cohen's other song Anthem which anticipates his period spent as a Buddhist monk, and which, he says, contains the fundamental belief behind a lot of his songs. I feel it expresses a fundamental truth about all our lives. It reminds us that when we should not wait till we think we are perfect before we start to give. Each one of us are broken in many ways, and make mistakes. We all search for the cure that will bring us wholeness. But this brokenness is what ultimately allows real compassion for others in their weakness and pain. The greatest gift we can offer another is an acceptance of their real selves, not some ideal version of them.

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem


We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in some ways shameful- because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed - is made much more bearable when it is shared, face to face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them.

Alice Walker, Letter to President Clinton

This too will pass

One of the more frequently quoted phrases coming from different wisdom traditions is "This too will pass" It is a reminder that we can find contentment in whatever circumstance if we glimpse the truth that all things will not last forever. Change is constant, people - friends and enemies - come and go in our lives, difficult situations will end. It allows us create space between ourselves and the situation and focus instead on why the situation has been presented to us and what we can learn from it.

It's not always easy to stay balanced but it helps me when I see that things are the way they are because of so many causes. The wisest way I can respond to my life is by working with it and responding to it and not struggling with it. This does not mean that we should not fight for the things that we can change or refuse to accept when others treat us badly. However, at times, there are things that I cannot change. "This too will pass" helps me see that all things have an ending. And when I see that endings can lead to new beginnings, I can endure difficulties more easily and let go of good things without resentment.

Stillness

"No snowflake falls in an inappropriate place.”
Zen Saying

All things happen for a reason. Everything can be our teacher. Snow falls quietly. It covers all in a blanket of stillness. We look out the window at the falling snow. It is easy to be at one with exactly what is happening here and now - simply being with the snow falling, simply being with what is in our lives.

Setting out

The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts.
Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day.

The content of your character is your choice.

Day by day, what you do is who you become.
Your integrity is your destiny -
it is the light that guides your way.

Heraclitus (c.540 - c.475 BC)