Awakening the Luminous Mind: Tibetan Meditation for Inner Peace and Joy (3 page)

F
INDING
R
EFUGE
T
HROUGH THE
T
HREE
D
OORS

Our ordinary experience offers us three opportunities to transform our lives and find the inner peace, joy, and liberation from suffering that we all wish for. Since our confusion is expressed through our body, our speech, and our mind, these three places also offer opportunities to dispel that confusion. The three areas of body, speech, and mind are referred to as the three doors. By shifting our attention in specific ways—away from the expression of pain and toward the release of that pain—we enter these doorways to discover the gifts of openness, awareness, and warmth.

There are three ways in which you will learn to shift attention. While directing attention to the pain body, you are instructed to feel the
stillness
of the body. While directing attention to pain speech, you connect with hearing the
silence
. And while you direct your attention to the pain mind, or the moving mind, the instruction is to recognize and connect with
spaciousness
. In these ways, it is possible to find a deep place of stillness, silence, and spaciousness. These three doorways lead to accessing important places of protection and refuge.

Many people find it difficult to become aware of the space of
being
itself rather than simply being aware of the sensations they are feeling, the inner dialogue they are having, or the contents of the moving mind altogether. What kind of shift are we describing? First, it is necessary to open and simply experience your discomfort. Can you be fully open, as the sky is with the clouds? In this analogy, clouds can refer to your thoughts, feelings, sensations, or memories. Does the sky have a problem with the clouds? Is the sky agitated? Does the sky say, “You have been here too long! Why are you still here? What does it mean that you are here?” No. The sky simply allows the presence of clouds, and when the clouds eventually dissipate, the sky does not comment. The sky is not lonely when the clouds leave. Can you
be
like that sky and host the clouds? If you are able to do that—to be with your pain directly—the pain heals itself: it self-liberates. As your pain or discomfort shifts, it is important to simply remain present and aware of the openness itself.

Each person’s path is unique, and each must be willing to directly experience the sense of limitation and pain as it occurs in body, speech, and mind, and become familiar with turning to the inner refuge to discover the positive benefits that arise in so doing. It is important to recognize that we pay so much attention to ego, to our problem-solving, moving mind. We must recognize ego for what it is—a pain identity. We have a constant dialogue of pain talking to pain, which is what usually guides us or drives us, sometimes driving us crazy. And no matter how smart or sophisticated, ego only operates within the logic of pain, and therefore produces more pain. Perhaps it is time to discover there is something other than ego to turn toward and to trust.

For each of us to heal personal, family, and societal suffering, we need to recognize the habitual reactions that obscure our true nature and block us from living in full relation to our inherent intelligence and capacity. Our habitual reactions to the challenges in life I refer to as the
pain body
. By using the word
body
, I am not only referring to the physical body with its tensions, aches, constrictions, and illnesses, but to our sense of identity altogether, our sense of “I” or “me.” In the Bön teachings, this identity is known as the “karmic conceptual pain body.” This pain body is who you feel and think you are in any given moment.

It is useful to draw your attention to moments of pain and challenge in your life because the pain body is more obvious in those moments. When we react in stressful moments, the karmic conceptual pain body is triggered. But this sense of “me,” this “I,” is a completely false idea of self. Perhaps you have heard yourself saying at one time or another, “I’m going through a hard time. I broke up with my wife. I’m having a hard time with my boss. I am getting old. I am sick.” I. I. I. Who is that “I”? Is it really you? It appears to be so. That’s what you believe, and in a particularly painful moment, you may have full conviction in that identity. And yet it is your belief in your identity that is the fundamental problem.

From this sense of “I” develops pain speech, which articulates the distress of separation. Sometimes this distress can be felt as restless, upward-moving sensations in the chest, throat, and breath, and often it emerges outwardly in speech, or inwardly as inner dialogue. It can be as simple as a sigh or as elaborate as habitual negative self-talk that accompanies us through our sleeping and waking hours, often unrecognized for the damage it does in reinforcing our pain identity.

As human beings we are storytellers. The pain mind involves the imagination of ego, the story that is woven of thoughts and images that may appear intelligent, but fail to recognize the truth of the fundamental separation from our essential nature. Our stories can delight and amuse as well as shock and horrify us. But we are not our stories. And no matter how smart or sophisticated the storyteller is, the pain mind cannot liberate us from the suffering we experience.

What
does
liberate suffering? The moment you have some glimpse that you are bigger than what you are thinking or feeling is a healing moment. In such a moment, the false sense of “I” begins to lose its grip. Through meditation, noticing this dissolution of a solid self is encouraged by drawing your attention to the sense of being itself, rather than to a given momentary reaction. The moment that false sense of “I” starts to dissipate, you begin to feel different. If you trust in the space that opens up, you can discover a deeper support than the reactivity of your ego. This deeper support is the inner refuge, and this is your protection.

Our false self thinks,
This is not okay. That person has hurt me so much. This is not acceptable to me
. Or,
I have to push back. I have to be strategic. I need the upper hand
. Who is that “me,” that “I”? We want to have a very clear sense of being a victim or a victor. But that view, that ego, those voices, are what we need protection from, because from this “I” we suffer. How do you connect with what is larger than “I”? You don’t connect with what is larger than “I” by having a conversation with that “I.” You don’t connect by negotiating with “I.” You don’t try to improve it, destroy it, or ignore it either. You start by simply feeling what you are feeling. The very moment in which you feel awkwardness, confusion, irritation, or a reaction of any kind is an opportunity to discover that you are not that reaction.

To take full advantage of the challenges in our life so that they become the doorways to healing and positive development, we need to discover where to look. Go to stillness, go to silence, go to spaciousness. From these three places, allow your reaction. You allow it by not resisting, talking back, or rejecting it in any way. And, at the same time, you are not allowing it to affect your stillness, your silence, your spaciousness. If you examine your own experience, you will often find that, because of fear, you do not allow pain to be as simple as it is in the moment. And because we fear pain and vulnerability, we try to manage it, to handle it. I refer to the one who is managing and handling the situation as “the smart ego.” While it may seem reassuring to have some aspect of ourselves in charge of a given situation, the smart ego is not the one who will find release from that false identity and find the end to suffering. You think that smart voice is the solution. That is a mistaken belief. Because it is so easy to believe in the false ego, it is all the more important to find inner refuge in stillness, silence, and spaciousness.

The teachings of Bön
dzogchen
, as mentioned in the preface, tell us that our natural mind is pure and perfected, giving rise spontaneously to positive qualities such as love, joy, compassion, and equanimity. We do not need to directly cultivate these positive qualities nor produce them through effort, because they naturally arise. That is why
recognizing
the natural mind is the inner refuge, and is the purpose of the meditation practices in this book. We access the inner refuge through the experience of the stillness of the body, silence of speech, and spaciousness of mind, the three doors.

The inner refuge of the natural mind is not a belief or a concept. This experience has no shape, no color, no definition, no single location, nor is it the product of any religion or philosophy. Recognizing the natural mind, we are freed from suffering; failing to recognize this, we continue to suffer. The discovery of the natural mind heals divisions, resolves conflicting emotions and thoughts, and extinguishes confusion and suffering. When we recognize our natural mind, and attain stability and maturity in the recognition of this source within, we refer to this attainment as enlightenment. As humans, we each have an incredible treasure, a place of wisdom in ourselves. But we have lost touch with the refuge within ourselves.

F
INDING
I
NNER
R
EFUGE
T
HROUGH THE
S
TILLNESS OF THE
B
ODY

How do you find inner refuge through the door of the body? How can you find that place of stillness in yourself when you feel agitated or disturbed? First, don’t move your body. Let it settle. Allow your pain to breathe. Second, don’t feed your body negative attention or worry; it is important to draw the right kind of attention to the body. Become still and focus your attention upon stillness. That’s your door. Go deeper toward this stillness. It is possible that in ten minutes you’ll arrive at a deep place in yourself. When you come to a place of stillness, there is a natural sense of expansion or spaciousness. This sense of being, this spaciousness that you experience is indestructible. You don’t take refuge in something that can be destroyed or changed. You take refuge in something that does not change. That refuge is the spaciousness of being. Even if you only glimpse it, that glimpse is enough to begin to trust. Trusting the place of inner refuge is very important. Once you arrive in the place of deep stillness, you feel a complete sense of protection. So in this way, the body is one door to inner refuge.

Sometimes we lose touch with our essence and get caught up in how we look or feel and what we possess. Of course, the body is important and needs to be taken care of, because it is a door to experiencing your essence. The body gives access to deep stillness, which allows you to experience wisdom. Ultimately, we are able to experience inner stillness as the subtle flow of awareness in the body. The purpose of Tibetan yoga is to support the subtle movement of this awareness. (For more information on Tibetan yoga, see my book
Awakening the Sacred Body
, Hay House 2011.)

When we are conscious through and within our body, we find that inner body. You might call it a
sacred body
. This is the awakening of the sacred body. You have an experience of ground or being or self beyond what you feel with the ordinary body and its changeable conditions. You have a sense of being that is beyond ignorance and the dualistic fears of the ego. You can go beyond all that by connecting to this deep place in a very simple way—by connecting through stillness. It is not complicated. If you experience it, it is the most exciting thing you can do. When you face an incredible challenge or experience pain, and in a second can shift to a place of total peace, it’s a very powerful experience. It’s valuable and absolutely necessary. That is how we find protection—by finding refuge through the stillness of the body.

F
INDING
I
NNER
R
EFUGE
T
HROUGH THE
S
ILENCE OF
S
PEECH

How do you find inner refuge through the door of speech? The pain body has its own speech. It has its own voices. It’s not hard to avoid certain people, change your job, and get a divorce, but it’s very difficult to get divorced from your inner critical voices. Even if you go on a beautiful holiday, pain speech travels with you. If you go to the beach, it’s there. If you go to the mountains for fresh air, the inner dialogue is still running. How is it possible to overcome your inner critic? It is not possible by more talking, not even by more “intelligent” talking, which is what we commonly try.

You may say, “I don’t have problems with debt; I just don’t think about it. I’m busy with my work, and I have an active social life.” But when you are awake at three in the morning, you begin to think about your debt. Is that a good time to do this? No. But there you are, in your bed, unable to get back to sleep because you’re having a conversation with yourself. It’s very noisy. So you negotiate with your inner voices and come to a temporary intellectual peace. You find reasons to be calm. You find reasons to feel good. If you want to produce reasons to be calm and peaceful, you can. But that is not the solution for your unrest, because no matter how intelligently you reason, it is part of pain speech.

So what can you do? Focus your attention and listen to the silence. If your voices are persistent, simply allow the voices and feel the space and the silence around them, instead of listening to them and trying to negotiate with them. Feel the silence in and around the voices rather than trying to find the silence in the absence of voices. You don’t need to run away from noise to find silence. You find the silence within the noise. Begin to hear the silence. It is there. It has always been there. You can discover it. Basically you are neither rejecting your inner voices nor inviting them. You’re just being completely open. Openness is the key. As the sky hosts the clouds, silence hosts all sounds, whether external or internal.