Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (10 page)

Needless to say, we probably won’t do this perfectly. I once had the experience of sitting quietly on my bed, reading Shantideva and crying because I was so moved to be loving and compassionate. Then someone burst into the room, and I blew up at her for interrupting me.

Experiences like that are definitely humbling. They can either cause us to spin off into self-criticism or inspire us to renew our intention to be there for others, no matter what they trigger. Right then, when we miss the mark, we can do the three-step practice. We can use it to catch the spark of irritation, impatience, or disappointment before it bursts into the flames of anger. This practice allows us to look at what’s happening around us while simultaneously
being aware of what’s happening inside us. To review the steps:

First, come into the present. Flash on what’s happening with you right now. Be fully aware of your body, its energetic quality. Be aware of your thoughts and emotions.

Next, feel your heart, literally placing your hand on your chest if you find that helpful. This is a way of accepting yourself just as you are in that moment, a way of saying, “This is my experience right now, and it’s okay.”

Then go into the next moment without any agenda.

This practice can open us to others at times when we tend to close down. It gives us a way to be awake rather than asleep, a way to look outward rather than withdraw. For example, we often go into a meeting so preoccupied with what we’re going to say that we tune out other people, not hearing what they’re saying or picking up clues about how they’re feeling. But if, before entering, we can ground ourselves by doing the three-step practice, bringing mind and body together right where we are, then we can enter the meeting with an open mind, an inquisitive “let’s see how this unfolds” attitude, rather than being fixated on achieving a specific outcome. We prepare, we know our topic, and then we leap. This was how I was taught to teach. I read, I take notes, I decide what I want to say. And then I go into the room and speak without any props.

Many years ago, one of the monks at Gampo Abbey introduced me to the practice of saying to myself when I
wake up, “I wonder what will happen today.” That’s the spirit of taking a leap.

As we continue to do this practice, whether as a formal meditation or on the spot throughout the day, we become more and more skilled at noticing when we’re activated. So we come into the present—“synchronizing body and mind,” as Chögyam Trungpa called it—then drop the story line and open to the person or situation at hand. This is the foundation for caring for one another, for extending ourselves to others with kindness and compassion. This is the practice of claiming our warriorship rather than being swept away by our thoughts and emotions.

Granted, there’s a discrepancy between the inclusiveness of the second commitment and the reality that there are, for sure, people we have trouble liking. Boss, coworker, spouse, roommate, mother, father, child—who are the people you really dislike and wish would simply go away? Who’s on your list? Be grateful to them: they’re your own special gurus, showing up right on time to keep you honest. It’s the troublemakers in your life who cause you to see that you’ve shut down, that you’ve armored yourself, that you’ve hidden your head in the sand. If you didn’t get angry at them, if you didn’t get fed up with them, you would never be able to cultivate patience. If you didn’t envy them, if you weren’t jealous of them, you would never think to stretch beyond your mean-spiritedness and try to rejoice in their good fortune. If you never met your match, you might think you were better than everybody else and arrogantly criticize their neurotic behavior rather than do something about your own.

When we make this commitment, we begin an ongoing
training in loving-kindness and compassion. One way to do this is to continually ask ourselves: How can I be of service? We can make this an everyday practice. Time after time, however, we’ll find that we’re not really sure what will help and not hurt. But the warrior learns a lot by failing. We probably learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. We have to recognize when something doesn’t work and—this is important—not take it personally. Instead, we can follow Chögyam Trungpa’s suggestion:
Live your life as an experiment.
Adopt an attitude of “I’m not sure what will help in this situation, but I’m going to experiment and try this.” Sometimes the result will be, “Wow, did
that
ever not work!” But if it is, we’ve learned something. And now we can try something else.

In our efforts to keep this commitment, it helps to give ourselves a break and remember the enormity of it—the time frame, which is so long that it’s unimaginable, and the number of people we vow to help, which is infinite: not just people we feel sorry for but all beings everywhere, without exception. If we see them on the street, if we read about them in the news, if we hear about them from our friends—if they come into our consciousness in any way—they are candidates for our loving-kindness and compassion. It’s an assignment without boundaries, without borders, and we’re forever engaged in on-the-job training.

The aspiration of the warrior is to not close down ever—even when a personal relationship falters. That’s not to say there won’t be pain involved. The ending of a previously close relationship throws us right into the midst of fundamental uncertainty—and that definitely hurts. We’ve met our edge. We find ourselves caught up in behaviors we assumed we had outgrown years ago. Sometimes just the
thought of the person makes us close down. But often it is a seemingly irresolvable relationship that teaches us the most, once we’re willing to be vulnerable and honest, once we’re willing to connect with what Chögyam Trungpa called “the genuine heart of sadness.” As warriors in training we do our best to hold the person in our heart without any hypocrisy. One thing we can do with a difficult relationship is to place a picture of the person somewhere we will see it often and think,
I wish for your deepest well-being.
Or we can write down the person’s name, along with the aspiration that they may be safe, may be happy, may live in peace.

Regardless of what specific action we take, our aspiration is to benefit the other person and wish them well. This aspiration is based on a growing trust in basic goodness, our own and theirs. It’s based on our willingness to shed our own protective layers and try to see the other person free of our labels and fixed ideas. We try to drop the story line about how that person harmed us, about how they’re at fault. We still may be left with the rawness of our feelings, with our aversion to the person and to the situation. But regardless of what happened, regardless of who did what to whom, we do whatever we can to dissolve our negativity. That doesn’t necessarily mean getting back together—often it means staying away—but we can send the person forgiveness and caring. Believe me, that feels a whole lot better than poisoning ourselves with bitterness.

The task is inconceivable: saving everyone everywhere from endless depths of suffering. Not just from hunger or no clothes or no shelter, or from being abused or neglected or tortured or killed. We also dedicate our lives to saving both ourselves and others from the very causes of suffering: from our tendencies to cause harm and escalate aggression,
from our inability to know our triggers or see our prejudices, from our preexisting propensities to be provoked and then blame it all on other people.

With the warrior commitment we gradually become a vehicle for connecting others with their unfettered mind, with their intrinsic goodness, so that they, too, can begin to embrace the groundlessness of being human as a source of inspiration and joy. Our wish for all beings, including ourselves, is to live fearlessly with uncertainty and change. The compassion and kindness required for this are limitless, but we start with whatever we have right now and build on that.

The warrior commitment involves understanding that there is nothing static about human beings. Usually we try hard to maintain our fixed ideas about people: my self-centered, unreasonable sister; my cheerful, optimistic co-worker; my mean, uptight father. And what about me? I’m too fat, a loser, can never get it right; I’m a lot smarter than everyone else, or in better shape; I’m capable and successful; I’m not cut out to be a meditator; I’m a bad mother and a worse spouse. But in fact, we can’t make a single label stick. We can’t ever conclude definitively what someone is like, because the data is always changing. The information is never all in.

This commitment challenges us to question our conventional mind-set, question reality as we usually assume it to be. Each of us lives in a reality we take to be the real one. This is how it is, we insist. End of story. But isn’t even the consensus reality we share as human beings just a projection of our human sense perceptions? Animals don’t have the same perceptions as we do; therefore, they don’t share the same reality. So what is the “real” reality? Is it ours? Is
it a dog’s? A bird’s? A fly’s? The answer is, there isn’t one “real” reality. Reality is wherever we find ourselves in the moment, and it’s not as solid, not as certain, as we think.

One of the astronauts who went to the moon later described his experience looking back at Earth from that perspective. Earth looked so small, he said. Just a single sphere hanging in space. It made him very sad to realize that we have divided the world arbitrarily into countries that we’re fiercely attached to, with borders we keep waging wars to protect. What we do just doesn’t make sense, he realized. We have just this one Earth with one people to take care of it, and the way we’re going about it is crazy.

Chief Seattle had the same insight more than a hundred years ago:

We are all children of the Great Spirit. We all belong to Mother Earth. Our planet is in great trouble, and if we keep carrying old grudges and do not work together, we will all die.

The way we label things is the way they will appear to us. When we label a piece of the earth
China
or
Brazil
or the
United States,
it becomes an entity that carries strong emotional baggage. When we label something
good,
we see it as good. When we label something
bad,
we see it as bad. We get so hung up on like and dislike, on who’s right and who’s wrong, as if these labels were ultimately real. Yet the human experience is an experience of nothing to hang on to, nothing that’s set once and for all. Reality is always falling apart. In this fleeting situation, the only thing that makes sense is for us to reach out to one another.

As we move in the direction of seeing more space around
our fixed ideas, around our limited sense of self, around our notions of right and wrong, around the labels we’re so invested in, the crack in our conventional way of experiencing life will get wider and wider. At that point it may start to dawn on us that if we want to change the movie of our life, we will have to change our mind.

There’s a story that Ed Brown, the Zen chef, tells about his early days with his teacher, Suzuki Roshi. Ed was the head cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California in the 1960s and was well known for his volatile temper. Once, in a fury, he went to his teacher and complained about the state of the kitchen: people didn’t clean up properly; people talked too much; people were distracted and unmindful. It was chaos on a daily basis. Suzuki Roshi’s reply was simple: “Ed, if you want a calm kitchen, calm your mind.”

If your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accommodating world, a place that’s endlessly interesting and alive. That quality isn’t inherent in the place but in your state of mind. The warrior longs to communicate that all of us have access to our basic goodness and that genuine freedom comes from going beyond labels and projections, beyond bias and prejudice, and taking care of each other.

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Breathing In Pain, Breathing Out Relief