The Authentic Life (16 page)

The sense of helplessness is no doubt one of our biggest fears, but this is not something new. Haven't we always been just one doctor's visit away from falling through the thin ice? Acute current events simply bring this fact to the surface, that the world around us is unpredictable and precarious. There are also times when our personal emotional distress is particularly powerful, such as when we're struck with serious illness, chronic pain, a relationship crisis, or financial and work reversals
. At these times, it can seem as if meditation techniques such as observing the mind or feeling the spaciousness of the breath aren't quite enough to deal with the churning anxiety that we're experiencing.

When it seems as if the future is dissolving right in front of us, we need to know how to practice with the experience of uncertainty; otherwise we'll remain confused and anxious, and we will continue to detour away from genuine equanimity into the artificial comfort of distractions, busyness, or efforts to control our world. When we experience the discomfort of groundlessness, and especially the feeling of panic when things go really awry, our little mind will naturally resist. It will tell us to fix it right now or to find a sense of ground or some escape. But practice asks us to view the discomfort, even the panic, with a curiosity that's willing to explore exactly what we're feeling in the present moment. This is what it means to say yes—to simply want to know
what
our life is, whether it's interesting or boring, pleasant or unpleasant, joyful or painful.

What helps us open to the experience of a life that no longer fits our expectations—where safety, security, and certainty are no longer givens, where what we counted on is gone, and where there may be little left for us to hold on to? It starts with a question: How do we actually work with this sinking feeling of anxiety, of having no ground? Do we understand what it means to surrender to the insecurity of groundlessness itself? Can we get out of our heads, with our stories about ourselves and our plight, and instead open our eyes and hearts and finally face the fears we've never wanted to face?

Perhaps we should first ask, “What does it actually mean to surrender?” Surrender means, very specifically, to cease fighting—to give up. But give up what? First, give up our resistance,
including our constant effort to avoid discomfort. Surrender also requires that we give up our stories, such as our stories about how our life should be comfortable or within our control, or our stories about how awful things are—stories that are invariably about “Me” and “Mine.” Surrender ultimately means giving ourselves up completely to what is.

But the fact is we can't force ourselves to surrender. We can't just drop our resistance simply because we want to. What we
can
do, however, is experience
the totality of what we are in this very moment.
We can focus all of our attention on the exact truth of our own mental, emotional, and physical experience, which includes our resistance. To do this includes acknowledging the detours that we often take—our self-deceptions, our craving to escape, our blaming—because these things separate us from reality, as well as increasing our bodily tension. The practice of surrender means feeling the totality of this with an unwavering intensity, allowing the cocoon that protects us, the hard shell that covers the heart, to begin to break open. When we can enter into this dark place fully, something else emerges. Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chödrön wrote, “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” The grace that can flow from consciously experiencing our pain becomes a gift that transcends our imagined helplessness.

The specific practice is to move toward, and to fully reside in the physicality of our discomfort, allowing the fear, the sadness, the grief, to be breathed directly into the center of the chest. In the darkest circumstances, breathing into the heart is the one thing that will always be a genuine response to the moment. Using the breath as a conduit, it's
as if
we're breathing the swirling physical sensations and energy of distress right into
the chest center. Then, on the outbreath, we simply exhale. We're not trying to alter our experience; we're simply using the heart's breath as a container to fully feel our distress. We can also include the wider sense of the breath—the air all around us—which gives us a bigger context for experiencing whatever is present.

The process of surrender is to take all of it in—the distress, the resistance, the protections, the breath into the heart, the environment—and to feel it all fully.

In other words, it's to experience the totality of what we are in this very moment. It is here that we can come to understand the paradox that the experience of real ground comes from surrendering to groundlessness itself. We can experience the rockbottom security that grows out of opening into our deepest doubts and insecurities. It is also here that the sweetness of the simple joy of Being becomes available to us.

I recently had a six-month roller coaster ride that started with getting a kidney cancer diagnosis and ended with having surgery and a long and difficult recovery. First there was the anxiety and uncertainty about what would happen. Then, after being told that the tumor had to be cut out, I began exploring other options, including doing a less-risky procedure. But fairly quickly these other options were put in doubt. Anyone who has been through the process with the medical establishment knows there are no easy answers as to what to do, with risks connected to every choice.

It was impossible for me to find any certainty, so my path was to surrender to the experience of uncertainty as best I could, while at the same time objectively researching my best options. I eventually canceled the original surgery and opted for another form of surgery, in which they would attempt to freeze the
tumor to death rather than cutting it out. But even then it was hard to choose a surgeon—there was never any certainty that I was making the right choice. The uncertainty continued well after the surgery, with a variety of postoperative complications that I described in the previous chapter. All of this was quite challenging, but also, in the end, very rewarding. In fact, one of the unexpected benefits was my opening into a bigger sense of compassion for others. Letting our uncertainty be breathed into the heart seems to cultivate compassion, since we are opening to the shared pain of being human—the shared pain that anyone with health issues has to go through. However, to experience the depth of compassion we have to first experience the depth of our own struggle, which, in turn, is the touch point to connecting with the universal pain of being human.

The point is that the path of the authentic life requires being open to change, to the unknown, to
whatever
arises. Prioritizing safety and control guarantees that our life will remain both very small and very unsatisfying. Yes, we fear change and discomfort, and we prefer the quiet waters; but in order to live more genuinely, we need be more wary of our desire for comfort and complacency than we are of our fear of change. We can learn that in those moments when our expectations and plans crumble and there seems to be nothing left, it is only by completely surrendering to what is that we can realize that what remains is more than enough. This is what the four men in the movie learned, each in his own way. When we reach our lowest moments, a part of us gets exposed that we're rarely in touch with when things are going well, and when we enter into it consciously, this is the very part that opens the door to the essence of our existence. Surrendering to the physical reality of the present moment, we learn to go deeper with each in-breath, entering
the silence, the equanimity, of reality-as-it-is. The experience of groundlessness transforms from our worst fear to the Great Teaching, because it forces us to give up our deepest attachments and surrender to what is.

14

What We Really Want

I
recently read a book called
The Long Walk
—the supposedly true and compelling story of a small group of people dealing with extreme adversity. Their quest was to find freedom—not freedom from their emotions and attachments, but literal freedom—from being imprisoned without just cause. At the time of the story, around 1939, the author, Slavomir Rawicz, was twenty-five years old. He was a lieutenant in the Polish army, and with no warning was arrested by the Russians for being a spy. He was taken from his new wife, whom he never saw again, and was arbitrarily imprisoned. We have often returned to the theme of how we're all skating on thin ice, and how easily and without warning we can fall through it. What happened to Slav was a perfect example, for not only was there no warning, there was no legitimate reason for his arrest. Yet his life as he knew it changed forever, and in ways he could never have imagined.

For his first few months in jail he was tortured every day. They asked him to sign a confession saying that he was a spy, but his sense of honor, as well as his stubbornness and pride, wouldn't
allow him to sign it, even though he expected to be killed for not signing. For days on end he was placed upright in a narrow box, like a vertical coffin, and allowed out only for hours of beatings and interrogations. Finally, after months of torture they held a mock trial and sentenced him to twenty-five years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp.

The journey across Russia, from Moscow to Siberia, sounds similar to how the Nazis transported the Jews in cattle cars to the concentration camps. The Russian prisoners were given no food or water for days on end and they had to stand upright, elbow to elbow, urinating and defecating where they stood. Many froze to death or died from illness. After they got off the trains, they were all chained together, two abreast, and had to walk for weeks through freezing snow and blizzards. They were given a cup of coffee and a hunk of bread each day, and when one of them would get weak and fall down, they would be unchained and left to freeze to death.

When they finally got to the Siberian labor camp, which was just a few hundred miles south of the Artic Circle, Slav immediately decided to try to escape. He was young and still strong, and was determined not to spend his next twenty-five years in the prison camp. Gradually he found six other inmates who were willing to attempt the seemingly impossible task of escaping. They prepared as best they could, hoarding food and gathering clothing to keep warm. The author describes the escape and their long walk south, first through the Siberian wilderness, then through Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, and finally across the Himalayas. When they arrived in India, they finally felt that they were free.

The details of their long walk are compelling. They walked for eighteen months straight, across three thousand miles of some of the most difficult terrain in the world, through freezing
blizzards, crossing many turbulent rivers, through scorching desert heat—often going for days without food or water. What struck me most was their absolute determination to survive. Every day one of them would say the words “Let's go,” and they would all begin walking again. There was very little complaining or dramatizing, and although they certainly felt the fear of not surviving, they didn't let it get in the way of their resolute perseverance to make it to freedom.

It's interesting to look at our own desire to be free in light of what these men had to endure. There's a relevant line from another of my favorite books—
Lying Awake
by Mark Salzman: “No matter how many times we hear what it costs to practice, we're still shocked when the bill comes, and we wonder all over again if we can pay it.” Yet, in reading about their encounters with one difficulty after another, I was definitely inspired by their perseverance—their ability to keep going, no matter how much they were hurting or how they felt emotionally. This does not mean they were “practicing” in the way we might understand it—they were probably going on pure survival instinct. But their ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other is vaguely analogous to our taking one more conscious breath to stay present, even when everything in us is telling us to turn away.

I'm close to seventy years old, and in recent months I've had many recollections of my ten years as a hospice volunteer, which began in the early nineties when I was forty-eight. One particular memory was of my second hospice patient, who himself was close to seventy at the time and still an active horseshoer in Northern California, when out of the blue he was diagnosed with liver cancer. He died four months later, and what happened to him is another perfect example of how we're all skating on
thin ice. The Buddha exhorted us to remember that we are not here forever; he said we should remind ourselves that each day could be our last. The truth is, we have no idea how long we have, yet we unconsciously assume we have endless time. But if we remember that we have limited time, we can begin to understand that each day is precious and that we waste much of our life replaying the past and worrying about the future. We can begin, perhaps for the first time, to take our life seriously. We can also begin to truly appreciate the people around us—the fact that they, too, have limited time. Do we want to continue our self-centered and small-minded behaviors toward others, when any one of us could die at any time? We certainly wouldn't want someone to die while we were angry at them or filled with petty thoughts and judgments about them.

The ephemeral nature of our lives reminds us to bring a little more urgency to really being here, to committing more fully to our spiritual path. This urgency doesn't need to be grim—we can be serious in our purpose without being morose.

There's an old Zen term called
tangaryo
. It's used to describe the five-day sitting period that new students go through to demonstrate their sincerity before being allowed to enter the monastery. But the deeper meaning is that it is a time of looking at ourselves as if we were examining a leaf, seeing every detail in depth, looking at what we understand, what we value, and the depth of our commitments.