The Authentic Life (21 page)

Remorse is one path to awakening to what is most important. Another is through the intentional cultivation of gratitude. Our culture, which is based in self-centeredness, does not actually foster the natural cultivation of this feeling. Gratitude may be given lip service, such as the moral dictate that we
should
be thankful, but in reality, we're taught to protect “Me and Mine.” This is not true in every culture. There's an African tribe where
an anthropologist proposed a game to the children. He put a basket full of fruit near a tree and told the children that whoever got there first won the sweet fruits. When he told them to run, they all took each other's hands and ran together, then sat together enjoying their treats. When he asked them why they had run like that when one of them could have had all the fruits for himself, they said, “
Ubuntu
, how can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?” “Ubuntu” in their culture means, “I am because we are.”

Even though gratitude is an intrinsic aspect of the awakened heart, we often have to work with the barriers that prevent us from connecting with it—barriers such as selfishness, fear, and self-protectiveness. One way to work with these barriers, and to cultivate our natural gratitude, is to do a daily gratitude practice called Nightly Reflection. Many have found this practice helpful, not only in cultivating gratitude but also in opening to the experience of remorse. In a way, these two go together: the more we experience remorse for living from a closed heart, the more we aspire to live from gratitude.

T
HE
P
RACTICE OF
N
IGHTLY
R
EFLECTION

Nightly Reflection is a relaxed meditation that is done right before going to sleep. I do it lying on my back in bed with my hands folded on my stomach. The eyes can be open or closed. It's best to do this at approximately the same time each night, and it's especially important to do before getting too tired.

The intention of Nightly Reflection is to review the events of the day, starting from your first memory of the morning to the moment you began your evening's practice. Focus on the main events—the thoughts and feelings you experienced throughout the day—as if you were watching a movie. During
Nightly Reflection, it's important not to get pulled into thinking, analyzing, or judging, but instead to review what actually transpired as objectively as possible. The instruction is to try to stay physically grounded by maintaining awareness of the breath in the area of the center of the chest. Without this grounding, the exercise can easily become too mental.

Once the review is finished, ask yourself two questions: “What am I most thankful for?” and “What do I feel the most remorse for?” Note that breathing into the center of the chest is particularly important when we are raising these two questions, since it helps avoid the mental detours of thinking and judging.

In doing the Nightly Reflection regularly, we become not only more appreciative during the meditation, we also become more aware and receptive during the day. For example, we begin to notice that we are often not very appreciative as we go through our daily routine. Little positive moments are often not even acknowledged or, if so, are quickly forgotten. But as we become more attuned to what is actually happening during the day, these moments begin to stand out, and we experience genuine appreciation during the present-moment experience.

Similarly, in asking what we are most remorseful about each evening, our sensitivity to this also becomes much more finely tuned during the day. Interestingly, when we can simply notice, without judging ourselves, where we feel remorse, it is not at all discouraging. In fact, feeling this awakening of conscience is very positive and helps activate the aspiration to live from the awakened heart. In effect, by reviewing our day through a focused Nightly Reflection practice, we're remembering what is most important. Watching the movie clip of the long body of our day allows us to see what we do more objectively, while at the same time being much less identified with it. This, in turn, allows us to open to a bigger sense of things.

K
INDNESS

Along with gratitude, one other essential aspect of living from the awakened heart is kindness. In fact, when asked what he considered to be the most important thing, the Dalai Lama answered, “Kindness.” Kindness, like gratitude, needs to be cultivated. But to have the discipline to cultivate kindness, we may first need to realize how often we are incapable of extending it. A Hospice patient once said to me, “Knowing I have cancer and probably only a short time to live gives me a certain freedom to say things I wouldn't have said before.” She said it not as a justification to vent her anger and tell people off, but to describe her growing courage to be honest and genuine. She realized how she often held back her heart, either from laziness or fear or self-doubt. It took the awareness of the fact that her time was limited for her to be able to live more authentically.

When we find ourselves in situations where we see the choice point between self-centeredness and extending kindness, we can remember the question of the eternal recurrence: “If I were to live my life in the exact same way, again and again and again, throughout eternity, what would I do in this situation?” This question is a direct call to awakening the heart, and the answer will turn us away from self-centeredness and toward kindness. It will remind us of what is truly the most important thing.

Once we're aware of how crucial it is to aspire to live from kindness, we're ready to begin the actual work of cultivating it. One way to cultivate it on a daily basis is through the Loving-kindness Meditation. There are many different versions of this meditation, but the essence is to extend unconditional friendliness, both to ourselves and to others. It's about living from the awakened heart, where we naturally desire the welfare of everyone.
The one thing that most prevents our natural loving-kindness from coming forth is the solidity of the judgmental mind—finding fault with both ourselves and others. And the one most effective way to undercut this tendency to judge is through staying grounded in the breath in and out of the heart, while at the same time saying words to direct our attention toward awakening our natural wish for the well-being of everyone. Here are the instructions:

 

The Loving-kindness Meditation is perhaps the single most transformative meditation practice I have ever encountered. However, for it to take root in our lives, it needs to be done on
a daily basis. The good news is that when we do it regularly, it gradually becomes not just an exercise but our natural response to life. It allows us to
live
from what is most important. We may first have to experience adversity and loss, as well as remorse. We may also need to persevere for a long time in our efforts to cultivate gratitude and kindness, but living from the awakened heart is the essence of living authentically. And it's the fruition of discovering who we most truly are.

19

Enjoy the Ride

F
or an eleven-year period, ending when I was in my forties, I lived on a rural property with my wife and two young daughters. We had a half-acre organic garden and tried to grow most of our own food, including raising chickens, sheep, and goats. What we didn't know was that the prior owners had buried DDT and other toxic farm chemicals right where we had our garden and pasture; so for eleven years we were filling our bodies with poison. We didn't discover this until my wife and I both got very sick with an immune system disease, and although we moved, there was no cure for the disease, only symptomatic relief with the aid of powerful steroids.

Before I got sick, although I had a fairly stable meditation practice, it had been clear to me for a while that I was somewhat stuck in the complacency of the familiar, with nothing pushing me to go deeper. This changed radically with the onset of the severe symptoms of weakness, pain, and an unrelenting feeling of nausea. At first I could no longer sit in meditation, since I
lacked both physical energy and mental clarity, and for a period of a few months I felt lost and groundless. Yet as often happens when we are faced with intense difficulty and uncertainty, this illness was a pivotal turning point in my practice and in my life. At first haltingly, and later with a genuine willingness, I learned to relate to my physical condition in a new way; and in the process I also learned how to truly enjoy the ride.

Many people talk about viewing their illnesses as a gift. However, when I first got sick, I saw it as just the opposite—as an unwanted obstacle that I wanted to get rid of as soon as possible. The result of resisting my life was anger, anxiety, confusion, depression, and isolation. My attachments to comfort and control, both of which ran very deep, were severely challenged. Yet for whatever reasons, instead of giving up and wallowing in despair, this most difficult circumstance became the most fruitful learning experience I had ever had up until then. The learning began when I was able to reframe my resistance to the illness so that I could see it as my path—particularly my path to freedom from attachment. This reframing did not come quickly or easily, but at one point the depth of my misunderstanding became very clear: I may not like my experience and I can try to push it away, but the fact remains that whatever is happening right now, regardless of how unpleasant it is, is my genuine life. Whether or not the small mind wants it is not the point; to live most authentically requires that we honestly embrace our life, exactly as it is.

Being able to see our most difficult experiences as our path means that we understand, very specifically, how our difficulty pushes us to work with the exact places where we are most caught in our attachments. For example, one of the places I was particularly caught was in my emotion-based thoughts—thoughts such as “Poor me,” “This isn't how it was supposed to
be,” “What's going to happen to me?” “I can't take this.” These layers and layers of believed thoughts were at first very intractable, but in repeatedly observing the mind and labeling the thoughts each time they arose, it made it possible to be able to observe the thoughts without getting caught in them, and it began to feel as if age-old excess baggage was dropping away.