The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (3 page)

The meditation technique itself cultivates precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go – qualities that are innate within us. They are not something that we have to gain, but something that we could bring out, cultivate, rediscover in ourselves. Now I’d like to discuss the meditation technique and point out how it helps bring out these qualities.

precision

The technique is, first, to take good posture and, second, to become mindful of your out-breath. This is just your ordinary out-breath, not manipulated or controlled in any way. Be with the breath as it goes out, feel the breath go out, touch the breath as it goes out. Now, this seems simple, but to actually be
with that breath and to be there for every breath requires a lot of precision. When you sit down and begin to meditate, the fact that you always come back to that breath brings out the precision, the clarity, and the accuracy of your mind. Just the fact that you always come back to this breath and that you try, in a gentle way, to be as fully with the breath as you can sharpens your mind.

The third part of the technique is that, when you realize that you’ve been thinking, you say to yourself, ‘Thinking.’ Now, that also requires a lot of precision. Even if you wake up as if from a dream and realize that you’ve been thinking, and you immediately go back to the breath and accidentally forget about the labeling, even then you should just pause a little bit and say to yourself, ‘Thinking.’ Use the label, because the label is so precise. Just acknowledge that you’ve been thinking, just that, no more, no less, just ‘thinking.’ Being with the out-breath cultivates the precision of your mind, and when you label, that too brings out the precision of your mind. Your mind becomes more clear and stabilized. As you sit, you might want to be aware of this.

gentleness

If we emphasized only precision, our meditation might become quite harsh and militant. It might get too goal-oriented. So we also emphasize gentleness.
One thing that is very helpful is to cultivate an overall sense of relaxation while you are doing the meditation. I think you’ll notice that as you become more mindful and more aware and awake, you begin to notice that your stomach tends to get very tense and your shoulders tend to get very tight. It helps a lot if you notice this and then purposely relax your stomach, relax your shoulders and your neck. If you find it difficult to relax, just gradually, patiently, gently work with it.

When the breath goes out, not only does it ripen the precision of our minds, but it also brings out this inherent gentle quality, this quality of heart or warmth, of kindness, because the attention to the breath is very soft. If you were doing a technique that said, ‘Concentrate on the out-breath, have one hundred percent attention on the out-breath’ (and there are techniques like that which are very beneficial), that would be cultivating precision, but not gentleness. But since this technique is ripening not only precision, but also gentleness, the instruction is that there is only twenty-five percent awareness on the out-breath, which is really very little. The truth of the matter is that if you are concentrating on the out-breath and
only
on the out-breath, you’re not being aware of the person next to you, of the lights going on and off, of the sound of the ocean. However, in this technique, because your eyes are open and because the gaze is not a tight gaze and because the whole emphasis of the practice is one of openness,
even though you’re mindful of the out-breath, you’re not shutting out all the other things that are going on. So it’s only twenty-five percent awareness on the out-breath. The other awareness is less specific; it’s simply that you are alive in this room with all the different things that are occurring here. So we give the instruction, ‘Be mindful of your out-breath, be with your out-breath,’ and that’s what you do. But the instruction that the awareness is only twenty-five percent really brings home the idea that it’s not a concentration practice – there’s a very light touch on the breath as it goes out. Touch the breath and let it go. The touch is the precision part and also the softness part. Touch it very softly and let it go.

If the object of meditation were something concrete, something solid and graspable – an image or a statue or a dot on the floor or a candle – it would be much more of a concentration exercise. But the breath is very elusive; even if you wanted to give it one hundred percent attention, it would be difficult because it is so ephemeral, so light, so airy and spacious. As the object of meditation, it brings a sense of softness and gentleness. It’s like being mindful of a gentle breeze, but in this case it’s our ordinary, uncontrived out-breath. This technique with the breath is said to be without a goal. You are not doing it to achieve anything except to be fully present. Being fully present isn’t something that happens once and then you have achieved it; it’s being awake to the ebb and flow and movement and creation of
life, being alive to the process of life itself. That also has its softness. If there were a goal that you were supposed to achieve, such as ‘no thoughts,’ that wouldn’t be very soft. You’d have to struggle a lot to get rid of all those thoughts, and you probably couldn’t do it anyway. The fact that there is no goal also adds to the softness.

The moment when you label your thoughts ‘thinking’ is probably the key place in the technique where you cultivate gentleness, sympathy, and loving-kindness. Rinpoche used to say, ‘Notice your tone of voice when you say “thinking.”’ It might be really harsh, but actually it’s just a euphemism for ‘Drat! You were thinking again, gosh darn it, you dummy.’ You might really be saying, ‘You fool, you absolutely miserable meditator, you’re hopeless.’ But it’s not that at all. All that’s happened is that you’ve noticed. Good for you, you actually noticed! You’ve noticed that mind thinks continuously, and it’s wonderful that you’ve seen that. Having seen it, let the thoughts go. Say, ‘Thinking.’ If you notice that you’re being harsh, say it a second time just to cultivate the feeling that you could say it to yourself with gentleness and kindness, in other words, that you are cultivating a nonjudgmental attitude. You are not criticizing yourself, you are just seeing what
is
with precision and gentleness, seeing thinking as thinking. That is how this technique cultivates not only precision but also softness, gentleness, a sense of warmth toward oneself. The honesty of precision and
the goodheartedness of gentleness are qualities of making friends with yourself. So during this period, along with being as precise as you can, really emphasize the softness. If you find your body tensing, relax it. If you find your mind tensing, relax it. Feel the expansiveness of the breath going out into the space. When thoughts come up, touch them very lightly, like a feather touching a bubble. Let the whole thing be soft and gentle, but at the same time precise.

letting go

The third aspect of the technique is the quality of opening or letting go. This seemingly simple technique helps us rediscover this ability that we already have to open beyond small-mindedness and to let go of any kind of fixation or limited view. Precision and gentleness are somewhat tangible. You can work on being more accurate with the out-breath, more accurate with the label. You can relax your stomach and your shoulders and your body, and you can be softer with the out-breath and more sympathetic with the labeling. But letting go is not so easy. Rather, it’s something that happens as a result of working with precision and gentleness. In other words, as you work with being really faithful to the technique and being as precise as you can and simultaneously as kind as you can, the ability to let go seems to happen to you. The discovery of your ability
to let go spontaneously arises; you don’t force it. You shouldn’t be forcing accuracy or gentleness either, but while you
could
make a project out of accuracy, you
could
make a project out of gentleness, it’s hard to make a project out of letting go. Nevertheless, I’ll describe how the technique leads you toward this rediscovery of your ability to let go and to open.

You may have wondered why we are mindful of our out-breath and only our out-breath. Why don’t we pay attention to the out-breath
and
the in-breath? There are other excellent techniques that instruct the meditator to be mindful of the breath going out and mindful of the breath coming in. That definitely sharpens the mind and brings a sense of one-pointed, continuous mindfulness, with no break in it. But in this meditation technique, we are with the out-breath; there’s no particular instruction about what to do until the next out-breath. Inherent in this technique is the ability to let go at the end of the out-breath, to open at the end of the out-breath, because for a moment there’s actually no instruction about what to do. There’s a possibility of what Rinpoche used to call ‘gap’ at the end of the out-breath: you’re mindful of your breath as it goes out, and then there’s a pause as the breath comes in. It’s as if you … pause. It doesn’t help at all to say, ‘Don’t be mindful of the in-breath’ – that’s like saying, ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant.’ When you’re told not to be mindful of something, it becomes an obsession. Nevertheless, the mindfulness is on the
out-breath, and there’s some sense of just waiting for the next out-breath, a sense of no project. One could just let go at the end of the out-breath. Breath goes out and dissolves, and there could be some sense of letting go completely. Nothing to hold on to until the next out-breath.

Even though it’s difficult to do, as you begin to work with mindfulness of the out-breath, then the pause, just waiting, and then mindfulness of the next out-breath, the sense of being able to let go gradually begins to dawn on you. So don’t have any high expectations – just do the technique. As the months and years go by, the way you regard the world will begin to change. You will learn what it is to let go and what it is to open beyond limited beliefs and ideas about things.

The experience of labeling your thoughts ‘thinking’ also, over time, becomes much more vivid. You may be completely caught up in a fantasy, in remembering the past or planning for the future, completely caught up, as if you had gotten on an airplane and flown away someplace. You’re elsewhere and you are with other people and you’ve redecorated a room or you’ve relived a pleasant or unpleasant experience or you’ve gotten all caught up in worrying about something that might happen or you’re getting a lot of pleasure from thinking about something that may happen, but you’re completely involved as if in a dream. Then suddenly you realize, and you just come back. It happens automatically. You say to yourself,
‘Thinking,’ and as you’re saying that, basically what you are doing is letting go of those thoughts. You don’t repress the thoughts. You acknowledge them as ‘thinking’ very clearly and kindly, but then you let them go. Once you begin to get the hang of this, it’s incredibly powerful that you could be completely obsessed with hope and fear and all kinds of other thoughts and you could realize what you’ve been doing – without criticizing it – and you could let it go. This is probably one of the most amazing tools that you could be given, the ability to just let things go, not to be caught in the grip of your own angry thoughts or passionate thoughts or worried thoughts or depressed thoughts.

five
the wisdom of no escape

Y
esterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openness, and described how the meditation technique helps us remember the qualities that we already possess. Now, sometimes the teachings emphasize the wisdom, brilliance, or sanity that we possess, and sometimes they emphasize the obstacles, how it is that we feel stuck in a small, dark place. These are actually two sides of one coin: when they are put together, inspiration (or well-being) and burden (or suffering) describe the human condition. That’s what we see when we meditate.

We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness. This is what we are here to see for ourselves. Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other. For a fully enlightened being, the difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, because somehow the energy underlying both
of them is the same. The basic creative energy of life – life force – bubbles up and courses through all of existence. It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught. Even though there are so many teachings, so many meditations, so many instructions, the basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind – thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call ‘me’ or ‘I.’ Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what to accept and what to reject in terms of what wakes you up and what makes you fall asleep. No one else can really sort out for you what to accept – what opens up your world – and what to reject – what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery. This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn’t have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject.

The practice of meditation helps us get to know this basic energy really well, with tremendous honesty and warmheartedness, and we begin to figure out for ourselves what is poison and what is medicine, which means something different for each of us. For example, some people can drink a lot of coffee and it really wakes them up and they feel great; others can drink just a thimbleful and become a nervous
wreck. Everything we eat affects each of us differently; so it is with how we relate with our own energies. We are the only ones who know what wakes us up and what puts us to sleep. So we sit here on these red cushions in this brightly lit room with this fancy, colorful shrine and this huge picture of the Karmapa. Outside, the snow is falling and the wind howling. Hour after hour we sit here and just come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds, come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds, follow the out-breath, label our thoughts ‘thinking,’ come back to the present moment, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds. The instruction is to be as honest and warmhearted in the process as you can, to learn gradually what it means to let go of holding on and holding back.