The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (9 page)

In other words, suppose there’s someone in your life that you can’t stand, the very thought of whom brings up all kinds of negative feelings. You decide to do tonglen to work with feeling more open and brave and gentle in that particular situation. So you think of that person and up come those awful feelings, and when you’re breathing in, you connect with them – their quality and texture and just how they grab your heart. It’s not that you try to figure them out; you just feel the pain. Then on the out-breath you relax, let go, open up, ventilate the whole thing. But you don’t luxuriate in that for very long because when you breathe in again, it’s back to the painful feeling. You don’t get completely trapped, drowned in
that
, because next you breathe out – you open and relax and share some sense of space again. Maybe you want to grasp on to the joy, but then you breathe in again. Maybe you want to dwell in the pain, but then you breathe out again. It’s like you’re learning how to touch and go – you touch again and then you let go again. You don’t prefer the pain to
the pleasure or the pleasure to the pain; you go back and forth continually.

After you’ve worked with the specific object for a while and you are genuinely connecting with the pain and your ability to open and let go, then you take the practice a step further – you do it for all sentient beings. This is a key point about tonglen: your own experience of pleasure and pain becomes the way that you recognize your kinship with all sentient beings, the way you can share in the joy and the sorrow of everyone who’s ever lived, everyone who’s living now, and everyone who will ever live. You are acknowledging that the discomfort that you feel when you think of that particular person is something that all human beings feel, and the joy that you feel, the sense of being able to open up and let go, is also people’s birthright. You’re breathing in that same pain, but now you think to yourself, ‘Let me feel it so that no one else on the whole earth has to feel it.’ In other words, it becomes useful. ‘I’m miserable, I’m depressed. Okay. Let me feel it fully so that nobody else has to feel it, so that others could be free of it.’ It starts to awaken your heart because you have this aspiration to say, ‘This pain can be of benefit to others because I can be courageous enough to feel it fully so no one else has to.’ On the out-breath you say, ‘Let me give away anything good or true that I ever feel, any sense of humor, any sense of enjoying the sun coming up and going down, any sense of delight in the
world at all, so that everybody else may share in this and feel it.’

So again, the first step is flashing some sense of openness and spaciousness, the second step is working with black in and white out, the third step is contacting something very real for us, and the fourth step is extending it out and being willing to do it for all sentient beings.

An interesting thing happens whenever I give tonglen instruction: people start going to sleep. It’s hard to hear this stuff. I’ve never given tonglen instruction where I don’t notice that at least three people are completely gone, and the others are probably all feeling extremely drowsy. By the same token, when you actually start doing the practice, you’ll probably fall asleep a lot. Don’t consider that an obstacle. This practice will still introduce to you the whole idea that you can feel both suffering and joy – that both are part of being human. If people are willing even for one second a day to make an aspiration to use their own pain and pleasure to help others, they are actually able to do it that much more. As you become more fearless, your bodhicitta will ripen with each day of your life, which will be of great benefit to others.

^*
The ‘great vehicle,’ which presents vision based on emptiness, compassion, and acknowledgment of universal buddha nature.

thirteen
taking refuge

T
oday I want to talk about taking refuge in the three jewels – the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha – and what that really means.

When we’re helpless infants, we totally depend on others to take care of us; otherwise we couldn’t eat and we wouldn’t be clean. If it were not for our helplessness, there would be no nurturing. Ideally, that period of nurturing is one in which maitri, loving-kindness, can be fostered in us. The Shambhala teachings tell us that the young warrior, the baby warrior, is placed in a cradle of loving-kindness. Ideally, among people striving to create an enlightened society, in the period of nurturing, individuals would naturally develop loving-kindness and respect toward themselves and a sense of feeling relaxed and at home with themselves. That would be a ground. In an enlightened society, there would be some ceremonial rite of passage, such as many traditional peoples have had, in which the child formally becomes a young man or a young woman. It seems that too often we’re victims of not enough nurturing in the beginning, and we don’t know when we’ve grown
up. Some of us at the age of fifty or sixty or seventy are still wondering what we’re going to be when we grow up. We remain children in our heart of hearts, which is to say, fundamentally theists.

In any case, whether we feel that we weren’t nurtured properly, or whether we feel fortunate that we were – whatever our situation – in the present moment we can always realize that the ground is to develop loving-kindness toward ourselves. As adults, we can begin to cultivate a sense of loving-kindness for ourselves – by ourselves, for ourselves. The whole process of meditation is one of creating that good ground, that cradle of loving-kindness where we actually are nurtured. What’s being nurtured is our confidence in our own wisdom, our own health, and our own courage, our own goodheartedness. We develop some sense that the way we are – the kind of personality that we have and the way we express life – is good, and that by being who we are completely and by totally accepting that and having respect for ourselves, we are standing on the ground of warriorship.

I’ve always thought that the phrase ‘to take refuge’ is very curious because it sounds theistic, dualistic, and dependent ‘to take refuge’ in something. I remember very clearly, at a time of enormous stress in my life, reading
Alice in Wonderland.
Alice became a heroine for me because she fell into this hole and she just free-fell. She didn’t grab for the edges, she wasn’t terrified, trying to stop her fall; she
just fell and she looked at things as she went down. Then, when she landed, she was in a new place. She didn’t take refuge in anything. I used to aspire to be like that because I saw myself getting near the hole and just screaming, holding back, not wanting to go anywhere where there was no hand to hold.

In every human life (whether there are puberty rites or not) you are born, and you are born alone. You go through that birth canal alone, and then you pop out alone, and then a whole process begins. And when you die, you die alone. No one goes with you. The journey that you make, no matter what your belief about that journey is, is made alone. The fundamental idea of taking refuge is that between birth and death we are alone. Therefore, taking refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha does not mean finding consolation in them, as a child might find consolation in Mommy and Daddy. Rather, it’s a basic expression of your aspiration to leap out of the nest, whether you feel ready for it or not, to go through your puberty rites and be an adult with no hand to hold. It expresses your realization that the only way to begin the real journey of life is to feel the ground of loving-kindness and respect for yourself and then to leap. In some sense, however, we never get to the point where we feel one hundred percent sure: ‘I have had my nurturing cradle. It’s finished. Now I can leap.’ We are always continuing to develop maitri and continuing to leap. The other day I was talking about meeting our edge and our desire to
grab on to something when we reach our limits. Then we see that there’s more loving-kindness, more respect for ourselves, more confidence that needs to be nurtured. We work on that and we just keep leaping.

So for us, taking refuge means that we feel that the way to live is to cut the ties, to cut the umbilical cord and alone start the journey of being fully human, without confirmation from others. Taking refuge is the way that we begin cultivating the openness and the goodheartedness that allow us to be less and less dependent. We might say, ‘We shouldn’t be dependent anymore, we should be open,’ but that isn’t the point. The point is that you begin where you are, you see what a child you are, and you don’t criticize that. You begin to explore, with a lot of humor and generosity toward yourself, all the places where you cling, and every time you cling, you realize, ‘Ah! This is where, through my mindfulness and my tonglen and everything that I do, my whole life is a process of learning how to make friends with myself.’ On the other hand, this need to cling, this need to hold the hand, this cry for Mom, also shows you that
that’s
the edge of the nest. Stepping through right there – making a leap – becomes the motivation for cultivating maitri. You realize that if you can step through that doorway, you’re going forward, you’re becoming more of an adult, more of a complete person, more whole.

In other words, the only real obstacle is ignorance.
When you say ‘Mom!’ or when you need a hand to hold, if you refuse to look at the whole situation, you aren’t able to see it as a teaching – an inspiration to realize that this is the place where you could go further, where you could love yourself more. If you
can’t
say to yourself at that point, ‘I’m going to look into this, because that’s all I need to do to continue this journey of going forward and opening more,’ then you’re committed to the obstacle of ignorance.

Working with obstacles is life’s journey. The warrior is always coming up against dragons. Of course the warrior gets scared, particularly before the battle. It’s frightening. But with a shaky, tender heart the warrior realizes that he or she is just about to step into the unknown, and then goes forth to meet the dragon. The warrior realizes that the dragon is nothing but unfinished business presenting itself, and that it’s fear that really needs to be worked with. The dragon is just a motion picture that appears there, and it appears in many forms: as the lover who jilted us, as the parent who never loved us enough, as someone who abused us. Basically what we work with is our fear and our holding back, which are not necessarily obstacles. The only obstacle is ignorance, this refusal to look at our unfinished business. If every time the warrior goes out and meets the dragon, he or she says, ‘Hah! It’s a dragon again. No way am I going to face this,’ and just splits, then life becomes a recurring story of getting up in the morning, going out, meeting the dragon, saying, ‘No way,’
and splitting. In that case you become more and more timid and more and more afraid and more of a baby. No one’s nurturing you, but you’re still in that cradle, and you never go through your puberty rites.

So we say we take refuge in the buddha, we take refuge in the dharma, we take refuge in the sangha. In the oryoki meal chant we say, ‘The buddha’s virtues are inconceivable, the dharma’s virtues are inconceivable, the sangha’s virtues are inconceivable,’ and ‘I prostrate to the buddha, I prostrate to the dharma, I prostrate to the sangha, I prostrate respectfully and always to these three.’ Well, we aren’t talking about finding comfort in the buddha, dharma, and sangha. We aren’t talking about prostrating in order to be safe. The buddha, we say traditionally, is the example of what we also can be. The buddha is the awakened one, and we too are the buddha. It’s simple. We are the buddha. It’s not just a way of speaking. We are the awakened one, meaning one who continually leaps, one who continually opens, one who continually goes forward. It isn’t easy and it’s accompanied by a lot of fear, a lot of resentment, and a lot of doubt. That’s what it means to be human, that’s what it means to be a warrior. To begin with, when you leave the cradle of loving-kindness, you are in this beautiful suit of armor because, in some sense, you’re well protected and you feel safe. Then you go through puberty rites, the process of taking off the armor that you might have had some illusion was protecting you from
something, only to find that actually it’s shielding you from being fully alive and fully awake. Then you go forward and you meet the dragon, and every meeting shows you where there’s still some armor to take off.

Taking refuge in the buddha means that you are willing to spend your life acknowledging or reconnecting with your awakeness, learning that every time you meet the dragon you take off more armor, particularly the armor that covers your heart. That’s what we’re doing here during this dathun, removing armor, removing our protections, undoing all the stuff that covers over our wisdom and our gentleness and our awake quality. We’re not trying to be something we aren’t; rather, we’re rediscovering, reconnecting with who we are. So when we say, ‘I take refuge in the buddha,’ that means I take refuge in the courage and the potential of fearlessness of removing all the armor that covers this awakeness of mine. I am awake; I will spend my life taking this armor off. Nobody else can take it off because nobody else knows where all the little locks are, nobody else knows where it’s sewed it up tight, where it’s going to take a lot of work to get that particular iron thread untied. I may have a zipper that goes right down the front and has padlocks all the way down. Every time I meet the dragon, I take off as many padlocks as I can; eventually, I’ll be able to take the zipper down. I might say to you, ‘Simple. When you meet the dragon you just take off one of
your padlocks and then your zipper’ll come down.’ And
you
say, ‘What is she talking about?,’ because
you
have sewn a seam up under your left arm with iron thread. Every time you meet the dragon, you have to get out these special snippers that you have hidden away in a box with all your precious things and snip a few of those threads off, as many as you dare, until you start vomiting with fear and say, ‘This is enough for now.’ Then you begin to be much more awake and more connected with your buddha nature, with buddha – you know what it means to take refuge in buddha. To the next person you meet, you say, ‘It’s easy. All you have to do is get your little snippers out of your precious box and you start –’ and they look at you and they say, ‘What is he talking about?’ because
they
have these big boots that come all the way up and cover their whole body and head. The only way to get the boots off is to start with the soles of the boots, and they know that every time they meet the dragon, they actually have to start peeling. So you have to do it alone. The basic instruction is simple: Start taking off that armor. That’s all anyone can tell you. No one can tell you how to do it because you’re the only one who knows how you locked yourself in there to begin with.