How to Meditate (15 page)

Gotsampa goes on to say: “[When those thoughts] lure my mind away and distract.” Usually in meditation you think, “Oh my gosh, my mind has been lured away and distracted!” Then you kick the thought in the head by saying to yourself, “I am that thought; I am bad to have done this; my meditation is a wreck.” So the sage reminds us that instead, he “plunge[s] straight into their essential point.” He basically says that he doesn’t try to block the thoughts; he doesn’t try to meditate without the thoughts. He plunges right into them, right into the essential point, which is that, “[These thoughts are] like clouds in the sky; there’s this shimmer where they fly.” It’s a beautiful line: “They’re like clouds in the sky; there’s this shimmer where they fly. / Thoughts that rise, for me sheer delight.” I love this poem because it presents a view that can bring such joy into your life. He’s saying, “Adverse conditions happen, and when they do it’s so delightful. They make a little song of sheer delight.” They are delight because they allow us to awaken to the fresh truth of our life. Even the hardest things allow us to awaken to the moment.

In another verse, Gotsampa says: “When the kleshas get me going, and their heat has got me burning.” Gotsampa knew what a klesha felt like, yet he doesn’t say, “Do anything you can to squelch the emotion.” Instead he says: “Like an alchemistic potion, turning metal into gold / What lies in klesha’s power to bestow / Is bliss without contagion, completely undefiled. / Kleshas coming up, sheer delight!” This is a very profound teaching, and it’s actually what we’re doing when we meditate through the most adverse conditions. We are welcoming the view that the things which we think are wrecking our life—like our thoughts and our emotions, or illness and death—are actually gifts for our transformation. He says: “Here the point to make your practice is reverse the way you see it.” Reverse the way you see the kleshas. You could see them as a cloud in the sky and say, “No big deal,” and with the attitude of sheer delight, let them go.

The seven delights introduce the idea that nothing is fundamentally a problem, except our identification with it. We have a very strong identity with our thoughts and emotions and the events in our life. We can’t kid ourselves about that. Whether life presents us with a pleasant sound or an unpleasant sound, a pleasant smell or an unpleasant smell, a pleasant thought or an unpleasant thought, it’s sheer delight because instead of identifying with the experience, we simply touch it and let it go.

We can let go of even the most intense fears that we carry. Our fears can be very, very mighty! For example, at times we are confronted with the fear of death. This fear can come from waiting for results about a medical test or from a close call in a car accident. There are so many ways we come up against our mortality. But fear of death is yet another thing that we can train with, in small moments, because the fear of death is really a fear of groundlessness, of having nothing to hold on to, of having no certainty about what will come to pass in our life. I don’t mean for this to be trite or superficial. Through many years of working with the fear of death myself and talking with a lot of other people about it, I’ve found that if you train in moving toward the impermanent, transient nature of things, then you’re training in short-circuiting the fear of groundlessness, or the fear of death.

I’ve found that the fear of the unknown is a sort of knee-jerk reaction. You don’t need to feed it with a story line. Rather, you can stay present with the quaky, trembly feeling. It’s the same as the instruction for working with emotions. Allow yourself to be with the energy of the fear of death. Place your awareness on the fear. There can be tension in your stomach, your thoughts can be going wild, and yet you can just focus on the quality and texture of fear itself. Watch how your experience of this fear begins to morph and change, to intensify and release.

There are a lot of views about what happens when we die. Every world religion has an opinion on this subject. But we don’t really know, do we? Each moment is also unknown, and the path of awakening is about not rejecting what arises but instead delighting in the aliveness of everything that shows up.

23

THE BEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

M
editation teaches us how to let go. It’s actually a very important aspect of friendliness, which is that you train again and again in not making things such a big deal. When you have pain in your body, when all sorts of thoughts are going through your mind, you train again and again in acknowledging them openheartedly and open-mindedly, but not making them such a big deal.

Generally speaking, the human species does make things a very big deal. Our problems are a big deal for us. So we need to make space for an attitude of honoring things completely and at the same time not making them a big deal. It’s a paradoxical idea, but holding these two attitudes simultaneously is the source of enormous joy: we hold a sense of respect toward all things, along with the ability to let go. So it’s about not belittling things, but on the other hand not fanning the fire until you have your own private World War III.

Keeping these ideas in balance allows us to feel less crowded and claustrophobic. In Buddhist terms, the space that opens here is referred to as
shunyata,
or “emptiness.” But there’s nothing nihilistic about this emptiness. It’s basically just a feeling of lightness. There is movie entitled
The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
but I prefer to see life from the view of the Bearable Lightness of Being.

When you begin to see life from the point of view that everything is spontaneously arising and that things aren’t “coming at you” or “trying to attack you,” in any given moment you will likely experience more space and more room to relax into. Your stomach, which is in a knot, can just relax. The back of your neck, which is all tensed up, can just relax. Your mind, which is spinning and spinning like one of those little bears that you wind up so it walks across the floor, can just relax. So shunyata refers to the fact that we actually have a seed of spaciousness, of freshness, openness, relaxation, in us.

Sometimes the word
shunyata
has been translated as the “open dimension of our being.” The most popular definition is “emptiness,” which sounds like a big hole that somebody pushes you into, kicking and screaming: “No, no! Not emptiness!” Sometimes people experience this openness as boredom. Sometimes it’s experienced as stillness. Sometimes it’s experienced as a gap in your thinking and your worrying and your all-caught-up-ness.

I experiment with shunyata a lot. When I’m by myself and no one’s talking to me, when I’m simply going for a walk or looking out the window or meditating, I experiment with letting the thoughts go and just seeing what’s there when they go. This is actually the essence of mindfulness practice. You keep coming back to the immediacy of your experience, and then when the thoughts start coming up, thoughts like,
bad, good, should, shouldn’t, me, jerk, you, jerk,
you let those thoughts go, and you come back again to the immediacy of your experience. This is how we can experiment with shunyata, how we can experiment with the open, boundless dimension of being.

24

BELIEFS

T
here was a yoga teacher in India in the twelfth century named Saraha, and he said (to loosely paraphrase him): “Those who believe in existence as solid are stupid. Those who believe that everything is empty are even more stupid.” He was referring to any beliefs that limit our experience and cause us to be unable to perceive what’s in front of our eyes and nose. Beliefs that we hold so strongly and so dearly that we’re willing to fight for them, beliefs that blind us and make us deaf.

I’ve found that one of the biggest struggles arising from meditation practice is when it asks us to examine our belief systems. A lot of meditation practice is about beginning to find those moments when you get stubborn and cannot let go. You meet those moments when you get righteously indignant, and you see that all you can do is either harden and wall yourself off from the world further, or you can soften, let go, and relax. In other words, the only way at all that a practitioner—or a human being—knows that they are still holding tight to beliefs or a way of seeing the world is when they get upset, when they get heated, when they find themselves quarreling with someone about anything because they want it their way. This “You’re wrong and I’m right” thinking keeps us in a certain kind of prison.

This is the juice of the spiritual path: when you begin to get stubborn and opinionated and righteously indignant, when you get hot under the collar and panicked that things are not going to go your way. That’s the only way you know that you’re making yourself unhappy, and it’s like a big bell going off. That’s the time to let the thoughts go, and to train in opening your heart and opening your mind. It all comes down to the meditation instruction of letting go.

This righteous indignation, this panic that someone is going to do it wrong, this dogma you feel that the world will go under if things don’t go your way, is actually a form of aggression. This is true even if the belief is so-called good; for instance, the belief that we need to clean up pollution in the rivers. When we hold on tightly to a certain way of seeing things, we’re poisoning ourselves, and it doesn’t bring any happiness to ourselves or to anyone else. Our good views don’t produce good results because they’re coming from such panic, such aggression, and such determination to have it our way. And there’s so much sense of an enemy.

All our beliefs are based on thoughts, and the energy of those thoughts make us emotional, even hysterical. So in meditation, we get to have an in-depth, earnest discussion with ourselves. A
really
serious talk. In this respect, well-being and making peace with ourselves has a lot to do with the quality of space we find in meditation, which is called shunyata, or emptiness. This open space reminds us to “lighten up.”

As I’ve said, the more you work wholeheartedly with this kind of practice, one of the first things you’re going to discover is that you don’t want to lighten up. You want to have it your way. I once asked a Tibetan teacher, a wild yogi and a wonderful person, about my tendency to get sleepy during practice. I said, “I get drowsy all the time, and I think it’s more than just needing a good night’s rest. I’m actually sort of habitually nodding out and drowsy, kind of clouded. What can I do?”

And he said, “You should just say
POT!”

I just started laughing! I knew it would work. After he said that, I didn’t feel drowsy in my practice for some time. But sure enough, habitual patterns returned, and there I was supposedly meditating, and I would get very drowsy and I’d want to lie down. Then I would remember what he said about how I could say
POT!
Then I said, “I don’t want to say
POT!
I want to lie down!” And so I would lie down. But I couldn’t rest very well, because I caught myself in this trick. The pleasure of lying down was somewhat interrupted by my insight into what was going on.

I realized that this is what we’re all up against, every single one of us. Even if someone said, “All you have to do is eat this little pill, and your pain will go away,” you’ll find that you don’t want to. You want to go to sleep. Or you want to prove them wrong. Or you want to have it turn out your way. You don’t want to eat the pill or say
POT!
or meditate or soften, or any of that stuff. You want it your way.

Our beliefs are an excellent opportunity to have a good laugh about the human condition, and to remind ourselves how we are all in this together. How tightly we hold on to our beliefs reminds us of what we’re all up against. We could get in the habit of going back to the out-breath, which is the same as coming back to the freshness of the moment. This is very difficult when the moment is pregnant with a lot of energy—because very often your beliefs lock you down into angry thoughts; jealous thoughts; very desperately lonely, sad thoughts; addictive thoughts; craving, wanting thoughts. When you look at your beliefs in meditation, you often find yourself sitting in a highly charged atmosphere. Get used to sitting there, breathing into it, rather than trying to escape. Pain can arise in space. Depression and fear can arise in space. We can make the space bigger so that we can let whatever arises be there because we put space around it. We put some softness and warmth around it.

And bring as much honesty as you can to your practice. When you feel any kind of firmness of mind, keep asking questions. Ask and ask questions. Get curious, and open yourself to the space of meditation. This is how the world speaks to you.

25

RELAXING WITH GROUNDLESSNESS

W
hether we’re studying Buddhism or doing Buddhist practice, we should realize that the essence of the practice is discovering how we misperceive reality. We actually have a misperception of reality. And what we’re doing through meditation is training in being able to perceive reality correctly.

Enlightenment—full enlightenment—is perceiving reality with an open, unfixated mind, even in the most difficult circumstances. It’s nothing more than that, actually. You and I have had experiences of this open, unfixated mind. Think of a time when you have felt shock or surprise; at a time of awe or wonder we experience it. It’s usually in small moments, and we might not even notice it, but everyone experiences this open, so-called enlightened mind. If we were completely awake, this would be our constant perception of reality. It’s helpful to realize that this open, unfettered mind has many names, but let’s use the term “buddha nature.”

You could say it’s as if we are in a box with a tiny little slit. We perceive reality out of that little slit, and we think that’s how life is. And then as we meditate—particularly if we train in the way that I’m suggesting—if we train in gentleness, and if we train in letting go, if we bring relaxation as well as faithfulness to the technique into the equation; if we work with open eyes and with being awake and present, and if we train that way moment after moment in our life—what begins to happen is that the crack begins to get bigger, and it’s as if we perceive more. We develop a wider and more tolerant perspective.