Unstick from Yourself

Practice of the Week
Unstick from Yourself

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Spiritual practice must be a process of training – envisioning your life as a process of opening and growing rather than simply enduring what happens to you, willy-nilly. To live with a training point of view requires a way to assess and see how you are doing as the training unfolds. Once you see how it’s going, you can extend and refine your practice.

Let me emphasize: go lightly. Do not be worried about “grades” or progress. Don’t turn corrosive judgment on ourselves, which will produce discouragement. The point of assessment is simply to remain engaged and informed so we can keep on making a steady, solid, interested effort.

There’s only one point, and it’s so simple, however much we keep forgetting it: Don’t be so stuck on yourself! Open Up! Mind training comes down to this. Keeping this slogan close by at all times is a good tool for seeing how you are doing. Whenever you feel upset, unhappy, dissatisfied, in a snit, frozen, constricted, bound – check and see. Probably if you reflect deeply enough you’ll come to the realization that the ultimate cause of this unpleasantness is that you are in one way or another stuck on yourself, favoring yourself and your own needs, desires, and viewpoint more than is necessary. Even recognizing this, and opening up just a little, relieves the pressure.

Think about it: you are living in a big world, with lots going one, many problems, many challenges, sad things, happy things. And all of this is the sphere of your life; it’s the ocean you swim in, the air you breathe. You are not separate from it for even a moment. Why would you want to artificially, conceptually, remove yourself from life’s great ocean and lock yourself up in the tiny prison of self, in which, despite your best efforts, you constantly feel confined and under attack?

The whole of the practice comes down to this: stop being so stuck on yourself. Let go of that and open up. Think of others. Try to do something to make them happy. Anything! Something like, “Hello, how are you?” And mean it.

This is a way to assess your practice as you go along, a question to ask yourself on a regular basis: Am I less stuck on myself, more available to others than I used to be? Am I thinking positively and generously of others more often? Be honest about your answers to these questions. If you are just as stuck on yourself as you ever were, that’s OK. That’s information. You know what you have to do. Invite someone out to lunch. Ask someone how she is. Practice more sending and receiving.

You can also practice this slogan particularly when you are feeling tight and embattled. When you notice a sinking feeling inside, say to yourself: “There’s only one point: open up!” Take three conscious breaths. Don’t think something in particular is supposed to happen. This is training. It takes time. You just have to keep on repeating the process. So take those three breaths. Notice what happens, and whatever it is, go on.

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Adapted from Judith Leif, "Train Your Mind: All Dharma Agrees at One Point"

How do we evaluate ourselves and others? How do we tell if someone is the genuine article or a charlatan? How do we know if we ourselves are going off the rails in our spiritual practice?

There are a lot of trappings in the realm of spirituality. There are all sorts of costumes, titles, and robes. People speculate on how enlightened this teacher or that may be, and look for signs of official recognition, status, and power. So what should we look for in a teacher or a faith community?

Looking inward, it sometimes seems that we are making progress, and at other times it seems that the whole endeavor has been a waste of time. It all depends on our mood. Sometimes all we notice is that years go by and we seem to be no different than when we began—or even worse. At other times, we notice that we have become a bit more calm, maybe, or a bit more aware, or even a bit more kind. We are discouraged one day and inspired the next. So how do we know how we are doing? What should we be looking for?

It all comes down to not being stuck on oneself. In looking outward, it is important not to be misled by trappings of popularity or spiritual power, and in looking inward it is important not to be caught up with our shifting moods or superficial changes. Instead, we must never forget the essential point, which is to give up ego clinging. That is the one and only true measure of a teacher or a practitioner.

Practice

As you go about your day, try to pay attention to the points when your solid sense of separateness is provoked. Notice the thoughts and sensations that arise with reactions such as defensiveness and territoriality. Pay attention to the thoughts and sensations that arise when something has drawn you out, beyond your self-absorption.

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PRACTICES INDEX

Practice for Death as Well as for Life

Practice of the Week
Practice for Death as Well as for Life

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Spiritual practice in particular, and religion in general, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fact that we die, and we really don’t know how to understand, cope with, or digest this fact. So even though we do spiritual practice while we are alive and for our lives, really, we do it because we die and in order to understand and cope with death, grief, and loss.

In fact, it is artificial to separate life from death. In a very concrete and down-to-earth sense, there is no such thing as “life” or “death.” Some traditions speak of “birth-and-death” as being one phenomenon, and of course it is. Time passing is birth-and-death. Moments arise and then pass away: this is one action, one moment. Loss is constant and conditions our every thought, word, and deed.

When I train caregivers for the dying in spiritual hospice care, I always tell them that the work they do isn’t about death, it’s about life. You are alive as long as you are alive, and when you are not, you are not. It’s a mistake to think of a hospice patient as “dying.” The patient is alive as long as she is alive. Truly, she is no more dying than we are. For we are dying. That’s what living is: dying a little, moment after moment.

You could say that the whole point of spiritual practice is to prepare for death. A French writer, Charles Peguy, composed one of my favorite sayings:

“A person doesn’t die from this or that disease. He dies from his whole life.”

This is certainly true. The way we live is the way we die.

The preceding five practices (“Determination;” “Repetition;” “Owning Your Nobility;” “Reproaching Your Demons;” and “Aspiring to the Impossible”) are collectively known as “The Five Strengths.” This practice – “Practice for Life is Practice for Death” – is telling us that as much as we need to practice the Five Strengths for our lives, just as much do we need to practice them for our deaths – and specifically at the time of our death.

Many people become religious or spiritual as they near death. This makes a lot of sense. When you are in bed, maybe in pain and sensing your life is now short, you are not so concerned about how to live more successfully going forward. The imminence of death has a way of grabbing your attention and changing your priorities. Everybody pays attention to his or her inner life and to questions of meaning when death is coming close (unless, that is, the person were to deny that death is close, which some can do). Death is powerful, very immediate, and a great motivator. But if you wait till the time when death is close to begin your practice, it may well be too late. It is much better to spend time in your life working on your spiritual practice so at the time of death it will be there for you. With years of practice while you’re still more-or-less healthy, when you’re dying, instead of being subject to a mind full of confusion and dread, it will be possible for you to meditate on love and compassion. It might even be possible to experience death (if this phrase makes any sense – it might not) as a process of entering unlimited love and compassion. Certainly I would never suggest to someone who is close to the end of life, “Well, have you though of entering death as a field of unlimited love?” He may well answer me, “You’re full of crap. Get out of here. I’m dying.” But if we have spent time in our life cultivating our spiritual practice until we see our whole life as practice, then it may be possible that our death can be not a tragedy but something much more. I have seen this happen.

Even in the last moments of life, you can breathe in and you can breathe out. You can breathe in the suffering and breathe out healing and relief. And when your selfishness pops up with fear and despair, you can turn around and say to it: “Ah, there you are again. I’ve been telling you to get out of here for a long time, and this time I really mean it. I’m going back to breathing. I’m going back to my meditation on love and compassion, and you see that glass of water on my bedside? You come back one more time, I’m throwing it all over you!”

Practice now, and when death approaches you may be able to remember, as you breathe in and out, all the things that you have been practicing for many years. You can remember that life is like a dream, that it has only ever been things coming and going, insubstantially, mysteriously. And that whatever form your life will take from the time of death onward, it will move in the same rhythm in which it has always moved. Such experiences are actually possible. And if you are practicing with the “Five Strengths” perhaps your practice will be there for you at the time of your own death. You will then be able to bring your practice to the bedside of family members, loved ones, and friends when they are close to death. You will be able to bring a sense of confidence and peace to those most precious moments.

Breathe in; breathe out; be where you are. All the training and teachings of spiritual practice come down to just that. So simple – yet not so easy to do. We have so many complications.

Breathing in and breathing out is an unspeakably deep process. To be alive is immense and unknowable. It’s not accident that in Latin and Greek, and in Hebrew, English, and Spanish, and probably in many other languages, the word for spirit is breath.

For Journaling

Try this prompt for your next journal entry: "When death is close, I want to be . . . " Follow-up: "In order for me to be that sort of person when death is close, I now practice . . . "

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See also: Judith Lief, Lojong Slogan #18: "The Ejection of Consciousness" -- HERE

PRACTICES INDEX

Aspiring to the Impossible

Practice of the Week
Aspiring to the Impossible

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

To dream the impossible dream /To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow /To run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong /To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary /To reach the unreachable star. (lyrics by Joe Darion)

In the words of the founder of the Hongzhou lineage of Chan, Mazu Daoyi (709–788), the fruition of Chan practice is a fluid "harmony of body and mind that reaches out through all four limbs...benefiting what cannot be benefited and doing what can’t be done." ("Chan Buddhism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Aspiration is a vow or commitment. In the Zen tradition, practitioners regularly recite “The Four Bodhisattva Vows”:

Beings are numberless; I vow to free them (all).
Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them (all).
Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them (all).
The Buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to embody it.

Thich Nhat Hanh's version is:

However innumerable beings are, I vow to meet them with kindness and interest.
However inexhaustible the states of suffering are, I vow to touch them with patience and love.
However immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to explore them deeply.
However incomparable the mystery of interbeing, I vow to surrender to it freely.

These are certainly very impractical commitments. In fact, they are literally, precisely impossible to fulfill. But why not have aspirations so lofty they are impossible to fulfill? We’d be selling ourselves short if our aspirations were any less lofty. The trick is to keep on making effort in the direction of fulfillment of the aspiration but not to think that you will actually complete the job. Do not be dismayed or discouraged by this “failure” – instead be encouraged by it. This is a good approach because you will always have more to do and always be spurred on by the strength of your commitment. To commit to something you actually could accomplish is such small potatoes for a lofty, sacred human being like yourself.

The Four Bodhisattva Vows are extravagant and enthusiastic. They are the vows of one who is committed to becoming awakened for the benefit of others. While “bodhisattva” is a Buddhist word, I think it stands for something more basically human. We all want to be compassionate, giving, loving people at the bottom of our hearts. This is a human, not a Buddhist, aspiration. We would all like to serve others, to feel for others, to love others with everything we’ve got. We would all like to be a light for the world.

We might admire people who are wealthy, famous, or skillful in some way, but these things are not difficult. If you are born with some talent, a little luck (which might include the luck of being – by native temperament or by habit trained into you since childhood – hard-working), and you know the right people, you, too, can have one or more of those attributes. Many people are wealthy, famous, skilled, or all three. Much more difficult and much more wonderful is to be someone committed to compassion, to service, to love. Not someone that many people know about and talk about but someone who has the almost magical power of spreading happiness and confidence wherever she or he goes.

What a vision for your life, for your family, to be a light for those around you! To think of everything you do, every action, every social role, every task, as being just a cover for, an excuse for, your real aspiration: to free every being, end every delusion, learn wisdom from every moment – to spread goodness wherever you go. This requires no particular luck other than the good luck to be the sort of person willing to take on impossible aspirations – even if everything goes wrong in your life, even if bad luck befalls you at every turn, you can still adopt an aspiration similar to the Bodhisattva vows. No special skills or special contacts with “important” people are needed. Anyone can do this. We can all do this. This is the aspiration we should all cultivate for training the mind.

People often complain to me that they don’t have time for spiritual practice. In today’s busy world, it seems that we can barely cover the basics, let alone refine our lives further with spirituality. When spiritual practice is an item at the bottom of our long to-do lists (embedded in task-accomplishment apps on our smartphones), it is very hard to get to it – and usually we don’t. My answer is simple: spiritual practice is not an item on the list. It is not a task we do. It is how we do what we do. It’s a spirit, an attitude. Practice is not something we are doing over and above our life. It is our life. It is the way we live. We can live by striving toward unfulfillable vows.

And the world will be better for this, that one man . . .
Strove, with his last ounce of courage,
To reach the unreachable stars.

For Journaling

What unfulfillable vow will you make with your life? In your journal, reflect on this and re-write the Bodhisattva vows – or Don Quixote’s aspirations as sung in “Man of La Mancha” – into vows that you want to commit to pursuing (not achieving or keeping). Then, once a week, look back on the previous seven days and reflect on ways that your aspiration mattered – to you or to others -- or simply moments during which you recollected your vows.



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If Don Quixote's "quest" seems a bit ridiculous, consider the impossible aspirations of hopelessly overpowered resistance movements. Resistors may see themselves as having no chance to actually win -- yet they commit to "fight the unbeatable foe." Zbigniew Herbert's moving poem, "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito," is based on his experience in the Polish resistance against Nazi occupation. See the poem and my reflection on it: HERE.

For list of all weekly practices: "Spiritual Practice Directory"

Reproaching Your Demons

Practice of the Week
Reproaching Your Demons

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

There’s a popular saying, “embrace your demons.” Accepting the reality that they exist is necessary -- and acknowledging that in some ways they may have done some positive things for you can be helpful. But if, on balance, they are doing you more harm than good, then its time to reproach them for that.

If we are honest we have to admit that we have a lot of bad habits that keep appearing over and over again, despite all our good intentions. Of course! Look at all we’ve been through! Look at our crazy parents! Look at this troubled world we’re living in! If we are wrecks inside, it’s no mystery why. It’s the most natural thing in the world. But it’s OK, because we know that underneath that, we have a sacred noble human nature. In that spirit and with that knowledge we can correct ourselves without brutality or aggression. We can complain to ourselves (“Hey, you did it again! Cut that out! Stop that! What’s the matter with you?”) and still maintain a gentleness and sense of humor.

Judgmentalism becomes problematic when it aims at our own, or other people’s, essential character. But your bad habit, or greed, or anger, or selfishness isn’t your essential character. Think of it as a person in its own right – a demon who comes to visit you more often than you’d like. It’s the bad habit, not you, that needs reproaching.

Your practice (and your life) isn’t about – and has never been about – you. As long as spiritual practice (and life) remain about you, it is painful. Of course, your practice does begin with you. It begins with self-concern. You take up practice out of some need or some desire or pain. But the very self-concern pushes you beyond self-concern. “To study the way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self” (Dogen). When you study yourself thoroughly, this is what happens: you forget yourself, because the closer you get to yourself, the closer you get to life and to the unspeakable depth that is life, the more a feeling of love and concern for others naturally arises in you. To be self-obsessed is painful. To love others is happy. Loving others inspires us to take better care of ourselves, as if we were our own mother. We take care of ourselves so that we can benefit others.

First, try to become as familiar as you can with some of your most popular bad habits. Take jealousy, for instance. Instead of being spun around by jealousy, confused and full of passion and self-blame, as if the jealousy were somehow a substance ingrained in your essential character, study the jealousy. Be curious, almost scientific about it. How does it feel inside? How does it cause you to think and want to act? Study the jealousy until you can see it as a kind of entity, as if it were an independent person rather than a part of yourself. Then you can reproach the jealousy: “Here you are again, my skillful, silly old opponent. Many times you have fooled me and taken me in, but not this time! I reproach you with all my heart! I see you, but I am not taken in!”

Your jealousy is not you. It is simply something very disadvantageous that is arising. You don’t have to be so convinced by it and you don’t have to take it so personally.

The great Tibetan master Trungpa Rinpoche spoke of making speeches to our various bad habits: To our selfishness, for instance, we could say, “You know, you are a terrible person. You have caused me so much trouble. I’m so tired of you. And you know I just don’t like you anymore! It’s all because of you that I have all of these problems, and you know what? I’m not going to hang around with you anymore! And who are you anyway? I’m fed up. Go away! I have absolutely no use for you at all.”

To be able to address your own selfishness like this is no easy thing. This is the opposite of how we usually view our various faults. We don’t think of our selfishness as being an opponent, an adversary in its own right. Instead, we think of it as ours and that we ought to be ashamed of it. The idea that my selfishness is an independent entity that I can reproach and disidentify with doesn’t come naturally to me.

And yet, if I think about it for a moment, why not? My experience shows me that my life consists of experiences that are constantly coming and going. Even my sense of self is something that comes and goes – there is no place it exists and no particular experience or substance I can point to that is “me.” I can think this through, but even more, my daily meditation practice has given me the visceral experience that it is certainly so. There is no essential me. Things are coming and going, here, within the sphere of what I call my consciousness, and that is all. So it really is true – my jealousy isn’t mine and isn’t me. I am responsible for dealing with it – which I do by reproaching it. But I am not responsible for its being there; it just arises, and it isn’t really mine.

If you don’t completely grasp this point, that’s OK. Full understanding is not necessary. You will grasp it eventually, little by little, as you keep up the practices of training in compassion. The training itself will slowly make clear that you don’t have to take everything so personally. You can have a much more flexible and even humorous attitude toward yourself and your many faults than you ever thought possible. And once your attitude loosens up, everything becomes much more workable.

For Journaling

Pick one of your "bad habits." Write a letter to it in your journal voicing your reproach. Acknowledge the ways that it might be trying to protect you and keep you safe, but be clear why you don't need it (anymore).

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For list of all weekly practices: "Spiritual Practice Directory"

Owning Your Nobility

Practice of the Week
Owning Your Nobility

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Mind training begins with getting in touch with our deepest, best motivation. As human beings we are inherently noble -- inherently motivated to see life truly, generously, magnanimously. This is our human birthright, our human capacity. It is why every human community from the dawn of time to the present has had some form of wholesome, salvific spirituality. But the pressures of life and the persistence of human folly, embedded as these are in our societies and our communities (and therefore also in our own minds and hearts), can obscure our noble motivation to be wise and compassionate. That's why we need to remind ourselves of our noble heritage as human beings and step up to embody it.

Probably our biggest challenge in spiritual practice is not that we don't have the time or the talent or the focus or the right atmosphere or setting. Probably the biggest challenge is simply that we don't take ourselves seriously enough. Though we may believe that spiritual practice is a good idea and self-transformation a possibility, when it comes down to it, we don't really think it's possible for us. Or maybe we actually don't want to transform. Of course we want to transform -- especially if our lives are noticeably unsatisfactory. But at the same time, we don't. Our motivations are mixed. So we can't be truly serious about our practice. Owning our nobility, we step into seriousness.

It is a rare and precious thing to be a human being. That's why we send money overseas in times of disaster, why we know it is wrong to take a human life. It's wrong not just because it is illegal, but because human life is sacred, precious. The heritage, the legacy, of being human is to manifest wisdom, compassion, and lovingkindness, to be fully worthy of our lives, worthy of admiration and celebration. This is your nature, my nature, the nature of every human being. In this we are all the same. No one is more worthy, more sacred, than you are. And you are no more worthy, or sacred, than anyone else.

Given this as a basis for our life, we can be perfectly aware of our many faults. Faults are perfectly natural, like earthquakes or floods. They may have bad consequences sometimes, but they are to be expected. The more we can learn to anticipate their periodic eruptions, the better off we will be.

But along with these various faults, at the same time, deep within us is this beautiful, noble human heritage. The reason for honoring and attending to our great saints and spiritual exemplars the world over is not to set up their supposed perfection as a reproach to us. It is the opposite. Their example shows us what we could be and what we are. To own your nobility is to remind yourself every day of who you really are. None of the world's great spiritual exemplars has ever said, "Look at me, how great I am; pay attention to me!" All have said, "I am what you are."

True nobility is not about lording it over the peasantry. For example, the Dalai Lama is owning his nobility when he says, as he often does, "I'm just a simple monk. I'm trying my best." I believe he really means this, and he's embodying noble simplicity. He's trying his best to practice. And if we admire him, what we are really admiring is not him but this potential within ourselves for such humble nobility.

For Journaling

Describe how and when, in the last 24 hours, you owned your nobility.

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For list of all weekly practices: "Spiritual Practice Directory"

Repetition

Practice of the Week
Repetition

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Familiarization is the key. To get out of an old way of being, get deeply familiar with a new way.

We take our point of view so much for granted, as if the world were really as we see it. But it doesn't take much analysis to recognize that our way of seeing the world is simply an old unexamined habit, so strong, so convincing, and so unconscious we don't even see it as a habit. How many times have we been absolutely sure about someone's motivations and later discovered that we were wrong? How many times have we gotten upset about something that turned out to have been nothing? Our perceptions and opinions are often quite off the mark. The world may not be as we think it is. In fact, it is virtually certain that it is not.

There's nothing wrong with habits as such. Habits can be good. But an unconscious habitual point of view will not be optimal. A little reflection shows us that our habitual way of seeing things, in many instances, large and small, causes us much difficulty. It's often distorted, causing us extra upset we don't need, and it's too narrow, limiting our possibilities and our love. And yet we are pretty stuck on our point of view. Clearly, it will take some doing to see through it, and this is why spiritual practice takes time, effort, support, and much repetition. But little by little our way of seeing the world and being in it can shift. With effort, the mind can be trained.

So choose your spiritual practice, and stick with it. Support your path with daily journaling, study, and meditation. Add further supporting practices such as mealtime grace, keeping sabbath, and getting enough sleep. Stick with these practices -- familiarize yourself with them so thoroughly that they become second nature.

New pathways in the brain are built through familiarization with a new approach. Repetition and repeated drill brings the establishment of a new habit that is not, like the old ones, unconscious -- but instead is a habit you have thought about and chosen to cultivate for reasons that come out of your best motivations. It's a matter of brain-washing yourself, but in a good way: washing out an otherwise musty brain, freshening it up.

Left alone with its unconscious habits, the mind goes down predictably dull and often disadvantageous pathways. We think, feel, and see in a way that doesn't serve us very well -- and we assume that this is a fixed and necessary experience. It's not! Repeating teachings and intentional practices establishes new pathways, new habits.

The brain is plastic, fluid. It changes with our inner and outer activity. When we go to the gym to lift weights or do aerobics, we know that these activities are not something we will do once or twice. Their virtue is in the drill, the repetition over time. This is what changes our body.

Through familiarization the habits we want to inculcate will little by little become automatic. When someone asks you for your address or phone number, you probably don't say, "Let me think about it." You don't need to reflect or consult with anyone. The information is at the tip of your tongue because you are fully familiar with it. You haven't needed to make a special study of the information because by simple repetition with interest over time you have made these facts part of you. The same thing happens with spiritual practice. Faith, God, and inspiration aside, repetition is the true soul of spirituality.

This is a sad fact: If someone does ask you for your phone number, your address, your place of business, and so on, you can answer easily because these things are uppermost in your mind. You refer to them every day. But if someone asks you to account for the condition of your soul, probably your response would not be at the tip of your tongue. Probably you would be embarrassed or confused by the question. How good is it that we are quite familiar with our outer circumstances and activities but quite unfamiliar with our inner lives, with our soul, our spirit? The practice of familiarization proposes that we correct this imbalance and become just as fluent in our spiritual lives as we are in our material lives.

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For list of all weekly practices: "Spiritual Practice Directory"

Determination

Practice of the Week
Determination

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Practice strong determination. Strong determination is a practice to teach us how to take ourselves seriously as dignified spiritual practitioners. Your strong determination will teach you that, whatever your shortcomings (and it is absolutely necessary to be honest, even brutally honest about our shortcomings at every point), you also have within you a powerful energy to accomplish the spiritual path. And that what you want to do is accomplish this -- it is of all things the important thing for you.

When you stop to think about it, what are you after in your life anyway? What is it that you most would like to accomplish or manifest with this one short, precious life you have been given? Of course you want to love and take care of your family and accomplish something in this world. You want to be someone, have some kind of identity in the world. We all need this and all it entails, in whatever way is possible for us to establish it. But why? Because we want to be good people, and we want to fulfill our highest human destiny.

At our best we all have high purposes, noble goals, even if we are modest about them. But we forget them. The daily grind takes us far from our reasons for doing what we do. We get lost in the details, absorbed in the problems. To practice strong determination is to intentionally stay connected to our higher goals and to remind us that we truly are spiritual practitioners; we are heroes; we can make effort; we can do what needs to be done to live a noble life.

To make this into a concrete practice, you could compose a short speech for yourself to this effect. Don't be afraid to be forthright and resolute about it and to use bold language.

"I might look like a merely ordinary person, but I am not. I am a spiritual warrior, a spiritual hero, and though this may not be apparent to others, inside it is clear to me. I definitely will be a sage! Maybe it will take a long time, maybe I won't complete the job in this lifetime. But there's no doubt about it whatsoever. I refuse to be stuck for good with my ordinary limited point of view; I'm leaving that behind. I'm going forward!"

That's the spirit of strong determination. So compose a speech like this for yourself and repeat it to yourself from time to time -- in meditation, on the commuter train, whenever you can.

For Journaling

In your journal, write out your determination speech.

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For list of all weekly practices: "Spiritual Practice Directory"

Whatever You Meet Is the Path

Practice of the Week
Whatever You Meet is the Path

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Whatever happens, good or bad, make it part of your spiritual practice. This practice sums up such earlier practices as "Live in Patience," "Turn All Mishaps Into the Path," "Stop Blaming," "Be Grateful to Everyone," "Put It In (the Ultimate) Context," and "Do Good, Avoid Evil, Appreciate Your Lunacy, Pray for Help." If you're following those practices, then you're seeing that whatever you meet is the path.

In spiritual practice, which is our life, there are no breaks and no mistakes. We human beings are always doing spiritual practice, whether we know it or not. You may think that you lost the thread of your practice, that you had been going along quite well and then life got busy and complicated and you lost track of what you were doing. You may have been embarrassed about this, felt bad about it, and that feeling fed on itself, and it became harder and harder to get back on track. And you think you are very far from your best intentions.

But this is just what you think. It's not what's going on. Once you begin practice -- or even just begin thinking about your practice -- you always keep going, because everything is practice, even the days or the weeks or the months or decades or entire lifetimes when you forgot to meditate, forgot to pay attention to your spiritual thoughts and exercises. Even then you're still practicing, because it's impossible to be lost. You are constantly being found whether you know it or not.

To practice the slogan, "Whatever You Meet is the Path," to memorize it, to repeat it to yourself again and again, to bring it up in meditation, to post it on your refrigerator, to keep it in mind, is to know that no matter what is going on, no matter how distracted you think you are, no matter how much you feel like a terribly lazy individual who has completely lost track of her good intentions and is now hopelessly astray -- even then you are on the path and you have the responsibility and the ability to take all of that negative chatter and turn it into the the path.

For Journaling

#1. Describe something in the last 24 hours that you didn't like -- about yourself or about someone else or about something that happened to you. Then write about how this was part of your path.

#2. Describe something in the last 24 hours that you really appreciated -- about yourself or about someone else or about something that happened to you. Then write about how this was part of your path.

* * *
from Judith Lief, "Whatever You Meet Unexpectedly, Join with Meditation," Tricycle.

When our lives are going relatively smoothly and predictably it is easier to maintain our mindfulness. But when things are happening fast, it is hard to remember to join what we encounter with meditation. It is also easier to think of others if we ourselves are not currently either in the midst of some crisis or caught up in some amazing opportunity. But it seems that no matter how hard we try to stay on an even keel, we keep being blindsided by unexpected events.

According to this slogan, taking an attitude of compassion and awareness does not need to be some formal or long drawn-out process. It can be done in an instant, in the tiny gap that occurs at the very moment we are surprised by something unexpected, whether positive or negative. Of course, that is the same point where we are most apt to “lose it.”

When we are at that point of just about to lose it, before we have gone into reaction mode or dragged out our usual arsenal of habits, we can pause. We can interrupt that momentum. Instead of joining whatever we meet with our bundle of preconceptions, self-absorptions, fixed views, and programmed responses, we can immediately join it with meditation. We can insert awareness and compassion.

Throughout the slogan teachings, we keep being reminded that each and every situation is an opportunity for growth and awakening. To take advantage of such opportunities, we need to keep expanding the boundaries of our meditation to include more and more aspects of our life. By cultivating an attitude of ongoing mindfulness, by becoming genuine practitioners, it is as if we create a well of loving-kindness and awareness that we can tap even in the midst of sudden changes and challenges.

TODAY’S PRACTICE

In order to join experience and meditation, it is helpful to begin by noticing when that does not happen. So today’s practice is to pay attention to “losing it.” Strangely, simply seeing such moments more clearly, without too much judgment or commentary, is a way to extend an attitude of practice more consistently and deeply into our ongoing activities.

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For list of all weekly practices: "Spiritual Practice Directory"

Do Good, Avoid Evil, Appreciate Your Lunacy, Pray for Help

Practice of the Week
Do Good, Avoid Evil, Appreciate Your Lunacy, Pray for Help

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Four-in-one this week! These four reminders -- slogans to try to live by -- fit together, and bring us back down to earth. If spiritual teachings are to really transform our lives, they need to oscillate between two levels, the profound and the mundane. If practice is too profound, it's no good: we are full of wonderful inspiring, lofty thought, insights and speculations but lack the ability to get through the day with any gracefulness or to relate to the issues and people in ordinary life. We may be soaringly metaphysical, movingly compassionate, and yet unable to relate to a normal human or a worldly problem. This is the moment when the Zen master whacks you with her stick and says, "Kill the Buddha!"

On the other hand, if practice is too mundane, if we become too interested in the details of how we and others feel and what we or they need or want, then the natural loftiness of our hearts will not be accessible to us, and we will sink under the weight of obligations, details, and daily-life concerns. We need both profound religious philosophy and practical tools for daily living. This double need, according to circumstances, seems to go with the territory of being human.

First, do good. Do positive things. Say hello to people, smile at them, tell them, "Happy birthday!" or "I am sorry for your loss, is there something I can do to help?" These things are normal social graces, and people say them all the time. But to practice them intentionally is to work a bit harder at actually meaning them when you do them, to actually cultivate a sense of caring and feeling for someone else that is as real as you can make it, paying attention to what you say, how you say it, and how you actually feel it, or don't. We genuinely try to be helpful and kind and thoughtful in as many small and large ways as we can every day. From a religious point of view, doing good also includes wholesome religious acts like chanting a sacred text, studying, meditating, or giving money and other gifts to the spiritual community. All of these intentional positive actions, directly religious and not, generate virtue. They create a positive attitude in the mind or heart that will strengthen us for the good.

Second, avoid evil. Pay close attention to our actions of body, speech, and mind, noticing when we do, say, or think things that are harmful of unkind. Having come this far with our mind training, we can't help but notice them, we feel bad. In the past we might have said to ourselves, "I only said that because she really needs straightening out; if she hadn't done that to me, I wouldn't have said that to her. That's why I did it, it really was her fault." But now we see that this was a way of protecting ourselves (see "Stop Blaming"). Now we accept responsibility for what we have done. I'm not speaking of terrible things. Most of us probably do not do terrible things on purpose. This practice mostly references unkind thoughts or words that do not seem so bad and yet erode our sense of integrity if we don't pay attention to them. So we do pay attention to what we say, think, and do -- not obsessively, not with a perfectionistic flair, but just as a matter of course and with generosity and understanding, and finally we purify ourselves of most of our ungenerous thoughts and words.

Third, appreciate your lunacy. Indo-Tibetan Buddhist practice includes making offerings to demons. Psychologically, it's the same idea: bow to your weakness, your own craziness, your own resistance. In fact, congratulate yourself for them, appreciate them. Truly it is a marvel, the extent to which we are selfish, confused, lazy, resentful, and so on. We come by these things honestly. We have been well trained to manifesst them at every turn. This is the prodigy of human life bursting fort at its seams. It is the effect of our upbringing, our society, which we appreciate even as we are trying to tame it and bring it gently round to the good. So we make offerings to the demons inside us, we develop a sense of humorous appreciation for our own stupidity. We are in good company! We can laugh at ourselves and everyone else.

Fourth, pray for help. Pray to whatever forces you believe in -- or don't believe in -- for help. Whether you imagine a deity or God or not, you can reach out beyond yourself and beyond anything you can objectively depict and ask for assistance and strength for your spiritual work. You can do this in meditation, with silent words, or out loud, vocalizing your hopes and wishes. Prayer is a powerful practice. It is not a matter of abrogating your own responsibility. You are not asking to be absolved of the need to act. You are asking for help and for strength to do what you know you must do, with the understanding that though you must do your best, whatever goodness comes your way is not your accomplishment, your personal production. It comes from a wider sphere than you can control. In fact, it is counterproductive to conceive of spiritual practice as a task that we are going to accomplish on our own. Remember: "Be Grateful to Everyone." There is no way to do anything alone. Not only does it make sense to pray for help, not only does it feel powerfully right and good to do so, it is also important to do this so that we remember that we are not alone and we can't do it by ourselves. Sometimes we forget this point and fall into the habit of imagining an illusory self-reliance.

Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, and pray for help. Simple everyday instructions.

* * *
from Judith Lief, "Four Practices are the Best of Methods," Tricycle.

This slogan is very straightforward and action-oriented. It lays out four specific practices to incorporate in our everyday life.

The first practice is to accumulate merit. This is pretty tricky. It sounds as if you should try to pile up good deeds as credentials, like scouts collecting merit badges. But here the idea of merit has a twist. It is not just that if you are good you will be rewarded. Conventional acts of merit such as practicing good deeds, revering sacred images and texts, and supporting the sangha, are encouraged here as a way disrupt egotism, not build a holy persona that is even worse than normal egomania.

The second practice is to lay down evil deeds. You do not need to be heavy-handed or guilt-ridden about it. You just need to reach the point of getting tired of your neurosis, embarrassed and fed up enough to do something about it. Then you can refrain from what you have been doing, and let go not just of the evil but the evil doer as well.

The third practice is to offer to the döns. Döns are sudden attacks of neurosis that seem to come from nowhere in a sudden burst. When you are taken aback by such a dön, the idea is to take that as a gift. It shakes you out of your complacency so you should be grateful.

The fourth practice is to make offering to the dharmapalas, or “dharma protectors.” Dharmapalas are said to protect the integrity of the teachings and keep an eye on practitioners who lose their way. They are guardians of awareness. When we are caught in self-deception or unmindfulness, the world strikes back. The idea is that we should not only appreciate that, but invite it.

TODAY’S PRACTICE
When you do something good, try to remove any add-on of self-congratulation or righteousness. When you make a mistake, try to remove any add-on of self-punishment or guilt. Instead, simply commit yourself to refraining from such actions in the future. Tune in to whatever arises as a way to reconnect with kindness and awareness.

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For list of all weekly practices: "Spiritual Practice Directory"

Put It in (the Ultimate) Context

Practice of the Week
Put It in (the Ultimate) Context

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

The previous three [of the practices adapted from Fischer's Training in Compassion] -- Turn All Mishaps Into the Path, Stop Blaming, and Be Grateful for Everyone -- fit together. Grateful to everyone and everything, we are willing to acknowledge whatever happens as an opportunity, which we accept with complete responsibility and receive with joy. Moreover, these three depend on a conventional understanding of beings as we usually conceive of them, self and other, you and I, them and us.

"Put it in context" entails a deeper sense of what we are. The context we're talking about is not just one more relative context. Rather, this practice involves going beyond conventional or relative understanding. The isolated self of our concepts does not and could not exist. The distinction between self and other is an empty illusion. From an absolute perspective, there is no self and other. There's only Being, and there's only Love, which is Being sharing itself with itself without impediment and with warmth. It just happens to look like you and me to us because this is how our minds and sensory apparatus works.

"Put it in context" means seeing your situation and what you are experiencing in the context of -- indeed, as a part of and an integral manifestation of -- this love without boundary. "It" includes all the disturbances of your life -- all your confusion, which is to say, your resistance, your pain, your fear, your grief, your frustrated desires, and so on. Usually we hope any such emotion or reaction will eventually go away and we will be free of it. Instead, by placing it in context of the absolute, we take a different perspective, and we take it to a deeper level. We look at its underlying reality. What is actually going on when we are upset or angry? What is happening? If we could unhook ourselves for a moment from the blaming and the wishing and the self-pitying, and could look instead at the actual basis of what is in fact going on, what would we see?

We would see time passing. We would see things changing. We would see life arising and passing away, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. Moment by moment, time slips away and things transform. The present becomes the past -- or does it become the future? And yet right now there is no past or future. As soon as we examine "now" it is gone. And we cannot know how or where it goes. This may sound like philosophy, but it doesn't feel like philosophy when you or someone close to you is giving birth. If at that moment you are standing in the delivery room or are yourself, in pain and joy, giving birth -- in that first bursting-forth moment, you are amazed. This small life you think you have been living, with its various issues and problems completely disappears in the face of the miracle of visceral life springing forth in front of your eyes. Or if you are present when someone dies, you know then that this emptiness is not just philosophy. You may not know what it is, but you will know that it is real. And that this reality is powerful and makes you see your life, and the whole of life, quite differently in that moment. A new context emerges that is more than thought, more than concept. When you view your daily human problems in the light of actual birth and actual death, you are putting your experiences in absolute context.

Every moment of your life, even (and maybe especially) your moments of pain or despair or confusion, is a moment of your own inherent wholeness, your inherent perfection. This is a fact, whether you see it or not. Learning to see it is the path of wisdom.

Attend births and deaths whenever you have the chance. Accept these moments as gifts, opportunities for deep spiritual practice. But even when you aren't participating in these peak moments, you can remember and reflect on the ultimate context within which all your concerns and anguishes occur. And when your mind is confused and entangled, you can take a breath and try to slip below the level of your desire and confusion. You can notice that in this very moment time is passing, things are transforming, and this astonishing, inconceivable fact is profound, beautiful, and joyful -- even as you continue with your misery.

For Journaling

Describe the most confusing -- sad, annoying, upsetting -- moment of the past 24 hours. Then describe your feeling in the context of the ultimate.

* * *
from Judith Lief, "Seeing Confusion as the Four Kayas is Unsurpassable Shunyata Protection," Tricycle:

With this slogan, once again we are joining what we usually consider as undesirable with practice. In this case it is confusion. At first glimpse, this slogan seems rather obscure and even esoteric. What kind of confusion? What are the four kayas? What is shunyata, anyway, and what form of protection can it provide? Protection from what?

In everyday experience, it is often hard to pin down what exactly is happening and why. Whenever we begin to figure things out, there is always some kind of slippage. Things begin to make sense, but just almost and not quite. We keep trying to chip away at our confusion, to straighten it out, to get rid of it, imagining ourselves somehow coming out on the other side, into a nonconfused state where everything is workable. But according to this slogan, rather than getting rid of our confusion, what we really need to do is to examine it and in doing so transform our view of it. We need to look below the surface to how we perceive reality altogether.

Basically, the point here is that if we really look closely at the way our mind works, even in the midst of confusion, we alway find the same process: one of continual awakening. This process is described in terms of what are called the four kayas or “bodies.” Through careful attention and meditative practice we begin to see how every perception begins with uncertainty and openness (dharmakaya); then starts to come into focus (nirmanakaya); then develops energy and begins to come together (sambhogakaya), and finally clicks, synthesized as immediate present-moment experience (svabhavikakaya). It is as though confusion is awakening in disguise.

This pattern of continual awakening (seeing confusion as the four kayas) is paired with one of continual letting go (supreme shunyata protection). So in this slogan, not only do we transform how we view confusion, but we also see that although it may seem solid and intractable, fundamentally it is empty (shunyata). Combining all this, when we see everything as empty and awake, we have no ground to defend and nothing to protect—which is the most excellent protection of all.

TODAY’S PRACTICE

In your sitting practice, pay attention to the arising and dissolving of perceptions. Notice how your sense of self seems to arise simultaneously with each perception, ready to respond to any threat; notice the subtle undertone of fear. What are you actually protecting?

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For list of all weekly practices: "Practices of the Week Index"

Be Grateful to Everyone

Practice of the Week
Be Grateful to Everyone

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Be grateful to everyone. Very simple but very profound.

I went to visit my grandson when he was six weeks old. He couldn't do anything, not even hold up his head, much less feed himself. If he was in trouble, he couldn't ask for help. If suddenly he found his hand in his mouth and began chewing, he didn't know what that was or who it belonged to. And if he liked the hand in his mouth and it fell out of his mouth, he couldn't figure out how to get it back in. He had no idea of anything in the world. He had his likes and dislikes, certainly, but he was powerless to do anything but experience them as the world changed every moment. He was completely dependent on his parents' care.

We were all at one time precisely in this situation, and someone or other must have cared for us in this same comprehensive way. Without 100 percent total care from someone else, or maybe several others, we would not be here. This is certainly grounds for gratitude to others.

But our dependence on others did not end there. We didn't grow up and become independent. Now we can hold up our heads, fix our dinner, wipe our butt, and we seem not to need our parents to take care of us -- so we think we are autonomous. We think there is no longer a need to be grateful to others for our lives.

But consider this for a moment. Did you grow the food that sustains you every day? Did you till the soil, milk the cow, gather the eggs, kill the chicken? Did you make the car or train that takes you to work? Did you make the road? Extract the fuel? Sew your clothing? Build your house with lumber you milled? How do you live?

You need others every single day, every single moment of your life. It's thanks to others and their presence and effort that you have the things you need to continue, and that you have friendship and love and meaning in your life. Without others you have nothing. You may think, "Well, yes, but I work and I make money, and I pay for everything. So they are not taking care of me; it's my money that takes care of me. Even the highways and commuter trains: I pay my taxes." But suppose you have a lot of money and there is no one else in the world but you, you and your gigantic pile of money. How would you survive? Could you eat the money? Could you make a house for yourself inside the money? The money is only valuable because others exist. Money makes no sense without others. Its value exists because others exist.

Our dependence on others runs deeper. Where does the person we take ourselves to be come from in the first place? Apart from our parents' genes and their support and care, and society and all it produces for us, there's the whole network of conditions and circumstances that intimately makes us what we are. How about our thought and feeling? Where does it come from? Without words to think in, we don't think, we don't have anything like a sense of self as we understand it, and we don't have the emotions and feelings that are shaped and defined by our words. Did we invent this language that constitutes ourselves? No, it is the product of untold numbers of speakers over untold numbers of generations. Without the myriad circumstances that provided us the opportunities for education, for speech, for knowledge, for work, we wouldn't be here as we are. And without all the people in our lives whom we know and who know us and love us and create complications for us and infuriate us, we would have nothing to think about. We would be beyond bored: our consciousness would be shattered by loneliness.

There could not be what we call a person without other people. We can say "person" as if there could be such an autonomous thing, but in fact there is no such thing. There is no such thing as a person. There are only persons who have cocreated one another over the long history of our species. The idea of an independent, isolated, atomized person is impossible. And here we are not only speaking of our needing others practically. We are talking about our inmost sense of identity. Our consciousness of ourselves is never independent of others.

Buddhist teachings speak of "nonself" and "emptiness." What these terms mean is that there is no such thing as an isolated individual. Though we can say there is, and though we might think there is, and though many of our thoughts and motivations seem to be based on this idea, in fact it is an erroneous idea. Every thought in our minds every emotion that we feel, every word that comes out of our mouth, every material sustenance we need to get through the day, comes through the kindness of and the interaction with others. And not only other humans. Our nonhuman companions, the wildlife that sustain ecosystems that sustain us, and the animals whose pain and flesh provides food for some humans all contribute to making us who we are. Indeed, the whole of the earth, the soil, the sky, the trees, the air we breathe and water we drink constitute us. We not only depend on all of this, we are all of it and it is us.

To practice gratitude to everyone, to train is this profound understanding, is to cultivate gratitude every day. Gratitude is the happiest of attitudes: you simply cannot be grateful and unhappy at the same time. If you feel grateful, you are a happy person. If you feel grateful for what is possible for you in this moment, no matter what your challenges are -- grateful that you are alive, that you can think, that you can feel, that you can stand, sit, walk, talk -- then you are happy and you maximize your chances for well-being and for sharing happiness with others.

For Journaling

Listing gratitudes, at least once a week, is an important part of journaling. Take some time to particularly reflect on your gratitude to (a) people you never met, (b) people who cared for and helped you and are now dead, (c) nonhuman animals, all beings, and all things.

* * *
from Judith Lief, "Be Grateful to Everyone," Tricycle.

In the blindness of our wealth and privilege, we don’t see how much we have to be grateful for. We take all that we have for granted and we live in a very ungrateful world.

This slogan assumes that we at least have basic gratitude for the good things that befall us. It then challenges us to extend that feeling of gratitude to include not just gratitude for what is positive, but gratitude for the negative also. Personally, I think we need to work on our basic gratitude, first. Simply adding this dimension to the way we view things would be a great improvement.

Conventional gratitude is based on distinguishing what we like from what we do not, good fortune from bad fortune, success from failure, opportunities from obstacles. By practicing conventional gratitude, we may begin to better appreciate times of good fortune and opportunity. But what about all the obstacles, unpleasant people, and difficulties in our life?

According to this slogan, we should be especially grateful for having to deal with annoying people and difficult situations, because without them we would have nothing to work with. Without them, how could we practice patience, exertion, mindfulness, loving-kindness or compassion? It is by dealing with such challenges that we grow and develop. So we should be very grateful to have them.

TODAY’S PRACTICE
To begin with, reflect on the things in your life for which you are grateful. Notice what happens when you acknowledge all that you have to be grateful for. Now reflect on something difficult, the kind of situation or person that would not inspire conventional gratitude. Can you extend your gratitude to include that as well? What happens when you do so?

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See also, Practice of the Week: "Be Grateful" (Rick Hanson, with TED Talk by David Steindl-Rast) and "The Gratitude Visit"

For list of all weekly practices: "Spiritual Practice Directory"

Turn All Mishaps Into the Path

Practice of the Week
Turn All Mishaps Into the Path

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

"Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, 'This is a misfortune' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.'" --Marcus Aurelius

"Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune." --William James

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

The spiritual path -- the path toward wholeness, deepening wisdom and expansive equanimity, peace, and joy; that is, the path of life, insofar as we tread it with the intention of becoming more fully alive  -- isn't all sunshine and sweetness. Mishaps happen. If we treat them as part of the path, then they are.

When things go all right we are cheerful, we feel good, but as soon as bad things start happening, we get depressed, fall apart, or at the very best, we hang on and cope. We certainly do not transform our mishaps into the path. And why would we want to? We don't want the mishaps to be there. We want them gone as soon as possible. They are certainly not the spiritual path toward wholeness -- we think.

Previous "Practices of the Week" have included: "See Everything As a Dream," "Rest in the Openness of Mind," "Think Long and Hard on Four Points," "Examine the Nature of Awareness," "Don't Get Stuck on Peace," "Be a Child of Illusion," "Real Compassion," "Turn Things Around," and "Patience." Simply by treating these titles as slogans and repeating these, and other slogans from our "Practice of the Week" titles, to ourselves over and over, and reflecting on them repeatedly, they will begin to pop up naturally, unbidden, when we need them. This week's Practice introduces the slogan: "Turn All Mishaps Into the Path."

When something difficult or terrible happens to us -- a loss, a setback, a frustration, an insult -- naturally we immediately feel dismay, anger, disappointment, or resentment, just as everyone does and just as we always have. But now we have a slogan to train with until, in the midst of bad circumstances, it pops into mind: Turn all of this in the path!

When we catch ourselves trying to run away from the things that make us feel bad, we can, instead, reverse course. We can turn toward our afflictive emotions, understanding that they are natural, under the circumstances, and understanding that avoiding them won't work. Dismay, annoyance, anger, anxiety, resentment arise sometimes for all of us -- this is how the human heart works. Instead of denying, repressing, or (trying to) ignore these emotions, we can allow them to be present with dignity.

Forgive yourself for having the negative emotions. Forgive others -- whoever you might be blaming for your difficulties. With these forgivenesses come relief and even gratitude. We can say to ourselves, for example:

"Oh, yes, I really am angry right now, I am pretty upset right now, but this doesn't belong to me. This upset is what animals feel under such conditions -- so of course I feel this way. And I am grateful to feel what anyone, under such circumstances, would feel. I am glad to stand in solidarity and understanding with other human beings/primates/mammals/vertebrates who are probably, right now, in this very moment, also feeling these emotions."

This is not far-fetched. It does, however, take training. We are not talking about miracles, nor about affirmations or wishful thinking. We are talking about training the mind.

Repeat this slogan, turn all mishaps into the path, to yourself at various points during your day. Write it in your journal, along with your reflections on how it is working in your life: do this every day for a week, or a month -- until it is thoroughly internalized. The mind and heart react according to their well-worn habits. Whatever habit of mind you have now comes from your actions and thoughts of the past (however unexamined or unintentional they may have been). Whatever habits of mind you will have in future depend on what you do or don't do from now on. The way you spontaneously react in times of trouble is not fixed. Your mind, your heart, can be trained. Once you have a single experience of reacting differently, you will be encouraged. Next time it is more likely that you will take yourself in hand. Each time becomes easier than the last. And little by little you establish a new habit. When something difficult happens, you will train yourself to stop saying,

"Damn! Why did this have to happen!"

and begin saying,

"Yes, of course, this is how it is. Let me turn toward it. Let me practice with it. Let me go beyond entanglement to gratitude."

Because you will have realized that because you are alive and not dead, because you have a mammalian body and not some other kind of a body, because the world is a physical world and not an ethereal world, and because all of us together are the animals that we are, bad things are going to happen. It's the most natural, the most normal, the most inevitable thing in the world. Don't think "mistake," or "fault (my own or someone else's)." When mishaps occur, we can make use of them to drive our gratitude and our compassion deeper.

* * *
from Judith Lief, "When the World is Filled with Evil, Transform All Mishaps into the Path of Bodhi," Tricycle

When things go wrong, when we encounter obstacles, the last thing on our minds is the dharma. Instead, what is the first thing on our minds? Ourselves! It is all about how we are being inconvenienced, burdened, put upon, attacked, misunderstood, rejected—you name it. Not only do we lose track of the path, but our concern for others goes into hibernation as we focus front and center on our own particular problem.

Is it possible to use the very obstacles that block us and cause us to close down as a means of awakening? If so, it would be great, as there is certain to be no shortage of mishaps, and who can think of a time when the world was not filled with evil? When all was harmonious and at peace?

According to this slogan, you do not have to pretend that everything is okay. And you do not have to wait for things to get better in order to practice. Instead of viewing mishaps as personal attacks, you can include them in your practice. You might even welcome them, for it is when you face difficulties, not when things are going smoothly, that you learn the most. That is what tests the strength of your practice.

Transformation does not mean that all our problems go away or that we overcome all our difficulties. It does not mean that the world is suddenly all rosy. It means that the path of dharma is big enough to accommodate whatever arises, good or bad. When you work with mishaps using the tools of mindfulness and loving-kindness, your relationship to such mishaps is transformed—and in the process, so are you.

TODAY’S PRACTICE

As obstacles arise throughout the day, pay particular attention to your immediate response and the assumptions embedded in that response. Where is the awakening and where do you get stuck?

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SPIRITUAL PRACTICE DIRECTORY

Turn Things Around

Practice of the Week
Turn Things Around

Category: Slogans to Live By: Practices for everyone to keep in mind and pay attention to. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time. Just have the intention to grow stronger in each of these areas as you go about your day, and sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling. The titles of these practices are guiding slogans to live by.

Adapted from Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion

Where there's confusion or pain in your life, make use of it instead of trying to get rid of it. Trying to get rid of it usually doesn't work anyway. It only makes things worse. (Of course, if your painful situation can be resolved somehow, resolve it. Spiritual growth and depth is not about acquiescence to bad situations that can be improved; it is about addressing the pesky facts and emotional states that are not so simply removed: grief, fear, and so on.)

There is a slogan from the Buddhist tradition:

"Three objects, three poisons, three seeds of virtue."

"Turn things around" means turning the three objects and poisons into seeds of virtue.

Three objects refers to three categories of objects, and object isn't exclusively a physical object (thoughts and feelings are "objects" of consciousness, as physical objects are objects of perception.) The "three objects," then, are: attractive, repellent, and neutral. Objects themselves do not have these qualities, but our reactions to the objects do. Whatever comes into our consciousness will spur a reaction in us, and this reaction will be one of these three: we will either like, dislike, or be neutral to the object.

Three poisons refers to greed, hate, and delusion. These are the emotional activities we indulge in response to the three objects. We are greedy for attractive objectives; we hate repellent objects; we are confused or indifferent about neutral objects.

The three objects and three poisons describe basic ordinary daily life. "Objects" constantly arise, and we are constantly trying to grab them and make them stay or push them away as soon as possible, depending on the style of our reactivity and emotion. The flow of these objects and emotions goes on constantly, usually below the level of conscious awareness. We wake up in the morning and feel too cold or too hot or just right. This makes us feel pleasant or irritated or neutral. Our coffee is tasty or not so tasty, and we're slightly pleased or annoyed. Our thoughts are pleasant or not so pleasant. All day long objects appear to our perception, feeling, and thought, and all day long we are reacting in simple, basic ways to each and every object: wonderful, let's keep this one; terrible, let's get rid of this one; neutral, I don't care about this one.

All day long this flows on, usually without much discernible problem. But occasionally our likes or dislikes become strongly activated by objects, and then we become powerfully happy or miserable, overcome with lust or desire or anger or fear.

Quite often we cannot avoid losing what we find attractive and having to put up with what we find repellent. And in the biggest picture of our lives, we always end up losing what we want (our loved ones, our health) and having to put up with what we don't want (our aging, our illness, our death, and the loss of our loved ones). If we insist on trying desperately to control things we can't control, we eventually become very desperate and unhappy -- the world begins to seem like a very hostile and unjust place, and we can become quite paranoid and upset about almost everything. Once you decide that the world is a hostile and inhospitable place and the people in it untrustworthy and venal, things begin to get worse and worse and worse. So the three objects and three poisons are lamentable realities. If we don't pay attention to them, if we don't figure out a way to cooperate with rather than resist their pressure, they can ruin our lives.

Three seeds of virtue appear when the three poisons are turned around. We don't have control of much, but we do have control of whether to turn around the greed, hate, and delusion that appears in our lives.

Contrary to what we might think, the three objects and three poisons are not problems and traps. They are seeds of virtue. The basic human mess of likes and dislikes, in which we seem to be trapped and which seems to be so dangerous and troublesome, is actually wonderful, a real treasure. Our messes and our problems are our treasures! Our suffering, our troubles, our problems, the things that we really don't like and want to get rid of but can't, or the losses we feel, the things we wanted to keep and sadly cannot -- all of this is a treasure to us if only we can understand it in the right way. Everything painful and difficult has the potential to bring us great joy and deep spiritual riches.

We can turn toward and appreciate our suffering, our problems, and the suffering and problems of others. Given the power of our likes and dislikes and the intractability of the world (which doesn't organize itself according to our needs), it won't do not to deal with our likes and dislikes in some way other than simply trying constantly to fulfill them. So naturally we imagine somehow trying to modify or eliminate them. But this is not what "turn things around" means. It means something radically different. It means recognizing that our very likes and dislikes and the suffering they bring us, can be the source of spiritual growth.

How

Write down "turn things around." Contemplate it carefully. Bring it up when you find yourself annoyed or upset by instances of liking and disliking that are causing you suffering. This practice might help you to let go a little in that moment. Even if you don't believe it and are only a little intrigued by it, it can be helpful to practice this slogan. It will have the effect of causing you to stop your lamentation for a moment and recall that it might just be possible that there is something potentially good and positive in this agony in which you are right now enmeshed.

The earlier Practice, "Real Compassion" (SEE HERE), trains us to see and feel that our pain and difficulty in this life, and the pain and the difficulty of others, is the gateway that will lead us down the path of love. We don't need to avoid or protect ourselves from pain. Quite the contrary. When pain and suffering are present, we need to turn toward them, breathe them in. And through this practice of suffering, we can transform it, and transform ourselves. Turning things around -- turning the three objects and poisons into seeds of virtue -- fits with the sending and receiving of Real Compassion.

What a difference this would make in your life if you actually knew that when things happen that you don't like, that are difficult or painful, you don't need to complain and try fruitlessly to change them (when they can't be changed), and that you don't need to find someone to blame and then do battle with that blameworthy person, as if you were a victim, but instead you can have a profound and heartfelt sense of acceptance and love. You can breathe in the difficulty and transform it into ease and healing through your body.

The practice of turning things around requires cultivation over time, persistence, diligence, and strength. It requires keeping up the effort, all of the time, in everything we do.

Suppose you understood all of your pain and suffering as raw materials for transformation and healing. Your life would be completely different.

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Judith Lief, "Three Objects, Three Poisons, and Three Seeds of Virtue" Tricycle.

Three Objects: Labeling our World

One way of looking at this slogan is that it is about the power of labels. It is about the way we categorize our world and what happens as a result. At a crude level and very quickly we are always sizing people up. We put the people we deal with into mental bins such as “friend,” “enemy” or “not worth bothering with.” We do this both individually and collectively.

There are times when this ability to categorize may be crucially important for our survival, which depends on knowing whom we can trust and whom we need to avoid. Simply recognizing that someone is a friend or enemy or neither in that way is not in itself particularly problematic. But what happens is that those labels take on a life of their own. They change from being simple observations of a current situation or interaction to become unchanging definitions of the way things are. They become the world according to us.

Three Poisons: Fixed Reactions to Our Own Labels

When our labels become solid in that way, we can’t see past them, we can only react. And the way we do so, according to this slogan, is in three dysfunctional ways: by grasping, by hatred, and by avoidance or indifference. This trio is traditionally referred to as passion, aggression, and ignorance. As we scan our world, we pick out highlights and focus on those people who further or threaten our self-serving agendas, ignoring the rest. We are always struggling to draw in friends and push away enemies.

Three Virtuous Seeds: Taking Responsibility for Our Own Reactions

We first need to see this pattern at work. Then, when a poison such as hatred arises, instead of blaming the “enemy” that triggered such a response, we can see that hatred and the other poisons are our own creation. We can take full responsibility for them. Without the excuse of an external object, the poison is left hanging, with no support. When the three poisons arise, we can take them in and hope that, in doing so, others may be freed of such harmful patterns. In that way, we can transform the three poisons into the three virtuous seeds.

TODAY’S PRACTICE

Pay attention to labeling and notice how tenacious such labels are. When you react, notice what you are reacting to and where you place the blame. Explore the connection between the poison and the object.

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For list of all weekly practices: "Practices of the Week Index"