Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears (7 page)

In the evening, I review what happened. This is the part that can be so loaded for Western people. We have an unfortunate tendency to emphasize our failures. But when Dzigar Kongtrül teaches about this, he says that for him, when he sees that he has connected with his aspiration even once briefly during the whole day, he feels a sense of rejoicing. He also says that when he recognizes he lost it completely, he rejoices that he has the capacity to see that. This way of viewing ourselves has been very inspiring for me.

He encourages us to ask what it is in us, after all, that sees that we lost it. Isn’t it our own wisdom, our own insight, our own natural intelligence? Can we just have the aspiration, then, to identify with the wisdom that acknowledges that we hurt someone’s feelings, or that we smoked when we said we wouldn’t? Can we have the aspiration to identify more and more with our ability to recognize what we’re doing instead of always identifying with our mistakes? This is the spirit of delighting in what we see rather than despairing in what we see. It’s the spirit of letting compassionate self-reflection build confidence rather than becoming a cause for depression.

Being able to acknowledge shenpa, being able to know that we are getting stuck, this is the basis of freedom. Just being able to recognize what’s happening without denial—we should rejoice in that. Then, if we can take the next step and refrain from going down the same old road, which sometimes we’ll be able to do and sometimes we won’t, we can rejoice that sometimes we do have that ability to interrupt the momentum—that “sometimes” is major progress.

We can rejoice when we are able to acknowledge and refrain, and also we should expect relapses. Sometimes it’s one step forward, one step back. Then maybe one step forward, a half step back. When people do the Weight Watchers program, they’re told that their weight will go up and down, that they’re not always going to be losing those pounds. It’s recommended to be patient with weight loss, and that when you gain weight over one week, it’s no problem. You’re asked to look at it from the bigger perspective, to pay attention to what happens over a month or over many months.

It’s like that when we work with our firmly entrenched habits, as well. We include the compassionate realization that people have relapses. Chögyam Trungpa gave a teaching about this. He said that if we had nothing but smooth sailing, if our habitual patterns just dropped away, continually, week after week with no problem, we would have no empathy for all those people who continue to get hooked and act out.

He said the ideal spiritual journey needs the balance of “gloriousness” and “wretchedness.” If it were all glory, just one success after another, we’d get extremely arrogant and completely out of touch with human suffering. On the other hand, if it were all wretchedness and we never had any insights, and never experienced joy or inspiration, then we’d get so discouraged that we’d give up. So, what’s needed is a balance. But as a species, we tend to overemphasize the wretchedness.

For instance, when we review our day, it’s common to perceive it all as bleak, as if we didn’t get anything right. But maybe if somebody else is there, a partner for example, he or she might say, “What about the fact that you were getting all worked up, and you went out for a walk and came back calmed down?” Or, “I saw you smile at that man who was sitting in the corner all hunched over and depressed, and I saw him brighten up.” Sometimes other people have to point this out to us.

In our most ordinary days we have moments of happiness, moments of comfort and enjoyment, moments of seeing something that pleased us, something that touched us, moments of contacting the tenderness of our hearts. We can take joy in that. I find that it’s essential during the day to actually note when I feel happiness or when something positive happens, and begin to cherish those moments as precious. Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.

Until we start this journey of acknowledging when we’re being hooked, little things unconsciously trigger us all the time. The slightest setback or annoyance will trigger us and we’ll be blind to what’s going on. Life just becomes increasingly more of a struggle and we never can figure out why.

Once we start seeing, of course we still get triggered, but there’s a very important difference: the magic of recognition, the miracle of compassionate acknowledgment. It’s the miracle of being conscious rather than unconscious. The more we do it, the more our ability to do it grows. That’s not something we have to force. It just naturally happens that when there’s less self-deception, we have an increased capacity to remain awake to the joys and sorrows of the world.

It doesn’t help at all to feel guilty about where we find ourselves. When we can shed the light of compassionate attention on our actions, an interesting shift can happen—this regret of ours becomes a seed of compassion for all the other people just like us who are caught in fixed mind, closed mind, hard heart. We let this recognition connect us with others. We let it be the seed of empathy, and we go forward, not wallowing in guilt and shame about what we did.

In
The Art of Happiness
, Howard Cutler asked the Dalai Lama if there was anything he’s done in his life that he felt bad about, anything he regretted. He said there was, and told the story of an older monk who came to see him one day and asked about doing a certain highlevel Buddhist practice. The Dalai Lama casually told the old man that this practice would be difficult and perhaps would be better undertaken by someone who was younger, that traditionally it was a practice that should be started in one’s teens. He later found out that the monk killed himself in order to be reborn in a younger body to more effectively undertake the practice.

Cutler was stunned. He asked the Dalai Lama how he had been able to deal with his regret. He also asked how he had gotten rid of it. The Dalai Lama paused for a long time and really thought about it. Then he said, “I didn’t get rid of it. It’s still here.” He went on to say, “Even though that feeling of regret is still here, it isn’t associated with a feeling of heaviness or a quality of pulling me back.”

I was very moved by that. We have this mistaken idea that either we have regret or we get rid of it. Trungpa Rinpoche talked about holding the sadness of life in our heart while never forgetting the beauty of the world and the goodness of being alive. There comes a time when we are able to be pierced to the heart by our own suffering, and the suffering of others, and by our own regrets, without it dragging us down. The Dalai Lama went on to say that being dragged down by regrets or held back by them would be to no one’s benefit, so he learns from his mistakes and goes forward doing all he can to help others. I think we could say he is the great teacher that he is because of how he works with his own challenges. It’s not as though he goes through life untouched, with no sadness or remorse. But he doesn’t turn this into what we call “guilt,” or the shame that drags us down and makes us feel powerless to be there for ourselves or anybody else.

This possibility is not just available to people like the Dalai Lama. It’s waiting for any of us, every moment of every day. When we look back to our last moment, our last hour, our last day, if we can say that we caught ourselves when we were hooked and interrupted the momentum, if this was true even briefly, we can rejoice. And if we didn’t realize what was happening, and once again acted in an old familiar way, we can rejoice that we have the ability, the wisdom, to be conscious and actually acknowledge that, and go forward—perhaps older, wiser, and more compassionate for having made mistakes, for having had relapses.

8

U
NCOVERING
N
ATURAL
O
PENNESS

N
othing is static and permanent. And that includes you and me. We know this about cars and carpets, new shirts and DVD players, but are less willing to face it when it comes to ourselves or to other people. We have a very solid view of ourselves, and also very fixed views about others. Yet if we look closely, we can see that we aren’t even slightly fixed. In fact, we are as unfixed and changing as a river. For convenience, we label a constant flow of water the Mississippi or the Nile, very much the way we call ourselves Jack or Helen. But that river isn’t the same for even a fraction of a second. People are equally in flux—I am like that, and so are you. Our thoughts, emotions, molecules are continually changing.

If you are inclined to train in being open-endedly present to whatever arises—to life’s energy, to other people, and to this world—after a while you’ll realize you’re open and present to something that’s not staying the same. For example, if you are truly open and receptive to another person, it can be quite a revelation to realize that they aren’t exactly the same on Friday as they were on Monday, that each of us can be perceived freshly any day of the week. But if that person happens to be your parent or sibling, your partner or your boss, you are usually blinded and see them as predictably always the same. We have a tendency to label one another as an irritating person, a bore, a threat to our happiness and security, as inferior or superior; and this goes way beyond our close circle of acquaintances at home or at work.

This labeling can lead to prejudice, cruelty, and violence; and in any time or place when prejudice, cruelty, and violence occur, whether it’s directed by one being toward another or by groups of beings toward other groups, there’s a theme that runs through: “This person has a fixed identity, and they are
not like me
.” We can kill someone or we can be indifferent to the atrocities perpetrated on them because “they’re just hajis,” or “they’re just women,” or “they’re just gay.” You can fill in the blank with any racial slur, any dehumanized label that’s ever been used for those we consider different.

There’s a whole other way to look at one another—and that is to try dropping our fixed ideas and get curious about the possibility that nothing and no one remains always the same. This starts, of course, with getting curious and dropping the limiting stories we’ve created about ourselves. Then we have to stay present with whatever is happening to us. What I find helpful is to think of whatever I am experiencing—whether it’s sadness, anger, or worry; pleasure, joy, or delight—as simply the dynamic, fluid energy of life as it is manifesting right now. That shifts the resistance I have to my experience. Because I’ve been practicing this approach for some years now, I’ve come to have confidence in the capacity for open receptivity, for wakefulness and nobility, in all beings. And I’ve seen that how we regard and treat one another can draw this nobility out.

In the book
The Search for a Nonviolent Future
by Michael Nagler there’s a story that illustrates this. It concerns a Jewish couple, Michael and Julie Weisser—but it could have been any victim of prejudice and violence. The Weissers were living in Lincoln, Nebraska, where Michael had a prominent role at the synagogue, and Julie was a nurse. In 1992 they began to receive threatening phone calls and notes from the Ku Klux Klan. Of course this was illegal at the time and not condoned in this town, but nevertheless it was happening. The police told them that it was probably the work of Larry Trapp. He was the Grand Dragon, the head of the Klan, in that town. Michael and Julie Weisser knew of Trapp’s reputation as a man filled with hatred. And they knew that he was in a wheelchair, having been disabled by a beating years ago.

Each day, Larry’s voice on the phone would threaten to kill them, destroy their property, and harm their family and friends. Then one day Michael decided, just on the spot with the support of Julie, to try something. So in the next phone call, when Larry Trapp was ranting at them, he waited for an opportunity to speak. He knew that Trapp had a hard time getting around in his wheelchair, so when he could get a word in, he offered him a ride to the grocery store. Trapp didn’t speak for a while, and when he did, the anger had left his voice. He said, “Well, I’ve got that taken care of, but thanks for asking.”

By then, the Weissers had more in mind than ending the harassment: they wanted to help free Larry Trapp from the torment of his prejudice and rage. They began calling
him
, and told him if he needed help, they would be there for him. Not long after that they went to his apartment, taking him a home-cooked dinner, and the three of them got to know one another better. And he did begin to ask them for help. One day when they arrived for a visit, Trapp took off the ring he wore and gave it to them. It was a Nazi ring. With that gesture he was breaking his association with the Ku Klux Klan, telling the Weissers, “I denounce everything they stand for. But it’s not the people in the organizations that I hate. . . . If I were to say I hate all Klansmen because they’re Klansmen . . . I would still be a racist.” Rather than replacing one prejudice with another, Larry Trapp chose to let go of closed-mindedness altogether.