The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (10 page)

To cultivate equanimity we practice catching ourselves when we feel attraction or aversion, before it hardens into grasping or negativity. We train in staying with the soft spot and use our biases as stepping-stones for connecting with the confusion of others. Strong emotions are useful in this regard. Whatever arises, no matter how bad it feels, can be used to extend our kinship to others who suffer the same kind of aggression or craving—who, just like us, get hooked by hope and fear. This is how we come to appreciate that everyone’s in the same boat. We all desperately need more insight into what leads to happiness and what leads to pain.

Recently I was at a practice center visiting a friend. Over a few days, I heard many people saying how she was always late for everything. They were feeling inconvenienced and irritated. She would always justify her tardiness with what seemed to her good reasons. That she was even self-righteous got under people’s skin.

One day I came upon my friend sitting on a bench. Her face was red and she was trembling with rage. She’d had an appointment with someone and she’d been waiting for fifteen minutes and the person hadn’t shown up.

It was hard not to point out the irony of her reaction. However, I waited to see if she might recognize that the tables had just been turned, that this was what she’d been putting others through for years. But that insight never came. She couldn’t yet put herself in their shoes. Instead she stayed completely indignant, escalating her anger by writing outraged notes. She wasn’t yet ready to feel her kinship with all the people she had kept waiting. Just as most of us do, she unwittingly intensified her own suffering. Instead of letting the experience soften her up, she used it to strengthen her hardness and indifference.

It’s easy to continue, even after years of practice, to harden into a position of anger and indignation. However, if we can contact the vulnerability and rawness of resentment or rage or whatever it is, a bigger perspective can emerge. In the moment that we choose to abide with the energy instead of acting it out or repressing it, we are training in equanimity, in thinking bigger than right and wrong. This is how all the four limitless qualities evolve from limited to limitless: we practice catching our mind hardening into fixed views and do our best to soften. Through softening, the barriers come down.

An on-the-spot equanimity practice is to walk down the street with the intention of staying as awake as possible to whomever we meet. This is training in being emotionally honest with ourselves and becoming more available to others. As we pass people we simply notice whether we open up or shut down. We notice if we feel attraction, aversion, or indifference, without adding anything extra like self-judgment. We might feel compassion toward someone who looks depressed, or cheered up by someone who’s smiling to himself. We might feel fear of and aversion to another person without even knowing why. Noticing where we open up and where we shut down—without praise or blame—is the basis of our practice. Practicing this way for even one block of a city street can be an eye-opener.

We can take the practice even further by using what comes up as the basis for empathy and understanding. Closed feelings like fear or revulsion thus become an opportunity to remember that others also get caught this way. Open states like friendliness and delight also connect us very personally with the people that we pass on the streets. Either way, we are stretching our hearts.

As with the other limitless qualities, equanimity can be practiced formally in seven stages. When we have a feeling of spaciousness and ease that’s not caught up in preference or prejudice, this is equanimity. We can wish for ourselves and our loved ones to dwell in that sense of freedom. Then we extend that aspiration to our friend and to neutral persons and to our enemy. We then have the aspiration that all five of us could dwell in equanimity. Finally we can extend the aspiration to all beings in time and space. “May all beings dwell in the great equanimity, free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.”

We can also do equanimity practice before beginning the loving-kindness or compassion practices. Simply reflect on how much pain is caused by grasping and aversion, how much pain there is in our fear of losing happiness, how much pain there is in feeling that certain people are not worthy of our compassion or love. Then we can wish for the strength and courage to feel unlimited maitri and unlimited compassion for all beings without exception—including those we dislike and fear. With this intention we begin the seven-step practices.

As the
Maitri Sutra
says, “With a boundless mind one could cherish all living beings, radiating friendliness over the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit.” In practicing equanimity, we train in widening our circle of understanding and compassion to include the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. However, limitless equanimity, free of any prejudice at all, is not the same as an ultimate harmony where everything is finally smooth. It is more a matter of being fully engaged with whatever comes to our door. We could call it being completely alive.

Training in equanimity requires that we leave behind some baggage: the comfort of rejecting whole parts of our experience, for example, and the security of welcoming only what is pleasant. The courage to continue with this unfolding process comes from self-compassion and from giving ourselves plenty of time. If we continue to practice this way over the months and years, we will feel our hearts and minds grow bigger. When people ask me how long this will take, I say, “At least until you die.”

13

Meeting the Enemy

With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or what ever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.

—CHARLOTTE JOKO BECK

T
HE ESSENCE OF BRAVERY
is being without self-deception. However, it’s not so easy to take a straight look at what we do. Seeing ourselves clearly is initially uncomfortable and embarrassing. As we train in clarity and steadfastness, we see things we’d prefer to deny—judgmentalness, pettiness, arrogance. These are not sins but temporary and workable habits of mind. The more we get to know them, the more they lose their power. This is how we come to trust that our basic nature is utterly simple, free of struggle between good and bad.

A warrior begins to take responsibility for the direction of her life. It’s as if we are lugging around unnecessary baggage. Our training encourages us to open the bags and look closely at what we are carrying. In doing this we begin to understand that much of it isn’t needed anymore.

There is a traditional teaching that supports us in this process: the near and far enemies of the four limitless qualities. The near enemy is something that’s similar to one of these four qualities. Rather than setting us free, however, it burdens us. The far enemy is the quality’s opposite; it also gets in our way.

The near enemy or misunderstanding of loving-kindness is attachment. There’s a Tibetan word,
lhenchak
, that describes this well. “Lhenchak” points at how free-flowing love can go astray and get stuck. It is taught that the strongest lhenchak occurs in the following three relationships: between parents and children, between lovers, and between spiritual teachers and their students. Lhenchak is characterized by clinging and self-involvement. It’s like weaving ourselves into a web of shared neurosis. By its nature, it inhibits human growth. Inevitably the lhenchak relationship turns into a source of irritation and blindness.

Loving-kindness is different from lhenchak. It is not based on need. It is genuine appreciation and care for the well-being of another person, a respect for an individual’s value. We can love someone for his own sake, not because he is worthy or unworthy, not because he is loving toward us or he isn’t. This goes beyond relationships with people. Loving even a flower without lhenchak, we see it more clearly and feel more tenderness for its inherent perfection.

We get an interesting hit on the emotional roller coaster of lhenchak when we start to move through the seven stages of aspiration. Someone who’s theoretically quite dear to us can end up in several categories. In fact, it’s frequently not our partners or parents whom we put in the category of unconditionally beloved. They move around day by day, from loved one to difficult person.

The far enemy or opposite of loving-kindness is hatred or aversion. The obvious drawback of aversion is that it isolates us from others. It strengthens the illusion that we are separate. However, right in the tightness and heat of hatred is the soft spot of bodhichitta. It is our vulnerability in difficult encounters that causes us to shut down. When a relationship brings up old memories and ancient discomforts, we become afraid and harden our hearts. Just at the moment when tears could come to our eyes, we pull back and do something mean.

Jarvis Masters, my friend on death row, tells the story of a fellow inmate named Freddie who started to fall apart when he heard of his grandmother’s death. He didn’t want to let the men around him see him cry and struggled to keep his pain from showing. His friends saw that he was about to explode and reached out to comfort him. Then Freddie started swinging violently. The tower guards began to shoot and yell for Freddie’s friends to back away. But they wouldn’t. They knew they had to calm him down. They screamed at the guards that there was something wrong with him, that he needed help. They grabbed Freddie and held him down, and every one of them was crying. As Jarvis put it, they reached out to Freddie, “not as hardened prisoners, but simply as human beings.”

There are three near enemies of compassion: pity, overwhelm, and idiot compassion. Pity or professional warmth is easily mistaken for true compassion. When we identify ourselves as the helper, it means we see others as helpless. Instead of feeling the pain of the other person, we set ourselves apart. If we’ve ever been on the receiving end of pity we know how painful it feels. Instead of warmth and support all we feel is distance. With true compassion these up-down identities are stripped away.

Overwhelm is a sense of helplessness. We feel that there is so much suffering—whatever we do is to no avail. We’ve become discouraged. There are two ways I’ve found effective in working with overwhelm. One is to train with a less challenging subject, to find a situation we feel that we can handle.

A woman wrote to me that when she read about these compassion practices she felt inspired to do them for her son, who is addicted to heroin. She naturally longed for him to be free of his suffering and its causes. She naturally wanted him to have happiness and relief. But when she started to practice she found that she couldn’t do it. As soon as she would get in touch with the truth of his situation, it overwhelmed her. She decided instead to do tonglen and the aspirations for the families of all the young people addicted to heroin. She tried, and she couldn’t do that either. The situation was too frightening and too raw.

Around that time she turned on the television and there was her hometown football team who had just lost a game. She could see the heartbreak in their faces. So she started doing tonglen and compassionate aspirations for the losing team. She was able to contact her genuine empathy without overwhelm. When doing the practices became possible, her fears and her sense of helplessness decreased. Gradually she was able to make the stretch into practicing for the other families and finally for her son.

So starting with something workable can be powerful magic. When we find the place where our heart can stay engaged, the compassion begins to spread by itself.

The second way of training with overwhelm is to keep our attention on the other person. This one takes more courage. When someone else’s pain triggers fear in us, we turn inward and start erecting walls. We panic because we feel we can’t handle the pain. Sometimes we should trust this panic as a sign that we aren’t yet ready to open so far. But sometimes instead of closing down or resisting we might have the courage to do something unpredictable: turn our attention back toward the other person. This is the same as keeping our heart open to the pain. If we can’t shift our attention, perhaps we can let the story line go and feel the energy of the pain in our body for one second without freaking out or retreating. However, if none of these is yet possible, we engender some compassion for our current limitations and go forward.

The third near enemy of compassion is idiot compassion. This is when we avoid conflict and protect our good image by being kind when we should say a definite “no.” Compassion doesn’t imply only trying to be good. When we find ourselves in an aggressive relationship, we need to set clear boundaries. The kindest thing we can do for everyone concerned is to know when to say “enough.” Many people use Buddhist ideals to justify self-debasement. In the name of not shutting our heart, we let people walk all over us. It is said that in order not to break our vow of compassion we have to learn when to stop aggression and draw the line. There are times when the only way to bring down the barriers is to set boundaries.

The far enemy or opposite of compassion is cruelty. When we reach the limit of how much suffering we can take, we sometimes use cruelty as a defense against our fear of pain. This is common for anyone who was abused as a child. Instead of feeling kindness for those who are defenseless and weak, we can feel an irrational desire to hurt them. We protect our vulnerability and fear by hardening. If we do not recognize that by doing this we hurt ourselves as much as we hurt others, we’ll never get free. Booker T. Washington was right when he said, “Let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.” Cruelty when rationalized or unacknowledged destroys us.

The near enemy of joyfulness is overexcitement. We can churn ourselves into a manic state and mistake riding high above the sorrows of the world for unconditional joy. Again, instead of connecting us with others, this separates us. Authentic joy is not a euphoric state or a feeling of being high. Rather, it is a state of appreciation that allows us to participate fully in our lives. We train in rejoicing in the good fortune of self and others.