The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (6 page)

We can’t expect always to catch ourselves spinning off into a habitual reaction. But as we begin to catch ourselves more frequently and work with interrupting our habitual patterns, we know that the bodhichitta training is seeping in. Our desire to help not just ourselves but all sentient beings will slowly grow.

So in all activities, not just sometimes when things are going well or are particularly bad, train with the bodhichitta slogans of Atisha. But remember, “Don’t try to be the fastest,” “Abandon any hope of fruition,” and “Don’t expect applause”!

1.
For more information on the mind-training slogans, please refer to the appendix, where all fifty-nine slogans are listed, as well as to the list of books on slogan training in the bibliography.

6

Four Limitless Qualities

May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.

May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.

May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.

May we dwell in the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.

—THE FOUR LIMITLESS ONES CHANT

I
T’S UP TO US.
We can spend our lives cultivating our resentments and cravings or we can explore the path of the warrior—nurturing open-mindedness and courage. Most of us keep strengthening our negative habits and therefore sow the seeds of our own suffering. The bodhichitta practices, however, are ways for us to sow the seeds of well-being. Particularly powerful are the aspiration practices of the four limitless qualities—loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

In these practices we start close to home: we express the wish that we and our loved ones enjoy happiness and be free of suffering. Then we gradually extend that aspiration to a widening circle of relationships. We start just where we are, where the aspirations feel genuine. We begin by acknowledging where we already feel love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. We locate our current experience of these four boundless qualities, however limited they may be: in our love of music, in our empathy with children, in the joy we feel on hearing good news, or in the equanimity we experience when we are with good friends. Even though we may think that what we already experience is too meager, nevertheless we start with that and nurture it. It doesn’t have to be grand.

Cultivating these four qualities gives us insight into our current experience. It gives us understanding of the state of our mind and heart right now. We get to know the experience of love and compassion, of joy and equanimity, and also of their opposites. We learn how it feels when one of the four qualities is stuck and how it feels when it is flowing freely. We never pretend that we feel anything we don’t. The practice depends on embracing our whole experience. By becoming intimate with how we close down and how we open up, we awaken our unlimited potential.

Even though we start this practice with the aspiration for ourselves or our loved ones to be free of suffering, it may feel as if we’re just mouthing words. Even this compassionate wish for those nearest to us may feel phony. But as long as we’re not deceiving ourselves, this pretending has the power to uncover bodhichitta. Even though we know exactly what we feel, we make the aspirations in order to move beyond what now seems possible. After we practice for ourselves and those near us, we stretch even further: we send goodwill toward the neutral people in our lives and also to the people we don’t like.

It might feel like stretching into make-believe to say, “May this person who is driving me crazy enjoy happiness and be free of suffering.” Probably what we genuinely feel is anger. This practice is like a workout that stretches the heart beyond its current capabilities. We can expect to encounter resistance. We discover that we have our limits: we can stay open to some people, but we remain closed to others. We see both our clarity and our confusion. We are learning firsthand what everyone who has ever set out on this path has learned: we are all a paradoxical bundle of rich potential that consists of both neurosis and wisdom.

Aspiration practice is different from making affirmations. Affirmations are like telling yourself that you are compassionate and brave in order to hide the fact that secretly you feel like a loser. In practicing the four limitless qualities, we aren’t trying to convince ourselves of anything, nor are we trying to hide our true feelings. We are expressing our willingness to open our hearts and move closer to our fears. Aspiration practice helps us to do this in increasingly difficult relationships.

If we acknowledge the love, compassion, joy, and equanimity that we feel now and nurture it through these practices, the expansion of those qualities will happen by itself. Awakening the four qualities provides the necessary warmth for an unlimited strength to emerge. They have the power to loosen up useless habits and to melt the ice-hardness of our fixations and defenses. We are not forcing ourselves to be good. When we see how cold or aggressive we can be, we aren’t asking ourselves to repent. Rather, these aspiration practices develop our ability to remain steadfast with our experience, whatever it may be. In this way we come to know the difference between a closed and an open mind, gradually developing the self-awareness and kindness we need to benefit others. These practices unblock our love and compassion, joy and equanimity, tapping into their boundless potential to expand.

7

Loving-Kindness

Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals.

—MAHATMA GANDHI

O
UR PERSONAL ATTEMPTS
to live humanely in this world are never wasted. Choosing to cultivate love rather than anger just might be what it takes to save the planet from extinction.

What is it that allows our goodwill to expand and our prejudice and anger to decrease? This is a significant question. Traditionally it is said that the root of aggression and suffering is ignorance. But what is it that we are ignoring? Entrenched in the tunnel vision of our personal concerns, what we ignore is our kinship with others. One reason we train as warriorbodhisattvas is to recognize our interconnectedness—to grow in understanding that when we harm another, we are harming ourselves. So we train in recognizing our uptightness. We train in seeing that others are not so different from ourselves. We train in opening our hearts and minds in increasingly difficult situations.

For an aspiring bodhisattva, the essential practice is to cultivate maitri. In the Shambhala teachings this is called “placing our fearful mind in the cradle of loving-kindness.” Another image for maitri or loving-kindness is that of a mother bird who protects and cares for her young until they are strong enough to fly away. People sometimes ask, “Who am I in this image—the mother or the chicks?” The answer is we’re both: both the loving mother and those ugly little chicks. It’s easy to identify with the babies—blind, raw, and desperate for attention. We are a poignant mixture of something that isn’t all that beautiful and yet is dearly loved. Whether this is our attitude toward ourselves or toward others, it is the key to learning how to love. We stay with ourselves and others when we’re screaming for food and have no feathers and also when we are more grown up and more cute by worldly standards.

In cultivating loving-kindness, we train first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves. Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness. Sometimes we feel good and strong. Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak. But like mother love, maitri is unconditional. No matter how we feel, we can aspire to be happy. We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress. Without loving-kindness for ourselves, it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.

To move from aggression to unconditional loving-kindness can seem like a daunting task. But we start with what’s familiar. The instruction for cultivating limitless maitri is to first find the tenderness that we already have. We touch in with our gratitude or appreciation—our current ability to feel goodwill. In a very nontheoretical way we contact the soft spot of bodhichitta. Whether we find it in the tenderness of feeling love or the vulnerability of feeling lonely is immaterial. If we look for that soft, unguarded place, we can always find it.

For instance, even in the rock-hardness of rage, if we look below the surface of the aggression, we’ll generally find fear. There’s something beneath the solidity of anger that feels very raw and sore. Underneath the defensiveness is the brokenhearted, unshielded quality of bodhichitta. Rather than feel this tenderness, however, we tend to close down and protect against the discomfort. That we close down is not a problem. In fact, to become aware of when we do so is an important part of the training. The first step in cultivating loving-kindness is to see when we are erecting barriers between ourselves and others. This compassionate recognition is essential. Unless we understand—in a nonjudgmental way—that we are hardening our hearts, there is no possibility of dissolving that armor. Without dissolving the armor, the loving-kindness of bodhichitta is always held back. We are always obstructing our innate capacity to love without an agenda.

So we train in awakening the loving-kindness of bodhichitta in all kinds of relationships, both openhearted and blocked. All these relationships become aids in uncovering our ability to feel and express love.

The formal practice of loving-kindness or maitri has seven stages.
¹
We begin by engendering loving-kindness for ourselves and then expand it at our own pace to include loved ones, friends, “neutral” persons, those who irritate us, all of the above as a group, and finally, all beings throughout time and space. We gradually widen the circle of loving-kindness.

The traditional aspiration used is “May I and others enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” In teaching this I’ve found that people sometimes have trouble with the word
happiness
. They say things like, “Suffering has taught me a lot and happiness gets me in trouble.” They aren’t sure that happiness is what they wish for themselves or others. This may be because our conventional notion of happiness is far too limited.

To get at the heart of the loving-kindness practice we may have to put the aspiration for happiness into our own words. One man told me of his aspiration that he and others realize their fullest potential. The aspiration of a woman I know is that we all learn to speak and think and act in a way that adds up to fundamental well-being. The aspiration of another person is that all beings—including himself—begin to trust in their basic goodness. It is important that each of us make the aspiration as genuine as possible.

To work with this practice it is useful to consider ahead of time people or animals for whom we already feel good heart. This might be a feeling of gratitude or appreciation or a feeling of tenderness. Any feeling of genuine heart will do. If it’s helpful, we can even start a list of those who easily inspire these feelings.

Traditionally we begin the practice with ourselves, but sometimes people find that too hard. It’s important to include ourselves, but whom we start with isn’t critical. The point is to contact an honest feeling of goodwill and encourage it to expand. If you can easily open your heart to your dog or cat, start there and then move out to more challenging relationships. The practice is about connecting with the soft spot in a way that is real to us, not about faking a particular feeling. Just locate that ability to feel good heart and cherish it, even if it ebbs and flows.

Before we begin the aspiration practice we sit quietly for a few minutes. Then we begin the seven-step loving-kindness practice. We say, “May I (or a loved one) enjoy happiness and the root of happiness,” or we put that in our own words. Perhaps we say, “May we learn to be truly loving people.” Or “May we have enough to eat and a place to sleep where we will be safe and comfortable.”

After making this aspiration for ourselves and for someone we easily love, we move on to a friend. This relationship should be slightly more complicated. For example, we care for her but perhaps we also feel jealous. We say, “May Jane enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” And we send loving-kindness her way. We can spend as much time as we want with each stage of this process, not criticizing ourselves if we sometimes find it artificial or contrived.

The fourth step is to cultivate loving-kindness for a neutral person. This would be someone we encounter but don’t really know. We don’t feel one way or another toward this person. We say, “May the shopkeeper (the bus driver, the woman who lives down the hall, the panhandler on the street) enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” Then we watch without judgment to see if our heart opens or closes down. We practice awareness of when tenderness is blocked and when it is flowing freely.

The Buddhist teachings tell us that over the course of many lifetimes all beings have been our mothers. At one time, all these people have sacrificed their own comfort for our well-being, and vice versa. Although these days “mother” doesn’t always have a positive connotation, the point is to consider everyone we encounter as our beloved. By noticing and appreciating the people in the streets, at the grocery store, in traffic jams, in airports, we can increase our capacity to love. We use these aspirations to weaken the barriers of indifference and liberate the good heart of loving-kindness.