The Art of Mindful Living...Can be difficult
This Monday, we will build on last week’s exploration of the 2nd Mindfulness Training, True Happiness. We will investigate those moments when we did/did not feel happy and reflect on how we behaved as a result of these feelings.
Last week, I experienced a roller coaster of emotions - from exquisite happiness of being outdoors with my family in the snowy mountains of Colorado - to making harsh judgements about the very same family and wishing they were different from how I view them as being.
While the roller coaster felt extreme at the time, I now see that it is more normal that I’d like to admit. For someone who has been practicing mindfulness for a long time, this was a “bitter awakening”, as Anam Thubten calls those powerful moments that invite us to wake up.
I had time to read and reflect, and, as usual, Thich Nhat Hanh provided a balm.
Because we are human beings, we cannot avoid making mistakes... But it is always possible for us to begin anew, and to transform all these kinds of mistakes. Without making mistakes there is no way to learn, in order to be a better person, to learn how to be tolerant, to be compassionate, to be loving, to be accepting. That is why mistakes play a role in our training, in our learning, and we should not get caught in the prison of culpability just because we have made some mistakes in our life.
If you can learn from your mistakes, then you have already transformed the garbage into a flower, for your own joy, for the joy of your ancestors, for the joy of the future generations, and also for the joy of the person who was the victim of your ignorance and your lack of skillfulness. Very often we have done that out of our unskillfulness, not because we wanted to harm that person, or we wanted to destroy the person, or because we wanted him or her to suffer. We were unskillful, that is all.
I always like to think of our behavior in terms of it being more or less skillful, rather than in terms of good and evil. If you are skillful, you can avoid making yourself suffer, and making the other person suffer. If there is something you want to tell the other person, then yes, you have to tell it, but there is a way to tell it and make the other person suffer, and make you suffer. But there are other ways to say it that would not make the other person suffer, and yourself suffer also. So the problem is not whether to tell or not to tell what you have in your heart, the problem is how to tell it so that suffering will not be there. That is why this is a matter of art, and of our practice also.
Your goodwill is not enough for the practice—you have to be artful in your practice. Walking, eating, breathing, talking, working, you should learn the art of mindful living, because if you are a good artist, you will be able to create a lot of happiness and joy around you and inside of you; but if you have only your goodwill, if you count only on your goodwill, that will not be enough, because out of goodwill we may cause a lot of suffering. As a father, as a mother, as a daughter, as a son, we may be filled with goodwill, we may be motivated by the desire to make the other person happy, but out of our clumsiness we make them unhappy. That is why mindful living is an art, and each of us has to train himself or herself to be an artist. Instead of saying to someone, "You are right or wrong," which is a very difficult thing to hear, you might say , "You are more skillful or less skillful." In our Five Contemplations before eating we say that we want to be aware of our unskillful states of mind, instead of saying that we want to be aware of our evil states of mind. Unskillful—if you are angry or if you are jealous, that is only unskillfulness. Because we are unskillful, anger and jealousy become mental formations. You know that that deed, that sentence, if we can do it or if we can pronounce it with art, it will help the other person, and it will help us.
All of us have to learn the art of living. And if you have the chance to meet with parents, friends and teachers who are skillful in the art of mindful living, then you can learn, and you will be able to make many people around you happy, and therefore you make yourself happy. But if you are not lucky, you cannot learn that art from your parents or from your brothers and sisters, or your friends, and you continue to be unskillful, and you make the people around you unhappy, and yourself unhappy. If we know how to look at things from that angle, we suffer much less already. That person who has caused me a lot of suffering just because he is unskillful, he didn’t know what he said, he didn’t know what he did. And we know our parents are full of love for us, they only want our happiness, but out of their unskillfulness they make us suffer so much. And we also have our love for our parents, we don’t want them to suffer, but our way of acting or reacting can make them suffer terribly. So it is not the issue of goodwill here, it is the issue of art. (The full Dharma talk can be found here)
I invite you to consider a few questions before we meet:
Reflect on the last week and notice those moments when you practiced the art of mindful living and those when you did not.
What made it easier/more difficult to be skillful?
How might you cultivate the pre-conditions to be skillful during those most-difficult-of-moments your day-to-day life?
I look forward to being together on Monday.
Warmly,
Marie