With all that is happening in our world, in our country, and in our cities at this time, I pondered what might possibly be of assistance today. I realized that I wanted you to know that All of you who are reading this message are part of our practice community, our sangha. Please know that we hold you tenderly in our hearts when we sit and walk together --- and that includes many of you who have not yet had the opportunity to sit and walk with us in person or virtually. When we dedicate any benefits of our shared practice together, know that it includes you:
May you and all beings everywhere have happiness and the root causes of happiness
May you and all beings everywhere be liberated from suffering and the root causes of suffering
May you and all beings everywhere never be separated from the joy which is free from sorrow
May you and all beings everywhere rest in equanimity, free from attachment and anger.
As I sat down and prepared to write, I was moved by an online offering on May 30, 2020 in Tricycle:
“In his earliest teachings, the Buddha said that the heart possesses four divine qualities: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. He spoke of these qualities as the most direct and effective way of relating to ourselves and others, and also as the very substance of who we are.
At a time of anger and polarization, when the world to many of us feels more divided than ever, the teachings of the four immeasurables serve as a reminder of our true nature as human beings. We are loving and kind by nature. We are already compassion itself. We are innately joyful. These qualities exist naturally within us, and when we consciously cultivate them, we can transform our lives and our world.”
Guidance from Pema Chodron led me to focus our evening’s practice on the first of the four immeasurables: loving-kindness. During a month-long retreat she led at Gampo Abbey in 1989, she gave simple, accessible instruction on how to alleviate human misery at a personal and global level. Her teachings are embodied in a small Shambhala book, Awakening Loving-Kindness (1991).
In these teachings, Pema notes that many approach meditation as a kind of self-improvement project. As if something is inherently wrong with us and needs to be fixed. And if we go on a retreat, we should be happier, calmer, and more satisfied when we come home to our lives. Without realizing it at the time, I know that this was certainly true for me over too many years.
Pema invites us to explore a different paradigm: “Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people that are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to these things. It’s about seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, in this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.
Monday night, we will employ a meditation technique that directly instructs us in how to cultivate and nurture several innate human qualities that are so needed, especially in these times: precision, gentleness, and letting go. The first sitting will be a guided meditation using this technique and the second sitting will be practicing it in silence. After meditation, we will share our experience and what may come up for us.
Please consider these questions before joining us:
1. What supports you to have more clarity?
2. What is the tone of your internal voice?
3. What would you like to practice letting go of?
Please take extra care of yourself and others as we move slowly outward.
I am excited to see those of you who can join and share virtually on Monday night!
Love to you all,
Mary
Awakening Loving-kindness (1991):
“When the Buddha taught, he didn’t say that we were bad people or that there was some sin that we had committed-- original or otherwise-- that made us more ignorant than clear, more harsh than gentle, more closed than open. He taught that there is a kind of innocent misunderstanding that we all share that can be turned around, corrected and seen through, as if we were in a dark room and someone showed us where the light switch was. It isn’t a sin that we are in the dark room. It’s just an innocent situation, but how fortunate that someone shows us where the light switch is. We can start to read books, to see one another’s faces, to discover the colors of the walls, to enjoy the little animals that crawl in and out of the room.
In the same way, if we see our so-called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, good-heartedness, and kindness, and having seen them fully, then let go, open further, we begin to find that our world is more vast and more refreshing and fascinating than we had realized before. In other words, the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see clearly who we are and what we are doing.
The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly, what is, with gentleness. Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy. This is the innocent naive misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.
Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people that are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to these things. It’s about seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, in this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness. Throughout this month of meditation practice, we will work with cultivating gentleness, innate precision, and the ability to let go of small-mindedness, learning how to open to our thoughts and emotions, to all the people we meet in our world, how to open our minds and hearts.
This is not an improvement plan; it is not a situation in which you try to be better than you are now. If you have a bad temper and you feel that you harm yourself and others, you might think that sitting for a week or a month will make your bad temper go away--- you will be that sweet person that you always wanted to be. Never again will a harsh word ever leave you lily-white lips. The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hang-ups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wisdom. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom. Someone who is very angry also has a lot of energy; that energy is what is so juicy about him or her. That’s the reason people love that person. The idea is not to try to get rid of your anger, but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty, and also to see it with gentleness. That means not judging yourself as a bad person, but also not bolstering yourself up by saying, ‘It’s good to be this way, it’s right to be this way. Other people are terrible and I’m right to be so angry at them all the time.’ The gentleness involves not repressing anger but also not acting it out. It is something much softer and more openhearted than any of that. It involves learning how, one you have fully acknowledged the feeling of anger and the knowledge of who you are and what you do to let it go. You can let go of the usual pitiful little story line that accompanies anger and begin to see clearly how you keep the whole thing going. So whether it’s anger or raving or jealousy or fear or depression---whatever it might be---the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you’ve experienced it fully, to let go.
The meditation technique itself cultivates precision, gentleness and the ability to let go---- qualities that are innate within us. They are not something that we have to gain, but something we could bring out, cultivate, rediscover in ourselves.”