Make a wish

My mom recently heard about an organization that grants senior citizens' wishes, like those groups that send terminally ill children and their families to Disney World, but this was for regular seniors with no special issues. This led her to think about what she'd wish for, she told me.

Her first thought was a trip across the country to visit my aunt. Sadly, the wish-granting organization is bound by the laws of time and space, and she'd still have to undergo the actual travel, which is what's holding her back. She dislikes airplanes, and other methods would take too long (otherwise I, her daughter, could grant this wish). No tesseract, no travel.

So then she thought that she'd like to revisit our family vacations in Cape Cod. But again the organization lacked the capacity to take everyone back 20 years when the grandkids would be happy hunting hermit crabs and digging holes for hours on end while she doled out Twizzlers.

She decided she didn't really have a grant-able wish, so she would simply be happy with how things are. She's a wise woman.

Our conversation made me think, though, of how often our hopes and wishes and expectations -- conscious and especially unconscious -- would crumble under the light of awareness. Do we realize how much our good mood depends on the weather cooperating or our co-worker's mood or the arrival of an anticipated email? How much we expect consistency from our technology and environment and friends? How much we are thrown off balance when we don't get that?

We pin our happiness on achieving some ideal situation, big or small -- the dishwasher will be empty when we open it; we'll find a well-paying, fulfilling job that benefits society; the tomatoes will have ripened overnight. And if that doesn't happen, we're disgruntled at having to empty the dishwasher or answer phones cheerfully or eat plain salad.

We fail to see what we have, right now, because we thought it would be different.

But we can change that.

The lotus and the mud

You often see lotuses in images of Eastern religions or philosophies. They stand for beauty, peace, purity -- in Tibetan Buddhist iconography, the buddhas sit on lotuses with as many as 100,000 petals, symbolic of their great wisdom and compassion.

But lotuses, as lovely as they are, grow in unlovely mud, not pristine pools. They live in the mud and the muck; they thrive there. They don't transcend the mud. They exist together, inseparable. As Thich Naht Hanh says, they inter-are. No mud, no lotus.

Merriam-Webster defines transcendent as "going beyond ordinary experience." But Buddhism celebrates the ordinary as the path to liberation. Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck started the lineage of Ordinary Mind Zen. Popular teacher Pema Chodron advises us to "start where you are." You work with what you have -- emotions, fears, irritations, pleasures -- and use that to wake up to the way habitual patterns rule your life and keep your from directly experiencing the world. "When nothing is special, everything can be," Beck writes.

Our tendency is to avoid those feelings, to pretend the lotus exists independently of the mud. That leads to suffering, as we blindly follow habits, doing the same things over and over to distract ourselves and wondering why it doesn't make us feel good. Buddhist psychologist John Welwood coined the term "spiritual bypassing," which refers to that tendency to use spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with the discomfort of life. Denying suffering or bypassing it without examining it, processing it, loving it, leaves it there, and you're likely to find yourself back there.

The Buddha taught that nirvana -- or liberation -- is not separate from samsara, the world of habit and struggle. They exist together, like the mud and the lotus. It's about all in how you see and understand it.  If we see the mud as an unacceptable, unpleasant aspect of life that needs to be cleaned up or covered over, we're creating suffering, trying to do what can't be done. If we accept it, we can appreciate fully the beauty of the lotus.

Tis the Season

At this time of year, hope takes center stage. Children draw up lists of presents they hope Santa will deliver. Everyone who lives north of a certain point hopes for a picturesque white Christmas -- enough snow to make it pretty but not enough to make travel dangerous or require strenuous

digging out. Family members hope that other family members will like their gifts, that the sweaters will fit, and everyone will behave themselves. Singles hope for an invitation.

Hope is all around.

Buddhism says the best gift you could give yourself is to give that up.

Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron describes hope as an addiction to the idea that things would be better if they were somehow different. That keeps us from seeing and working with things as they are, which is the only way we actually can create change.

"Abandon hope" is one of the lojong, or mind training slogans.

“Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning,” she writes. The hope we’re giving up, she says, is the idea that we could “be saved from being who we are.”

“Without giving up hope – that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be – we will never relax with who or where we are," she writes in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.  When we do relax and look around without a judgmental eye, we begin to see what is there, to realize that we are sufficient and the world is not out to get us. Life becomes workable.

Abandoning hope relies on a foundation of impermanence. To give up the hope that things will change for the better, you need the refuge of knowing that things will change, whether you want them to or not. The bad news and the good news about impermanence are the same -- things will change.  If you look around at where you are and realize you don't want to be stuck there forever, you can be assured that it won't stay that way forever -- it's already changing. What you do in this moment influences what that change will be. 

Ani Pema notes that hope is the other side of fear, and that pairing is the root of our pain.

“In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.” 

If instead we stay with the feeling of discomfort, get to know our true selves, we can find confidence in our basic nature and our ability to be ourselves in the world. We can identify the source of the discomfort, rather than escaping it or covering it over, and work with that. 

The practice of meditation is based not on how we would like things to be but on what is. We often do not have a proper understanding of what we are, of what we are actually doing. From the beginning, spirituality should be concerned with the actuality of who is involved in the practice. In the Buddhist form of meditation, we try to look at the perceiver of the universe, the perceiver that is self, ego, me, mine.
—The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychotherapy by Chögyam Trungpa

What are you expecting?

For many years, I thought the best way to get through life was to be prepared for the worst. Going into a situation, I'd envision the worst thing that could happen and how I would deal with it. I would be ready -- even if it rarely, if ever, came to that.

The problem with that, of course, is that you walk into every situation defended, tensed, ready for battle. That leaves you unprepared to see the best thing that could happen. If you walk into an unfamiliar room full of people you've never met in a configuration you've never seen prepared to be ignored and out-of-place, you give off that energy, almost guaranteeing that will happen.

One of the gifts of Buddhist practice is learning to trust that you can work with whatever happens, best or worst or somewhere in-between. In fact, best and worst are just labels. Life just is.

That's more advanced practice. The first step is figure out what your view is -- what is the undercurrent to the attitude you bring to the day? What are the words beneath the words you speak to yourself? When you know that, you can -- if you choose -- play with shifting that.

"At some point, we need to stop identifying with our weaknesses and shift our allegiance to our basic goodness. It’s highly beneficial to understand that our limitations are not absolute and monolithic, but relative and removable. The wisdom of buddha nature is available to us at any time."
Pema Chodron

The Women in Buddhism Group at the Interdependence Project will be exploring Right View at its May 17 meeting. What is your view?

What does gentle look like?

I was on retreat last fall with a teacher whose message is to meet everything with compassion. "Enlightenment is when you meet all the pain in life with compassion," he said.

I don't know what that means, I said. Let's say I have pain in my knee sitting here. I know how to be present with the pain, how to observe the sensation, to not get caught up in the stories about what I might have done or the congenital structural defects I'm cursed with, to not wander off into thoughts about whether I need a knee replacement and how I can fit six months of rehab into my life and and complications from surgery and ...

I know Shinzen Young's equation: suffering = pain x resistance. I can (and have) worked with all that.

But I don't know where compassion comes in. I don't know how to move from bare attention to kind attention. "Seeing what's happening is preliminary," he says. "You first learn to tolerate it, then move toward love and compassion."

How do I do that? I beg. Out loud, I ask the question, but internally I hear my pleading. It is a mystery to me. Tell me how.

The answer is the heart practices, the brahmaviharas, the divine abodes. Lovingkindness. Compassion. Appreciative joy. Equanimity.

I have done those, and I do those, and I appreciate their effects. I'm a nicer person. Really. Less defended, less rigid, more flexible. I see the inherent dignity of others, and I remind myself that I am equally worthy. But I don't know how to be that, to realize it, to embody it. And I want that. I see that I can't find equanimity in the world without finding it in myself.

The advice is to be gentle.

It's not the first time I've heard this piece of advice. It is something of a theme in my Buddhist life. The Bodhisattva name I was given translates to "gentle dawn," and when it was spoken people in the room -- who knew I had cried through most of the previous week of silent meditation -- went "awwww," the audible sound of the quivering heart.

I've been told that I'm hard on myself when I think I am merely stating things as they are, dispassionately.

What does it mean to be gentle to myself? I wrote in my journal. What does that look like?

Then I came home from the retreat and picked up with my life. The question lingered in the back of my mind: What would gentle look like?

Then this week, a video surfaced in my Facebook newsfeed. Pema Chodron had posted it in 2010, but it was circulating as if it were new.

Are you willing to commit to being gentle to yourself? Working on that for the next year? she asks.

Oh, a challenge.

Ani Pema didn't explain how to be gentle to myself. It's not like walking 10,000 steps with a FitBit to tell you every day that you've hit your milestone. You'll have to figure out what that means, she said.

So that's what I'm doing, making my next 12 months my year of living gently.

As an added incentive, in a recently published paper in Brain, Behavior and Immunity, Brandeis University researchers found a connection between a self-compassionate attitude and lower levels of stress-induced inflammation.

According to Medical Press,

It's long known that psychological stress can trigger biological responses similar to the effects of illness or injury, including inflammation. While regulated inflammation can help stave off infection or promote healing, unregulated inflammation can lead to cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer's.
Self-compassion describes behaviors such as self-forgiveness or, more colloquially, cutting yourself some slack. A person with high levels of self-compassion may not blame themselves for stress beyond their control or may be more willing to move on from an argument, rather than dwelling on it for days.

Participants in the study took stress tests and had their levels of a particular stress marker measured. Researchers were surprised to find that people with low self-compassion continued to show high levels of the stress hormone after the stressors had ended.

"The high responses of IL-6 (the stress marker) on the first day and the higher baseline levels on the second day suggest that people with low self-compassion are especially vulnerable to the adverse effects of this kind of stress," a researcher said.

The research illustrates how easy it is for stress to build over time and how a seemingly small daily stressor, such as traffic, can impact a person's health if they don't have the right strategies to deal with it.

Another teacher suggested that self-compassion is being willing to forgive yourself. Forgive everyone everything, including yourself, yet another teacher suggests.

Yeah, I'm on a quest. I'm going to find that gentle and bring it home?

Does that sound aggressive?

Being Mindful About Mindfulness

The first time I saw Oprah Winfrey, who has a net worth of $2.9 billion, promoting mindfulness on the cover of O! Magazine, I was taken aback. I was fairly new to Buddhist studies then, and I was protective of the dharma. How did mindfulness -- the practice of recognizing what's going on in the present moment and noting the distractions of desire and despair as they arose -- fit with a magazine that promoted buying pretty things to make yourself happier? (O! highlights a monthly list of things Oprah likes -- that I could never afford.)

But Oprah persisted, and I made my peace with it. She introduced hundreds of thousands to Buddhist nun Pema Chodron's teachings and featured other Buddhist teachers along with fashion and food. Any increase in mindfulness is of benefit, I told myself.

But now I wonder whether that's true.

We're in the midst of a "Mindful Revolution," according to Time magazine, and mindfulness proliferates -- there are publications devoted to mindful money, schools, and eating. There's dozens of studies confirming its benefits: lower blood pressure, brain changes, improvements in immune system function, decreased symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and on and on. Much of the research looks at Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, a program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at Harvard Medical School.

This is mindfulness divorced from Buddhist teachings on ethics and the development of wisdom. This is knowing what is without insight about how it came to be and how it might be different. (Josh Korda explains this aspect.)

Questions have been raised in several forums lately about whether mindfulness -- which so far has been found to have only beneficial effects on individuals' health and well being -- might be detrimental to society when separated from other aspects of spiritual development.

In an essay called "The Mindfulness Racket" Evgeny Morozov posits that mindfulness is being used to reinforce the status quo, especially among tech companies whose leaders now advocate for technology detoxes. He writes:

No wonder (Ariana) Huffington hopes that the pursuit of mindfulness can finally reconcile spirituality and capitalism. “There is a growing body of scientific evidence that shows that these two worlds are, in fact, very much aligned — or at least that they can, and should, be,” she wrote in a recent column. “So yes, I do want to talk about maximizing profits and beating expectations — by emphasizing the notion that what’s good for us as individuals is also good for corporate America’s bottom line.”

Ironically, perhaps, he concludes by urging mindful use of mindfulness -- know why we're doing what we're doing, whether it's to be more rested and productive or to undermine the effects of technology promoted by the corporations. (In a further irony, there are ads for "sound meditation" interspersed in the article.)


On Salon, in an article called "Gentrifying the Dharma: How the 1% is Co-Opting Mindfulness," Joshua Eaton writes:

Corporate America has embraced mindfulness as a way to raise bottom lines without raising blood pressure — much to the chagrin of people ... who feel that Buddhism’s message is much more radical.

Eaton quotes Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who he says "has long argued that 'Western Buddhism,' as he calls it, is an ideal palliative for the stresses of life under late capitalism — their 'perfect ideological supplement.'

“It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game,” Žižek explains in a 2001 essay for Cabinet magazine, “while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw.”

Several major corporations offer mindfulness programs to their employees, including Google, Coca-Cola, and General Mills.  

It was Google, in fact, that sparked much of the recent discussion of the role of mindfulness. At the Google-sponsored Wisdom 2.0 conference, protesters disrupted a panel of speakers from Google with charges that the company may be mindful but it's lacking in compassion.

One of the protesters, Amanda Ream, wrote about it in a blog post for Tricycle Magazine:

“Most of the workshops offer lifestyle and consumer choices that are meant to help people heal from the harm, emptiness and unsustainability associated with living under capitalism, but [they do so] without offering an analysis of where this disconnection comes from. ... “The conference presents an evolution in consciousness of the wealthiest among us as the antidote to suffering rather than the redistribution of wealth and power.”

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini is a meditator and yoga practitioner who's used his bully pulpit to Bertolini announced a partnership between Aetna and actress Goldie Hawn designed to expand a school-based stress reduction program called MindUP that’s sponsored by The Hawn Foundation.

promote mindfulness. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on a panel led by Arianna Huffington,

A month later, Bertolini announced Aetna's annual profits: $1.9 billion for 2013.

How does a company mindfully spend $1.9 billion? It seems that it primarily rewards its stockholders -- and promises to continue doing so.

But corporations aren't people. They don't have hearts or minds. And corporations aren't necessarily mindful, even if they are filled with calm, compassionate workers who are present for each other and their customers. For all the good it may do to have happy workers, if they're functioning in a larger system that values profit over people, the value is limited.

In Salon, Curtis White and Andrew Cooper write about the contradictions between Buddhism and business.

In the literature of mindfulness as stress reduction for business, we’ve seen no suggestion that employees ought to think about — be mindful of — whether they or the company they work for practice right livelihood. Corporate mindfulness takes something that has the capacity to be oppositional, Buddhism, and redefines it. Mindfulness becomes just another aspect of “workforce preparation.” Eventually, we forget that it ever had its own meaning.

The question is no longer whether mindfulness is good or whether it can find wider acceptance. The question is whether individuals can move from awareness of their own present moment to the their company's moment and to society's moment -- and how those are interdependent.

It takes wisdom and ethics, not just mindfulness, to make societal change.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in 1962:

If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell. 

Meditation is our way of identifying and seeing those issues. Acting with wisdom and skill, born of ethics, is how we change the drift of society so that it is headed away from individualistic and profane to enlightenment.

Surrender to the present moment

“Surrender Dorothy,” the Wicked Witch of the West wrote in the sky in the movie “The Wizard of Oz.” What she meant was, “Give up. Stop fighting. Stop struggling.” 

Taken out of the “us vs them” context, that doesn’t sound so bad. No fighting, no struggling – sounds pretty good, actually.

In Buddhism, surrender is not about handing over our power to another entity or becoming subservient. It’s about giving up, not giving in – as the song says, “I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield … ain’t gonna study war no more.” It’s about surrendering our small, limited concept of ourselves in order to see the larger, interconnected, fullness of being. We give up the things that keep us trapped and gain freedom.

Surrender is similar to the concept of renunciation in Tibetan Buddhism. In “The Wisdom of No Escape,” Pema Chodron writes that “it has to go with letting go of holding back. What one is renouncing is closing down and shutting off from life. You could say that renunciation is the same thing as opening to the teachings of the present moment.”

What we surrender are the self-defensive strategies that keep us separate from others, that lock us into the self-other binary. Instead of measuring ourselves and our accomplishments against others, clinging to what we’ve managed to accumulate, we see that we can be OK without that. “The ground … is realizing that we already have exactly what we need, that what we have already is good,” Chodron says.

It’s also seeing that everyone stands on that same ground, that everyone is inherently whole and worthy of respect and dignity. If we are truly living in that place, there’s no need to struggle, to fight for a bigger piece of the pie, to try to defeat everyone else and come out on top.

Letting go, surrendering the things that keep us apart and opposed ends the struggle and lets us relax.

“The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically, through understanding and gradual training,” Jack Kornfield writes in “A Path with Heart.” … “When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we can come to rest in the present moment.”

For the benefit of which beings?

I remember the first time I saw a headline touting "mindfulness" on the cover of O, the Oprah

magazine, which also extolls the benefits of a $250 french fry maker and $300 Ugg boots. I was disconcerted. This was several years ago, and I was fairly new to Buddhist study and protective of the teachings, which didn't seem to belong in a bible of conspicuous consumption and body image. It seemed to be a misappropriation of the teachings.

But Oprah's helped popularize teachers like Pema Chodron and Sharon Salzberg, and I've come to believe that mindfulness is a good thing, no matter how it comes about. That's beneficial since mindfulness has only become more ubiquitous.


Mindfulness, it seems, has become a thing unto itself. The New York Times reports that everyone from techies to celebrities to CEOs to the Marines are practicing mindfulness, which it calls "a loose term that covers an array of attention-training practices. It may mean spending 10 minutes with eyes closed on a gold-threaded pillow every morning or truly listening to your mother-in-law for once."

The Times credits Thich Nhat Hanh, as "the Vietnamese Buddhist leader who introduced mindfulness to westerners (Google got first dibs on him as a guest speaker)" but focuses on how technology companies are using mindfulness.

Walter Roth, 30, chief executive of a tech start-up called Inward Inc. ... (said) mindfulness has made him more competitive. “Not only do I put fewer things on my to-do list but I actually get them done and done well. It’s like I’ve learned that to be more successful and accomplish more, I must first slow down.”

In response, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship points out that the Buddha didn't intend mindfulness to be divorced from ethics and wisdom. It also quotes Thich Nhat Hanh, noting that he called for people

to use mindfulness as a basis for engaging in the world. "When bombs begin to fall on people, you cannot stay in the meditation hall all of the time… You have to learn how to help a wounded child while still practicing mindful breathing," he is quoted as saying.

(What that seems to prove is the emptiness of Thich Nhat Hanh -- there is no single, unchanging TNH.)

What is the right view of mindfulness?

Is there one?

David McMahan, a professor of religion at Franklin and Marshall College, says mindfulness may be becoming "a folk religion of the secular elite in Western culture." McMahan, who studies the role of social and cultural context in meditation, tells Tricycle magazine:

Right now, for the first time ever, we have contemplative practices derived from the Buddhist tradition that are being practiced completely independently of any Buddhist context. Secularization has filtered out what we would call “religious elements.” It is those religious elements, those ethical elements, and those intentions that have always formed the context of meditation and that have made meditation make sense. Otherwise, what sense does it make to sit down for half an hour and watch your breath? Somebody has to explain to you why that matters, why it is a good idea, and what it is actually doing in the larger scheme of things.

When meditation comes to the West completely independently of that, it is like a dry sponge; it just soaks up the cultural values that are immediately available. So it becomes about self-esteem. Or it might be about body acceptance or lowering your stress. It might be about performing lots of different tasks efficiently at work. It might be about developing compassion for your family. A whole variety of new elements now are beginning to form a novel context for this practice, which has not only jumped the monastery walls but has broken free from Buddhism altogether.

Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen, he says.

That's true with everything. We can't ever know with certainty what will happen. We may be able to predict the result of a particular action, but interdependence means that ripples out and has consequences that may be far beyond what we expect. Which is why, as a Buddhist, I try to live with the intention of non-harming. Intention is paramount because it sets the direction for actions.

One practice is to start the day by setting an intention: to be patient, to be kind, to be generous -- and to focus on that area. That makes it more likely that actions will incline in that direction by at least making us aware. And that's where mindfulness comes in. Having set an intention, we become more mindful about how we bring that into a situation.

For me, mindfulness practice inevitably leads to ethics and compassion. If you pay attention to what

you're doing, you must see how that affects others. And if you see how it affects others, your heart opens to them.

The vast intention, in Buddhism, is to be of benefit to all beings. That sounds overwhelming at first, but when you practice the intention becomes natural. Does that mean it's easy to make every action support that? No, but it's more likely than if you don't try.

Some of the secular mindfulness training seems to be aimed at benefiting individuals or corporations. Will that inevitably lead to ethics and compassion?

The Four Noble Truths according to Louis C.K.

There's a six-minute video of Louis C.K. on the Conan O'Brien Show explaining where he won't buy his daughter a smartphone that's making the rounds among Buddhist types, people who usually share quotes from the Dalai Lama and pictures of nature. Why? It expresses the essence of the Buddha's teaching that life is suffering (and we try to get away from the truth of that by distracting ourselves with Angry Birds and other apps) but that it doesn't have to be:

 You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty — forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you're not watching anything, you're in your car, and you start going, 'oh no, here it comes. That I'm alone.' It's starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it...
That's why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they're killing, everybody's murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don't want to be alone for a second because it's so hard.

Or, as the Buddha succinctly said: Everybody suffers. Not every minute. Not always in big dramatic ways. But, yeah, everybody suffers. (The First Noble Truth)

Why do we suffer? We want the newest smartphones to take distract us from our feelings, which may be unpleasant. But that only works for a while, so then we need something new. (The Second Noble Truth: The cause of suffering is craving or desire or the belief that getting that new smartphone will give us lasting happiness.)

But the good news is: You can stop suffering (Third Noble Truth). There is a way. (Fourth Noble Truth.)

To a great extent, that way involves being able to stay with the emotion we were trying to get away from by escaping into stuff and realizing that it's not all that bad. Suffering is the fear and anxiety about what will happen if we feel the bad thing -- which itself isn't as bad as the suffering.

Louis C.K. talks about hearing the Bruce Springsteen song "Jungleland" as he's driving:

And I go, 'oh, I'm getting sad, gotta get the phone and write "hi" to like 50 people'...then I said, 'you know what, don't. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck.'
And I let it come, and I just started to feel 'oh my God,'and I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You're lucky to live sad moments.
And then I had happy feelings. Because when you let yourself feel sad, your body has antibodies, it has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness. It was such a trip.
The thing is, because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or a jack-off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die. So that's why I don't want to get a phone for my kids.

That pretty much sums up every book Pema Chodron's ever written. But we also get bored with teachings and think we need to make it more complex. Really, though, it comes down to: Notice what you're feeling. Notice how you want to escape from it. Don't. Stay with it and see what's on the other side.

And do that for the rest of your life.

Two ways to 'Lean In'

Instead of pulling back from the pain ... we move closer. We lean into the wave. We swim into the wave.

Pema Chodron, Looking Into Laziness

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.”
Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In

For Sandberg, whose book is a cultural phenomenon, generating debate and blog posts for the past several weeks, leaning in is a way of building ego, of winning status, defeating competitors. Women should lean in rather than pass up opportunities for advancement because they are looking too far in the future when they may want other things, like children.


Chodron talks about leaning in as a way of cutting through fixation. In The Places That Scare You, see talks about using emotions to see where we are attached

Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we're holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in, when we feel we'd rather collapse and back away. They're like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we're stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we are.

This week I've been at a retreat with Lama Tsultrim Allione on "Feeding Your Demons." There are demons, those things that scare us, and there are god-demons, those things we want so much that they become an obsession. God-demons don't look at what truly would be of benefit for us or others, they want what looks or feels good.

Lama says you can tell whether something is an aspiration or a god -- whether it's an intention to work toward something or a desire to simply have it -- by the tension around it. Sandberg's "lean in" sounds like a tactic to make someone uncomfortable by invading their personal space so you can gain power over them.

Chodron's "lean in," however, is about relaxing into the moment, staying with the discomfort, not fighting with it, to learn from it.

Equanimity

Remember Weebles -- the children’s toy with the slogan “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down”? Small, round, sort-of-human figures, they had a curved – but weighted—base so that young children could push them over, and they would spring back up. My friend, Ven. Lawrence Do’an Grecco, a Zen monk, sometimes brings Weebles to illustrate his talks on equanimity, the quality that allows you to roll back up when you get knocked down, whether by ill fortune or giddy joy.
Shinzen Young, a secular Buddhist, says that the word equanimity comes from the Latin word aequus, meaning balanced, and animus, meaning spirit or inner state. So it means a balanced inner state.
Shinzen, who takes a scientific approach to Buddhist teachings, offers a number of physical analogies for equanimity:

 Reducing friction in a mechanical system.
 Reducing viscosity in a hydrodynamic system
 Reducing resistance in a DC circuit
 Reducing impedance in an AC circuit
 Reducing stiffness in a spring.

When we have equanimity, he says, emotions flow through us, rather than getting stuck, which allows us to be with them without getting obsessed or fixated.
More poetically, Gil Fronsdal describes equanimity as “one of the most sublime emotions of Buddhist practice. It is the ground for wisdom and freedom and the protector of compassion and love. While some may think of equanimity as dry neutrality or cool aloofness, mature equanimity produces a radiance and warmth of being. The Buddha described a mind filled with equanimity as “abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility, and without ill-will.”
Fronsdal says there are two Pali words that are often translated as equanimity, which reveal two aspects of it. (Pali is the language of the earliest Buddhist texts).
The first is upekkha, meaning “to look over.” It refers to the equanimity that arises from the power of observation, the ability to see without being caught by what we see. When well-developed, such power gives rise to a great sense of peace. It’s also translated as “to see with patience,” such as when we listen to criticism without getting defensive, or “grandmotherly love.”

The second meaning is literally “to stand in the middle of all this.” Fronsdal says that “being in the middle” refers to balance, to remaining centered in the middle of whatever is happening. This balance comes from inner strength or stability. The strong presence of inner calm, well-being, confidence, vitality, or integrity can keep us upright, like a ballast keeps a ship upright in strong winds. As inner strength develops, equanimity follows.”
Equanimity works with what the Buddha called the Eight Worldly Winds. They’re four pairs of states that represent the extreme points of a pendulum’s swing: Praise and blame, fame and ill-repute, success and failure, pleasure and pain. Often we classify our experiences as one or the other. We rarely sit exactly in between them – but that’s where equanimity (and sanity) lie.
My guess is that we can all agree this sounds like a good thing. It’s the eye of the storm, the ability to keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs.
Buddhism is a practical path, so how do we get there?
To some degree, equanimity is what’s known as a fruitional quality – the result of other practices. It is the fourth of the Four Brahma Viharas, or immeasurable states, and said to be the most difficult to attain. To dwell in equanimity, you have to accept impermanence and emptiness – the current situation, whatever it is, will not last. Nor will it define us. Emptiness says that states of being (and beings) are not solid, permanent, or independent. We change in response to circumstances; we adapt; we persevere. Life goes on.
We lose equanimity, and resilience, when we think that a situation has to be a certain way to be acceptable, that we can’t go on without whatever thing or circumstance we think is necessary. Then we suffer. If we can be flexible and work with what we have rather than insisting that things be a certain way, we can come back into balance.

We can experience this in meditation. When we lose concentration and get distracted, we come back. When the room is too hot or too cold, too loud, too quiet, with too many people or not enough, we watch thoughts arise and pass, pains arise and diminish, and emotions move through our minds like clouds across the sky. The sky is there no matter what is front of it – and when the clouds move or the storm clears or the bright sun sets, there it is. It doesn’t come back; it was always there, just obscured. Equanimity is always there; we just have to cultivate it and learn to access it.
Shinzen Young suggest specific ways to create equanimity in your mind and body in meditation:

Let's say that you have a strong sensation in one part of your body. As you focus attention on what is happening over your whole body, you notice that you are tensing your jaw, clenching your fists, tightening your gut, and squnching your shoulders. Each time you become aware of tensing in some area, you intentionally relax it to whatever degree possible. A moment later you may notice that the tensing has started again in some area; once again gently relax it to whatever
degree possible. If there are areas that cannot be relaxed much or at all, you try to accept the tension sensations and just observe them.
As a result of maintaining this whole-body relaxed state, you may begin to notice subtle flavors of sensation spreading from the local area of intensity and coursing through your body. These are the sensations that you had been masking by tension. Now that they have been uncovered, try to create a mental attitude of welcoming them, not judging them. Observe them with gentle matter-of-factness, giving them permission to dance their dance, to flow as they wish through your body.

He also suggests we notice when we spontaneously fall into equanimity. By
becoming familiar with it, we can extend it.
Pema Chodron says the traditional image for equanimity is a banquet to which everyone is invited. “Training in equanimity is learning to open the door to all ... inviting life to come visit,” she writes.

To cultivate equanimity, we practice catching ourselves when we feel attraction or aversion, before it hardens into grasping or negativity. She suggests training in equanimity by walking down the sidewalk, or through the mall, and noticing our feelings about each person we pass. We can use those feelings to develop empathy and compassion. Does that person look crabby? Sometimes I’m crabby too – can I make a mental wish for them to be happy? Do they look friendly? What feelings come up in us?
“When we have a feeling of spaciousness and ease that’s not caught up in preference or prejudice, that’s equanimity,” she says.
Traditionally, equanimity is developed by cultivating the seven factors that support it. Fronsdal describes them this way:
-- The first is virtue or integrity. When we live and act with integrity, we feel confident about our actions and words, which results in the equanimity of blamelessness. The ancient Buddhist texts speak of being able to go into any assembly of people and feel blameless.
--The second support for equanimity is the sense of assurance that comes from faith. While any kind of faith can provide equanimity, faith grounded in wisdom is especially powerful. The Pali word for faith, saddha, is also translated as conviction or confidence. If we have confidence, for example, in our ability to engage in a spiritual practice, then we are more likely to meet its challenges with equanimity.
--The third support is a well-developed mind. Much as we might develop physical strength, balance, and stability of the body in a gym, so too can we develop strength, balance and stability of the mind. This is done through practices that
cultivate calm, concentration and mindfulness. When the mind is calm, we are less likely to be blown about by the worldly winds.
--The fourth support is a sense of well-being. We do not need to leave well-being to chance. In Buddhism, it is considered appropriate and helpful to cultivate and enhance our well-being. We often overlook the well-being that is easily available in daily life. Even taking time to enjoy one’s tea or the sunset can be a training in well-being.
--The fifth support for equanimity is understanding or wisdom. Wisdom is an important factor in learning to have an accepting awareness, to be present for whatever is happening without the mind or heart contracting or resisting. Wisdom can teach us to separate people’s actions from who they are. We can agree or disagree with their actions, but remain balanced in our relationship with them. We can also understand that our own thoughts and impulses are the result of impersonal conditions. By not taking them so personally, we are more likely to stay at ease with their arising.
Another way wisdom supports equanimity is in understanding that people are responsible for their own decisions, which helps us to find equanimity in the face of other people’s suffering. We can wish the best for them, but we avoid being buffeted by a false sense of responsibility for their well-being.
One of the most powerful ways to use wisdom to facilitate equanimity is to be mindful of when equanimity is absent. Honest awareness of what makes us imbalanced helps us to learn how to find balance.
--The sixth support is insight, a deep seeing into the nature of things as they are. One of the primary insights is the nature of impermanence. In the deepest forms of this insight, we see that things change so quickly that we can’t hold onto anything, and eventually the mind lets go of clinging. Letting go brings equanimity; the greater the letting go, the deeper the equanimity.
--The final support is freedom, which comes as we begin to let go of our reactive tendencies. We can get a taste of what this means by noticing areas in which we were once reactive but are no longer. For example, some issues that upset us when we were teenagers prompt no reaction at all now that we are adults. In Buddhist practice, we work to expand the range of life experiences in which we are free.
Shinzen says:

Equanimity belies the adage that you cannot “have your cake and eat it too.” When you apply equanimity to unpleasant sensations, they flow more readily and as a result cause less suffering. When you apply equanimity to pleasant sensations, they also flow more readily and as a result deliver deeper fulfillment.

Shinzen Young, What is Equanimity?
Gil Fronsdal, Equanimity
Pema Chodron, The Places that Scare You: A guide to fearlessness in difficult times