The Buddha's Guide to Having a Good Time at a Party

The Buddha said that if you practice lovingkindness, or metta, meditation, you will experience scores of benefits (well, 11 specific ones). His list did not mention that you will have a better time at parties. Add that.

In the version of the Four Immeasurables practices that I do, you work with three people for each one: Someone you love, someone who irritates you, someone you don't really notice and have to cast around to bring into your meditation. Chances are these are the three types of people you will meet at a party (or really anywhere).

I like to get a head start. In the days before a social event, I bring people who are likely to be there into my meditation. Who will make my heart light up when I see them? That's the person I love. Who will make me sidle away from a group when they join? That's the irritating one. And who else was at last year's version of his party, standing next to someone who stands out in my memory? Oh, yeah. What's-his-name.

One by one, I offer them the aspirations of lovingkindness: May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.

And a warmth develops -- toward all of them. The irritating person just wants to be happy. In fact, they are not irritating. I am irritated.That background person is also a human, with things that make her happy or sad. I wonder what they are? Maybe I will ask.

Extend that feeling of warmth and kind attentiveness to everyone in the room. Feel the judgments about their outfits or how much weight they've gained or the food they brought fall away. Here we are, just humans, just dancing each other home once again. How fortunate to have each other.

And extending the wish to everyone in the city, on the continent, on the planet. May we all be free from fear and know the happiness that brings.

When you get to the actual event, you will feel warm-hearted and curious, open and attentive. You will have a pleasant expression on your face, and people will be happy to see you. You will be happy to see them. Heck, devas will love you.

And if there are moments where that's not the case, you can stealthily emanate lovingkindness, silently making the wishes as you gaze around the room. Or extend it to yourself and leave, if it's that bad. Kindly, attentively, gently.

May you be happy. And may your days be merry and bright.

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

Listen to the wisdom of anger

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

"Harlem" by Langston Hughes

This week, with its dream of justice denied, Ferguson, Missouri, exploded. A grand jury declined to indict a white police who shot and killed a black teenager. Riots started immediately -- buildings burned, police fired tear gas, looters stepped in, the media covered it all, and commentators condemned the rioting, forgetting the spark and the underlying fuel that fed the fires.

It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. Martin Luther King Jr.

What is the sound of an unheard scream of anguish? Violence. A riot demands to be seen, the pain it expresses cannot be ignored.

Anger is an intelligence and an energy. It needs release. Or it explodes.

What if there was another way to be heard? What if there was space for that energy to flow without being met by a countering aggression?

What if, during the six or seven hours between when the grand jury said it had made a decision and the announcement of that decision, President Obama had flown to Ferguson and promised to stay there until everyone was heard? If he sat behind a table and invited people to line up and speak -- and he would listen -- sharing their emotions but focusing of how the process could change to include them? If he called the Secretary of State back from wherever in the world she was and brought in VP Joe Biden and the attorney general or a top representative? If he convinced CNN to carry every minute of it live until everyone had their say?

What if we made space for the anger, acknowledged it, and respected it instead of trying to repress it and shame those who feel it? Could we then find the wisdom?

In Tibetan Buddhism, there are masculine and feminine aspects, both of which must be present in all genders for their to be balance. The feminine aspect is space, and the masculine is action. For centuries, the world has been dominated by the masculine -- an action demands an immediate reaction -- and space, which allows for other possibilities, has been closed off. That needs to change.

In the Tibetan Buddhist system of wisdom energies, anger and clarity arise together. If we get stuck in the anger, we can't see clearly what is there and what needs to change, let alone how it can be changed.

The wisdom energies are arranged in a mandala -- the Tibetan word, khilkor, is more descriptive. It means center and swirl, and it presents a way of understanding how energies move or get stuck.

At the center is the Buddha family, whose wisdom aspect simply allows things to arise, without filters; the confused aspect is ignorance or ignoring or suppressing. In the east is the Vajra family of clarity and anger. To the south is Ratna, equanimity -- respect for all things equally -- or pride, valuing one thing above others. To the west is Padma, which is desire for a particular outcome or thing in its confusion but is discriminating awareness in wisdom; Padma sees the best option. And Karma, in the north, is all-accomplishing action, carrying out the option Padma sees. Or its envy of those who have it with no movement to accomplish it.

If the energy swirls through, a new state arises and the process begins again.

I imagine that enlightened people move through that at lightning speed. The rest of us get stuck. This can be a useful way of seeing where -- and what's needed to get the energy moving. Stuck in anger -- what is it pointing to, what is the clarity? Stuck in envy? Look with discriminating awareness at what you want.

The first step, though, is to listen -- personally and as a society. Where are we stuck? What can we do to move to the next step? Then do it.

Anger is an energy

The whole world is watching Ferguson, Missouri, as a grand jury verdict is expected any day on whether to indict a police officer who shot an unarmed black man. That action led to protests, arrests, and boiling anger. In advance of the grand jury action, extra officers, FBI, and the National Guard are in place -- and officials urge people to be calm.
In this space, the St. Louis/Bentwood Transcendental Meditation (TM) Center is offering a talk on meditation to relieve stress for all Ferguson residents.
The whole world is watching Ferguson, Missouri, as a grand jury verdict is expected any day on whether to indict a police officer who shot an unarmed black man. That action led to protests, arrests, and boiling anger. In advance of the grand jury action, extra officers, FBI, and the National Guard are in place -- and officials urge people to be calm.
In this space, the St. Louis/Bentwood Transcendental Meditation (TM) Center is offering a talk on meditation to relieve stress for all Ferguson residents.
This might seems a bit disengenuous, crass (TM is a trademarked technique that costs money to learn), or too little too late -- the talk is Dec. 2. But a phrase in the notice caught at my heart:

Stress can cause people to react in ways that takes away from a person’s message and make it harder for people to hear each other.

And that is true, whether the issue is the nation's racial history, police tactics, or Thanksgiving dinner and the debate over whether canned or fresh cranberry sauce is better.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't feel angry. Anger is an energy and intelligence that tells us something is wrong here. Anger points out problems -- it doesn't solve them. Hatred never ends hatred, the Buddha said.
Notice the anger rising and look at what it's pointing to. Then look for the skillful action that you can take to change that.
This might seems a bit disengenuous, crass (TM is a trademarked technique that costs money to learn), or too little too late -- the talk is Dec. 2. But a phrase in the notice caught at my heart:

Stress can cause people to react in ways that takes away from a person’s message and make it harder for people to hear each other.

And that is true, whether the issue is the nation's racial history, police tactics, or Thanksgiving dinner and the debate over whether canned or fresh cranberry sauce is better.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't feel angry. Anger is an energy and intelligence that tells us something is wrong here. Anger points out problems -- it doesn't solve them. Hatred never ends hatred, the Buddha said.
Notice the anger rising and look at what it's pointing to. Then look for the skillful action that you can take to change that.

Accepting death doesn't mean denying grief

Accepting the inevitability of death is woven throughout the Buddha's teachings. So why are Buddhists so upset at the news that Thich Nhat Hanh may be near death?

Thay, as he is known, has taught often on death and how it is neither an end nor a beginning, just a change in appearance. Focusing on interdependence, or interbeing, he teaches that conditions have come together to create this form that we consider to be ourselves, and when that form no longer functions, what is us will become something else. He even wrote a book called "No Death, No Fear."

There are contemplations on death throughout Buddhist teachings, from meditations that ask us to imagine the decomposition of our bodies, organ by organ, to rituals performed in charnel grounds using instruments made from human bones.

Death is inevitable; it comes without warning. ... This body will be a corpse.

So why, when faced with the death, do Buddhists turn to prayers for the person's recovery?

Thich Nhat Hanh is 88 years old. He had a severe brain hemorrhage. He has been an extraordinary teacher, an example of kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, a proponent of mindfulness. Why not let him go?

I have no answers, just a couple of thoughts.

-- Thay has been an extraordinary teacher who has touched many people deeply. Those people want to continue to receive his teachings and hope that even more people may be affected by him. That would, without question, make the world a better place.

-- Accepting death doesn't mean denying grief. To those whose hearts have been touched by Thay or whose lives have been changed by his teachings, his passing will be a cause for grief. Grief hurts. But it's how we know that someone has been important to us, that their absence leaves a space that is filled for a time by sadness.

I was reminded of that this week when I got the news that a friend had died. She wasn't a close friend, someone I'd worked with years ago, but we were Facebook friends with similar interests. I was used to her vibrant smile and her enthusiasm showing up there. And it was painful to learn that this 30-something woman whose last Facebook post was about her excitement at starting to plan an annual event for a local LGBTQ center was gone.

Every morning I recite a version of the four thoughts that turn the mind to liberation. The second, impermanence, includes this:

Everyone who is born will die. My death is certain; the exact time is unknown. Knowing this, what is most important?

The answer, inevitably, is that being present with life and the people in it is most important. If every conversation could be the last time we talk, then I want to be there fully, not biding time until I can check my email, not thinking about what other people might think about how I look, not reviewing a conversation with someone else a day ago.

Plum Village, Thay's monastery, provides updates on his condition. They include suggestions for how his followers can practice to support him:

Please continue to enjoy the blue sky for Thầy, the fresh morning air and the small pathways in nature for Thầy. Especially, please enjoy each other, your loved ones, and our togetherness for Thầy.
If possible, you can dedicate a day to eat vegetarian as a way to generate compassion to send to Thầy. You can reconcile with your loved ones, or to let go of your resentment of someone and write them a love letter. And in the same Winter Retreat spirit being practiced at our monasteries, you can participate in your local Sangha more, support the collective energy of mindfulness, consume less and reduce your time online.

Finding joy for the irritating politician

On Election Day, I was doing a practice of mudita, appreciative or empathetic joy. Like in metta practice, you choose a neutral person, a loved one, and an irritating person. In this case, you look to feel happiness in their happiness, taking joy in their joy. For my irritating person, I chose a politician, not one whose election would bring me joy.

The practice, though, doesn't ask me to approve of the source of their joy. It doesn't ask me whether I would feel joy in their shoes.  It simply asks me to be happy that they are happy.

But grrrrrrr. If he is happy, presumably about being elected, I am not. I do not think he would do good things in the near future, and those things he says he would do that I term "bad" would have wide and long-term consequences. How can I be happy for that?

What the practice really asks me to do is to see the irritating person as human, not as some kind of irritation-generating machine built solely to annoy me. He is not inherently annoying, and almost half of the voters actually choose him on their ballots, so he must not annoy a lot of people. The irritation is in me, not him.

And while I disagree with his ideas, if I drop my aversion I can see that his intention, as a human, is to feel safe and to secure that safety.  I happen to think that he's going about it the wrong way, but it doesn't change the fact of his humanity. I don't have to agree with him to see that. But by seeing him as human, my disagreement becomes less closed in, less of an angry ball of despair at the state of the world. And that creates more space to explore options -- even to have conversations.

It's not easy to have conversations with people who are locked into a world view. Some people are so defended that you can't hope to reason with them. Maybe all you can do is bear witness, be a reminder that there is another way of looking at the situation.

I'm reminded of Ajahn Amaro, a genuinely lovely Buddhist monk, who I took a class with a few years ago. The day before he'd gone to a demonstration in favor of bombing Iran in Central Park, not to argue, not to disparage, simply to stand there as a presence of peace in the midst of people calling for war. He wasn't there to change minds, just to be a reminder that there is another way.

A couple of his comments in particular have stuck with me:

-- "There's no excuse to be contentious, but sometimes we have to be fierce."

-- "Just because you're compassionate and kind to someone doesn't mean you won't obstruct their activities."

Sometimes you can do more -- and you should. Amaro also said, "If we are aware, with unbiased compassionate attention, our attitude will respond in the best way possible to what is needed." But being there as a human among human, relentlessly optimistic because impermanence and emptiness mean that nothing is going to stay the same forever, gives you the chance to influence the direction events will take.

Kleenex Karma

You know how it is when you're thinking about something and you begin noticing it everywhere? For me, this week, it was karma. I looked up the lyrics to a song and learned I could earn "karma points" by making corrections. I think those are like the ephemeral punk points or scene points rather than a constantly running total on a cosmic spread sheet -- but the popular conception of karma seems to lean toward the spread sheet.

Here's today's Dilbert:

That's now how karma works. It's not tit-for-tat. Karma, literally, means action. It is shorthand for cause and effect -- your actions have consequences, in the next moment and the next lifetime. Not listening to what's being said means you don't have that information; in the work setting, that may mean that you fail to do things that have been assigned to you and you get fired and can't find a new job and lose your house... In a relationship, the other person may decide you're not interested and move on. (None of this applies in Dilbertland, where no work ets done and no one leaves.)

Popular knowledge is a two-edged sword. On the one side, it's nice that more people know about the Buddhist teachings; on the other, they get it wrong a lot.

Companies whose products have become so popular that their names verge on generic -- like Frisbee, Kleenex, and Xerox -- have staff to police that.  At the newspaper where I work, we've received many letters warning us about referring to a large trash bin as a dumpster. Was it, in fact, a Dumpster? Or a knockoff brand?

Karma may be in  need of similar policing. Dilbert gets a pass. The karma points people get a written warning.

Something more serious awaits those who see material success as evidence of good karma. 

We might call this a belief in spiritual meritocracy. The implicit idea here is that our professional and financial growth depends on our spiritual merit, not on the presence or absence of social structures and biases. We are told that if we are grateful enough, if we put enough happy energy into the universe, then we will be rewarded with material wealth and earthly pleasures. (Think “The Secret.”) We are told that we actually can have it all: a rich spiritual life, leading to a rich material life.

You can have it all, a rich spiritual life and a rich material life. The problem is the "leading to." Spirituality that's practiced for material gain is false spirituality. It's manipulation, not exploration, a search for treasure, not meaning. It has no depth

For the last seven years I have dedicated myself to a Buddhist meditation practice ... As I have become more skilled, I have enjoyed moments of sublime bliss. And the more mindfulness I developed, the better I got at daily activities. I got a little better at surfing, playing poker, driving; the truth is, meditation helps me achieve whatever goals I set for myself, whether that’s being kinder to my friends and family, or earning more money.

One problem with a capitalist-inflected Buddhism is that it can lead us to a kind of spiritual cul de sac. I found that my practice was in an uneasy tension with my leftist politics. I found myself attracted to a glamorous Santa Barbara lifestyle that left me feeling unfulfilled and disappointed. I found that it became easy to deal with disturbing images in the news by dismissing the suffering of others as the karmic products of their own poor decisions. (They’re just not being positive enough!)

Karma doesn't forgive social institutions that lock people into poverty. The idea is misused when it becomes an easy way to dismiss problems rather than an opportunity to look at the causes that have created these effects.

The infamous Satya Nadella quote about how women shouldn't ask for raises but should wait for the karmic process to play out actually isn't that far off about the cause-and-effect action, on an individual level. But it fails to take into account generations of discrimination against women that also have contributed to their current economic status (and the need to ask for raises). In fact, by asking for raises, women are helping men to avoid the karmic effect of perpetrating discrimination.

Buddhism's not for the lazy. It asks you to look at your thoughts, speech, and actions, to let go of the explanations and justifications, to take responsibility for them and commit to using them for the benefit of self and others. It supports "leftist politics," in my understanding of what that term means. Renounce killing. Renounce intoxication. Feed the hungry. See the worth and dignity of every being, even those in prison.

Don't let karma become a flying plastic disc. Keep it a Frisbee.