Projectile defilements

While Pope Francis dominated the religious scene last week with his display of charm and compassion during visits to Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia, His Holiness the Dalai Lama managed to cause a stir with his response to an interviewer's question about his possible successor.

Yes, HHDL said, of course the next Dalai Lama could be female. And, he added, pointing to his face, she should be attractive. The male interviewer was aghast. The Dalai Lama giggled. The video cuts to another question.


This is nothing new. HHDL has said for years that his mindstream might choose a female form next time around, maybe even a western woman. He's also said he won't come back. And the Chinese have said they'll find him.

And he's also said before that if his successor is a woman, she should be attractive. He points to his face. And giggles.

The interviewers' reactions seem to have more to do with their perceptions than his words -- ie, "You can't say that." Well, no, white male western interviewer, you can't say that because we have a pretty good idea of what you mean by it -- that looks matter more than wisdom. We don't know what HHDL means by it because interviewers stop there. I wish they wouldn't.

Maybe it's a joke -- she should be attractive like me, says the wizened monk. Maybe it's a reference to the padma, or magnetizing, energy a spiritual leader needs. Maybe it's a great big cosmic joke because enlightened beings see beyond the dualities the rest of us use to measure our progress -- hope/fear, good/bad, attractive/repulsive.

The lesson for me -- which I'm always learning -- is that when someone says something I find  offensive, before I jump on my high horse and ride off, I need to try to understand what they're saying. I don't need to agree with it, but I need to know more about what they mean.  You think vaccines cause autism? Why? Because someone told you about their experience?  Have you looked at the science?  Are you open to considering it? No? Got it.

There's an often-repeated story about HHDL meeting with a group of western Buddhist teachers a few decades ago. Sharon Salzberg asked him about working with self-hatred. The Dalai Lama was puzzled -- he had no context for understanding that since it wasn't part of the Tibetan experience. Maybe he's not familiar with the pressure westerners feel to be attractive.

When I feel self-righteous, I've learned, I need to look at the self. What part of me is reacting? What is her story? Does it apply to the situation in this moment, or can I let that go and see the situation differently, with more clarity?

We have a tendency to project our strongest defilements onto others. I listened to a talk today in which Matthew Brensilver, a teacher with Against the Stream, describes how our habitual reactions come out in stark clarity in retreat. We can become intensely angry, he says, that the kitchen has used the wrong beans, garbanzo beans!, when clearly the salsa-like dressing on the salad called for kidney beans. It's funny, but so true. We can be triggers looking for a target.

Surprisingly, to me, I'm not feeling righteous about HHDL's comment. Before he said he wants to be attractive in his next life, he expressed surprise that anyone would be surprised that a woman could be the leader of a Tibetan Buddhist lineage. It's happened before, he says, centuries ago. Why not again? There are many wise women teaching Tibetan Buddhism -- if that's what you need to feel like you belong here, find one of them. Or do you have issues with a woman teacher?

On a side note, the Dalai Lama has been advised by his doctors in the US to rest, to cancel a planned tour. He's 80, and his human body is aging, as all of our bodies do. I imagine that no one is better prepared for death than he is, but his death will create complications for Tibet and Tibetan Buddhists and the world. May he rest and recover and remain to teach for a long time. May we spend more energy following his example and teachings and less bickering over his words.

Off the cushion, on the dance floor

"It's a meditation," the dance instructor says, coaxing me to relax and follow him in the tango.

I immediately realize he's right -- or at least that tango requires me to bring my meditation training to the dance. Just before his comment, I'd been looking over his shoulder at the pairs of students moving around the studio, shifting my attention off my partner and his guidance. Wrong move. Like bringing my awareness back to my breath in shamata meditation, I bring my attention back to Jack, the instructor, back to this moment, this step, this gentle pressure that his palm exerts against mine, telling my body to pivot left.

Tango lessons are nowhere on my bucket list, but I'm visiting a dear friend who's just started and asks if I want to go with her. I can take the intro class and stay for the beginner class, if I'm inclined. After that we can go practice at nearby sushi restaurant that lets the tango-ers take over a back room that's under-used in the late afternoon.

I'm neutral on the tango, personally, but I'm delighted by her delight and willing to explore its spark. I've no personal investment in this -- if I somehow am unable to perform the duties of tango, I can sit on the side and watch. I love to watch dance, to observe bodies in space.

Why the tango? the instructor asks the three couples and me who are there for the rank beginner intro class (my friend opts for the more advanced technique side of the room). I'm just here with a friend, I say. I'm open to whatever the experience is. (That's meditation practice right there -- going in without hope or fear, free from attachment and aversion.)

And if it is a meditation, the tango is tantric meditation -- at least as I hear it explained by this instructor. It's less about following a set pattern of steps and more about sensing and playing with energy, he says. The leader doesn't push his partner into steps but feels her energy and uses that to guide her. It's a movement of active and receptive energy, subtle and silent, sensed rather than announced. It requires concentration and relaxation, stillness and movement. There's a leader and follower -- male and female, for this class -- but those roles are fluid; the leader actually follows the follower's energy; the follower guides the leader, taking languid pauses for a flip of the heel or a circle on the floor.

Most of all, it requires presence, the willingness to be there with the energy and let it flow. Try to anticipate, and you block the movement. Look around and compare yourself to others and stumble. It's only fun if you're doing only it.

And it is fun -- to take those attention-gathering skills off the cushion and bring them to the dance, to use them with bodies in motion -- and in relationship, not just in stillness. (I confess: I love the prostration part of my ngondro practice because of the physicality, a rare time when the body in the body-speech-mind triad gets to move.)

And if meditation training applies to tango lessons, maybe there are other, less exotic places 

where it also can bring vibrancy and delight and an awareness of energies interacting, giving and receiving, guiding and following.  Maybe we can be like the Padma deities in the Dechen Barwa, "magical dancers ... in the boundless net of illusion."

Maybe enlightenment is being able to tango with reality. Backwards, sometimes. And in glittery high heels.

What's discipline got to do with it?

I hate Dallas. I hate Dallas with a fiery hate equal to the temperature on this August afternoon outside the terminal at Love Field where I'm waiting for an airport-to-hotel shuttle.

I hate Dallas. That's a broad statement, but it's the kind of thing I tend to say, consigning an entire city or category of things to the trash bin of "unpleasant experience." Tofu. Humidity. Feta cheese.

And I don't mean it. It's what Tsoknyi Rinpoche calls "real, but not true." If I look closely at the causes and conditions that give rise to the thought "I hate Dallas," what is there is not a concrete lump of hate for a whole city but discomfort with being hot, hungry, unsure of what will happen next.

Waiting.

Transitioning,

The groundlessness of being in a space that's neither here nor there.

I want to be back at the retreat center I left a few hours earlier. I want to be home with my spouse. I just don't want to be in a 16-hour layover at Dallas-Forth Worth airport, waiting for a shuttle.

I'd been reading Tsoknyi Rinpoche's "Open Heart Open Mind" on the plane that brought me to Dallas, and I'd just read a section on how to work with difficult people. Rinpoche's one-word prescription: Discipline.

It takes discipline, one of the paramitas -- or perfections of the heart -- to stay with the difficult feelings, to accept that they are your feelings, and to see them as the impermanent, ephemeral things they are instead of treating them like a slab of marble, carving a statue, and writing a story that's engraved on a plaque to justify the whole thing.

I don't hate Dallas. I dislike how I feel at the moment, when I happen to be in Dallas.

When I see that, I see space around my feelings, space in which I know everything will be OK. The shuttle will come or I'll walk upstairs and get a cab. The hotel will be air-conditioned. I'll find food.

It's a similar process in working with a difficult person in metta meditation. When you tease out your feelings about this person, about their behavior, from the human being, you can see that they are just  getting through the day. It becomes easier to send lovingkindness -- the wish that they will be safe, happy, healthy, and live with ease -- when you see them as human rather than a monument to their irritating qualities. You don't have to like them or what they do, just see their humanity. Address yourself to their humanity, not their irritating qualities. You may find those qualities become less important and less irritating.

And then you can rest in that space, finding comfort wherever you are.

I love you anyway

Very early tomorrow I will be getting on a plane and heading off to a fairly remote retreat center in Colorado. Very early. The first flight leaves at 5 a.m., which means leaving the house around 2:30 a.m. to allow for check-in and security and all that.

I made the arrangements a while back. Lots of life has happened since then and I forgot what I'd booked. When I looked up my travel arrangements this week, my immediate reaction was, "What fool booked these flights?" Of course, it was me. And of course there were reasons -- cost, check-in time, etc.

At those moments, when my first reaction is to speak harshly to myself, I am reminded of a story Sharon Salzberg tells in "Lovingkindess." She'd been practicing metta meditation for a while but wasn't sure it was having an effect. Then one day she broke a glass and heard the automatic voice of her self talk, "You're such a klutz." And then the voice of metta spoke up: "And I love you."

Practicing metta meditation doesn't run you into a bowl of mush. It doesn't necessarily stop the voices of habit in your head. It does add the coda: "And I love you." Yeah, sometimes you make bad decisions, sometimes you don't pay attention, sometimes you mess up. And I love you.

You come to believe that you are loveable. And if you are loveable, even with your annoying habits, others are too.

Meeting meanness with metta

I don't have to tell you that the world is a mean place. You know that -- you're on the Internet, which some days seems like nothing more than a place to share hatred and rage and stories of the awful way people treat other beings. It can feel overwhelming.

Image by dreamingphotographer.deviantart.com

What can you do when faced with a tide of aggression and ignorance?

Practice lovingkindness.

Lovingkindness -- often known by its Pali word, metta -- is a quality of friendliness, "a steady, unconditional sense of connection that touches all beings, without exception, including ourselves," according to Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist teacher who literally wrote the book on loving-kindness 20 years ago.

I love that her book calls lovingkindness "the revolutionary art of happiness." Kindness, it seems, is directed outward, toward others. We do kind things for other beings. And yet we reap the benefits.

In lovingkindness meditation, we make the aspiration that several categories of beings (ourselves, a mentor, a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person, a group, and all beings) experience happiness, health, freedom, and ease. We don't necessarily take action, just make the aspiration.

But thought is precursor to action. As the Buddha said, "With our thoughts we make the world." So if we see the world as filled with hate and aggression that threatens us, we react defensively. If we aspire to keep people a safe distance away from us, we don't create the connections we innately crave and need to have in order to thrive.

If we practice sending out kind thoughts in meditation, we begin to send out kind thoughts outside of meditation.

Last month I was coming home from a meditation retreat in Colorado, and I met the nicest people all along my two-airplane, multihour trip -- from the shuttle bus driver who talked about the herds of rabbits that live along the airport access road in Albuquerque to the woman who commented on my giant cinnamon bun to the other people squeezed into the second-to-last row of the plane (who spread out once we realized no one had been condemned to sit in the last row).

Did I have extraordinary luck in the people I encountered that day? Nope. But I had spent a week cultivating kind intention, so I didn't take offense when a stranger remarked on unhealthy snack. I didn't write off the talkative man as a distracting loudmouth. I experienced it less defensively, as people looking to connect with other people in their own ways.

It's not always easy to maintain that view outside of retreat when you're actively working on that. But it is possible to make time to work on that. August is Metta Month at the Interdependence Project; there are many opportunities to practice together in real life and online.

Besides, metta meditation can be practiced steathily. On my way to retreat, I sat outside a Starbucks at Love Field in Dallas, silently wishing happiness and ease to the stressed-out passengers going by me. I don't expect it did anything for them, except put one less cranky person in their path, but it made my trip more pleasant. Try it.

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.

What has Buddhism done for you?

I was fortunate to spend a week this month on retreat with a teacher who had kickstarted my personal exploration of the Buddhist path a few years ago. By then, I'd been studying Buddhism for a while, but it had been largely intellectual until I did a weekend program with him, and later a weeklong retreat.

Since then I've seen him mostly for weekend programs and kept up with his podcasts and books. Sitting with him again in person was a push my practice needed -- and an opportunity for reflection on where I am and where I had been.

"Buddhism saved my life," I told him one evening after a session where several people shared their stories. (This was a retreat that emphasized building sangha; we were silent for half the day and spoke during the other half.)

Maybe I was being dramatic. Maybe not. Buddhism definitely helped me see and change negative patterns of thinking. It let me be touched by joy as well as suffering, to see the inseparability of the two. Suffering exists; it feels good to admit that, to not try to talk my way out of that. It arises from causes and conditions. It can be eased.

Today, July 20, is celebrated in Tibetan Buddhism as Chokhor Duchen, the anniversary of the Buddha's first teaching, which was on the Four Noble Truths. This is also known as the first turning of the wheel of dharma.

I am personally deeply grateful for the teachings, those who teach them, and those who study them. My all beings everywhere without one exception benefit.