Living This Precious Life
Trip Start
Nov 12, 2005
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14
16
Trip End
May 18, 2006
Dharamsala, India
Thursday, April 27, 2006
A vision that was first given life through a few weeks spent sitting at the feet of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Through him, I learned what it is to be transformed by someone not because of what they say (he spoke in Tibetan the whole time so I only understood his words through a translator). I experienced the depth to which I can respond to a person's presence. Each of us know this to be true. You could, for instance, be involved in a conversation with someone and be aware that what they are saying is not reflecting what they are really thinking, or that there is something going on for them that they are not saying. Your response will be much more related to those felt impressions then the actual conversation. Being with His Holiness was something like that, a suggestion of something greater then what I could see constantly pervaded my senses.
It has been said that the Dalai Lama is a living Buddha. The only living Buddha that we can see and experience (many Buddhas exist according to Buddhists, but not in a physical manifestation). But what does this really mean to those of us from the West, to whom being a living Buddha has little context or meaning? Herein lays the exact power of dedicated hours upon hours sitting at his feet: in that time I was given a clear vision of what a living Buddha looks like, what he embodies. Not because someone explained it, but because I directly experienced it. They call this a direct transmission of realization, not delivered through words but through experiencing another person's realization. His joyful rolling laugh, the tears in the eyes of his people as they watch him, the eager expressions that covered every face, Tibetan and Western alike, as he moved through the crowd putting his forehead to the forehead of the sick, the maimed and the refugee youth (much to the dismay of his uzi-weilding security team). His Buddha-like nature shines through in the compassion, actual compassion, that fills his voice as he talks of the Chinese regime that has oppressed, tortured and murdered his people. The grandfatherly way that he patiently coaches his people around temporal as well as spiritual issues: reminding them of the importance of their children learning to speak Chinese so they can continue to advocate for themselves, to wear cooler clothes in the warmer climes. All this, and every moment a blessing. Every moment, a communication of the ineffable.
For me, the power of this experience lay in the inspiration it gave me for who I can become, who each of us can become through constant dedication to our development through whatever path makes sense to us. The Buddhists call our highest potential enlightenment, but I think of my highest potential as complete, unblocked and equanimous love. But I am far away from being a living Buddha or even Mother Theresa. No matter, for my aspiration is set and just as I trod mountain paths for a living one step at a time, this worthwhile journey is no different. Step by step with no guarentee of reaching the actual goal of perfect love but nevertheless comforted by the clear knowledge that it is in the journey that all value is found. Truly a goal worth dedicating this life to. To this end, after His Holiness's teachings ended we embarked on two back to back courses: a 10 day meditation and Buddhist philosophy retreat and then a workshop on dying Buddhist style. Why these two courses? For me they represented the two places that I saw as my greatest obstacles to achieving my aspiration: I have detested meditation and the thought of dying makes my knees weak with fear. What better places to explore?
The first course was completed in silence...10 days of total silence. The permission to be completely quiet is profound. Never had I been this quiet in my life for this long. So much shifted in me simply through the quiet. On a day to day basis, we give so much of ourselves away, so much energy to the external world because of verbal communication. I couldn't believe the excess of energy that I experienced when I wasn't constantly giving myself away to the world. As well, I began to see the full range of thoughts that I have, through the silence and the meditation. And this was not always such a pleasant experience. I quickly realized why I had avoided meditation for so long: its uncomfortable. The first four days, the time I spent in meditation was dedicated to simply not moving each time I felt pain: pain in my back, knees, hips, everywhere. I would actually break out in a sweat from the effort not to move. Sometimes even tears of frustration. Our meditation coach pointed out that the human habit is to move when we feel pain, this is why we always are shifting our bodies, shifting our lives. Try it for a few moments, you'll notice a constant desire to move, to shift in discomfort. This reflects the constant moving away from what is painful or hard that is habit in human life. But if we always avoid what is painful (like meditation or death), then our lives are lived based on the aversion of certain things as oppposed to the embracing of others. This was worth exploring. I decided to move deeper.
On the fifth day I noticed certain signs of surrender from my body. I sat down and my legs just effortlessly flopped open. My breathing eased. At first I was completely relieved. Whew. I can do this meditation thing. Now maybe I can really get somewhere. But even as I thought that, the constant reminder from Ani Rita (the nun leading our Meditation sessions) cruised past my consciousness "Nothing to Attain. Nothing to Achieve." And once the pain subsided I realized that I was left alone with my thoughts. Nothing to shield me from them. Nothing keeps you in the present moment like pain. It keeps us constantly seeking (food if we are hungry, company if we are lonely, etc.). Slow that down, remove the pain, take care of the physical needs and only thoughts remain. That is where real courage begins to come in.
As I sat with my thoughts, I realized how I had been avoiding all of the unpleasant tracks of thoughts and feelings that simply emerge in me. I'd been suppressing, hiding, evading, whatever it took not to notice the judgements, the anger, the fear. Whatever it was in any moment. Because I was afraid on some level that these negative constructs in some way revealed I had a darker nature. And just like the guidance for physical pain was: don't move, sit with it, be gentle with yourself and let the pain melt (and after 4 days it did). So was the guidance for mental states: notice them, be curious about them, gently accept them no matter their nature and watch them melt. And the truth is that every single person constantly experiences both negative and positive streams of thought that arise unbidden, yet neither define who we are.
The practice becomes being aware of the negative streams so that we don't continually suppress them, shoving them more and more down, packing them tighter and tighter into ourselves until they form hardened layers around our hearts, blocking out others from permeating us. Leaving us to begin to identify with those hidden layers, out of fear that they are in fact our true selves. The choice is to apply the remedy: to notice the negativity, accept it and let it melt, thereby cultivating the positive. Otherwise we give the places that scare us the power to begin to rule our lives from a hidden place inside of us. The realization behind this all: we can spend our lives avoiding negative streams of thought and then that is exactly where all of our energy will go to. Or we can free ourselves up to do exactly what we want to do: live fully and effort toward a more positive mental stream. This is ultimately the path of the Bodhisattva, of love perfected.
Toward the end of the course I began to experience the beautiful thing about this approach, for the first time in my life I found myself effortlessly being very gentle in my mind. The consistent edge to my thoughts, the constant pressure to be good, to do the right thing, to excel, it was all gone. Instead there was a presence of curiosity, almost playfulness, like "what will come up today?" My instant fear was, oh my god, what if I lose all my drive? I want to be a good person, I want to always do what is right and meaningful. And therein lies the trick, it is in the efforting that we thwart our very efforts in the first place, at least this is what my expxerience tells me. The shift I am looking to accomplish, to live with the most boldness and the most heart, requires only one thing: an allowing, an opening, not an effort. And the only path to this: gentle acceptance of who I am now, with full awareness of what that is both positive and negative, and the gradual shift that happens as I apply the remedy. Not attaching to the negative and cultivating the positive. This is the Dalai Lama.
I worked with this over the next couple of days and started to see some slight opening. An easing in my chest where there had once been a tightness. A little more mental space before I jumped on things, trying to hide or change them. Then the dying course began. Since arriving in this part of the world and doing our very first teaching, I had been aware that my greatest growing edge had to do with death. Our first teacher back in Boudha, Nepal (Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche) had shared that one of the key shifts that must be made to achieve the highest human potential is to boldy face and accept your death. It is key because if you believe with all your heart that you are going to die, if you live each moment with the full conviction that you might die in the next, the quality with which you live your life will blossom. If I am holding in my awareness the terminality of simply being human, how fragile we each are, I will begin to live with an edge, a boldness born of the preciousness of each moment. This is what this course was designed to explore: how can I get myself to the point where I realize that it is certain I will die and that it can happen at any moment, including the next one, so that I begin living with no apology, no laziness but instead begin the tireless journey toward my birthright: the living of a precious life.
Its worth taking a few quiet moments, sitting with yourself and assessing how I am thinking about my death? Do I think about it? Do I have an inward groan as I notice that I am aging? Do I shrink from the aging or dying process in others? Do I fear my own death? Some psychologists believe that everyone in the West lives their lives in denial of death. And because of that we live with so much unexamined fear. Fear that therefore begins to undermine the way we live. Leading us to seek ever more security, more attachment to things that keep us younger, fear of the elderly, signs of aging, etc. Or conversely leads us to constantly risk our lives as though we are daring death to come find us. Either approach is an avoidance. What do the Buddhists recommend? Fully embracing the truth: we are fragile, terminal. So live each moment with great conviction TOWARD YOUR ULTIMATE GOAL. And that is the trick for each of us, identifying for yourself what you think will bring ultimate happiness. For me, it is clear that working toward the inspiration offered by the Dalai Lama is my ultimate goal. The Buddhists say that this is the only goal that each of us will find ultimately satisfying, but that is a topic for another entry.
After all the silence, all the teachings over the past 6 months, exploring my death fell like a magic drop into a pond. Ripples extended out for miles, years, galaxies in my heart. There is a freshness to life right now. The other day we climbed to a high mountain village (look at our photo album, its stunning) on the flanks of the Himalaya. Mountain goats, sheperds, and high alpine meadows surrounded and I was struck by living. How alive I felt: to just get out of bed with my partner, tie on our shoes and decide to climb up 3,000 vertical feet without a thought or fear. To walk through rain, thunder, past people from all nations and land ourselves in a place few people will ever see. That's powerful. That's living. And when climbing at that kind of altitude, your heart certainly let's you know you are alive. You must understand, however, that it is not in the climbing that life comes, but in the awareness in every moment as you climb just how precious this life is. To not spill one drop of life uselessly to the ground. That is living. That is power. That is my aspiration.
