Today, I had the good fortune of listening to a truly inspiring Buddhist teacher here at Deer Park Institute, a Tibetan Monastery in Bir, way up in the mountains of northern India. The teacher, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, spent 12 years in seclusion, meditating in a Himalayan cave, and now has devoted her life to helping others, as a nun.
Her talk today, and for this 3-day non-residential retreat I find myself on, is based on the practice of Lojong. I don't really know much about Tibetan Buddhism, so I'm just trying to follow along. She said some really amazing things that served as great reminders to me, and once again, I got that feeling that I'm exactly where I need to be, and hearing exactly what I need to hear, at this point in my life. She mainly spoke of the importance of bringing the practice of awakening into our daily lives. We can have all sorts of wonderful experiences while on meditation retreats, and profound insights, but if it doesn't make us nicer people when we get home, we've accomplished nothing.
It's too easy for the ego to take credit for any presumed progress along the path, and when it does, it furthers the gap between the one who has made so much progress and all the others who aren't as far along. When this happens, the practice isn't working, but it tends to happen all too often, and we need to be careful that it isn't happening in us as well.
"Why do you want to be the master of your mind?" she asked us.
If we don't have wholesome intentions behind our actions, any actions, they aren't serving us. First, we need to cultivate wholesome intentions. If we want to do good for ourselves and leave all others behind to fend for themselves, we will never get anywhere. "If the mind has distortions, everything we do will be distorted," she offered. Sometimes, we might not know how to deal with a distorted mind, and we need to see that it is due to our past karma. Instead of brooding over it, we can just work to plant wholesome deeds for a better future. By doing good deeds now, we can purify the mind and tip the scales in our favor. To do this, we need to have a sense of urgency about wanting to wake up. This urgency shows up as effort, and it is this effort that will allow us to cultivate a wholesome mind and be freed from the suffering of a mind that reacts to the changing conditions of life.
As she reminded us, it doesn't matter what happens to us in life, it only matters what we are doing with what happens. Are we reacting or responding? If we aren't responding skillfully to the rollercoaster of life, chances are, we are caught up in our reactivity and we are suffering. It's not that the awakened mind doesn't feel anything, and is indifferent to the highs and lows, but rather, that the awakened mind isn't swept away by these changing conditions. It still has feelings, it still has empathy, but it doesn't identify with these feelings, with this empathy. By identifying, by making it personal, we've crippled our ability to act skillfully. If our afflictive emotions get in the way of our ability to think clearly, how are we supposed to avoid reacting?
Her invitation is to really bring the practice into our daily lives, into the workplace with our boss and colleagues, into the homes with our families, and into the world as a whole with all beings. It is only through ignorance that we think that obstacles along the way aren't helping us. We all have been raised to believe that life is all about being happy and having pleasant experiences, but the Dhamma teaches us that obstacles can be opportunities for practice. Instead of getting upset or angry with someone for making our lives miserable, we can actually turn that around by thanking them for allowing us a wonderful opportunity to deal with our own problems caused by the self-cherishing mind. What a wonderful practice this is!
"Thank you for being obnoxious."
"Thank you for unloading your problems on me."
"Thank you for stealing from me."
"Thank you for going behind my back."
Like this, we can see that we always have something to work with, and we don't need to look beyond our own life circumstances to find it. Can we be grateful for hardships? Can we see that the more difficult things are, the more we are learning and growing?
"If we didn't have our self-cherishing mind, we wouldn't have any obstacles." Tenzin Palmo
Tibetan Buddhism is also well-known for its practice of Tonglen, which is a way of inviting in the suffering of others, and replacing it with our own good-fortune. Instead of celebrating our good-fortune, and being thankful that our situation isn't so bad as others, we actually volunteer to trade places with them. By breathing in all of their pain, anguish, and misfortunes, they transform it into pure, white or golden shining light, and breathe it back into the recipient. "I will accept your suffering!" you can say.
It really touches my heart to sit near such a profound and deeply realized being such as Jetsunma and hear from the depth of her experience what it means to be a spiritual person. She is funny, she is light-hearted, but there is something very serious about her, and that is her capacity to take on the suffering of others. These practices offer us an insight into what it really means to be a spiritual person. It's not all about chasing rainbows and riding on unicorns. It's not about pretending to be happy all the time. It's not about not having to do anything because we are perfect already. It's about some serious work, that most would think an absurd notion to undergo.
But, she won't let us forget about that which is unconditioned, either. "If there was no unconditioned, it would be impossible to escape the conditioned," said the Buddha. That pure awareness is who and what we are, but there is no "I" in it, so it's not something to grasp. Eventually, as she said, it becomes our automated response, but until then, we have to keep working to chip away at all the layers of imperfection that cover it up. "It takes a lot of effort to become effortless," she offered, which really clarifies these misconceived theories about not having to practice anything because we are perfect already.
In any case, we can use any hardships and misfortunes as a way to check-in with our own practice. If we find that we are truly grateful for the opportunity to practice, and that we are willing to take on these hardships and take on the the suffering of others, maybe we no longer need to put forth effort. Until that day comes, there is lots of work to do.
May all beings find the strength and courage to accept obstacles and blessings and be grateful for the opportunity to practice the Dhamma.
May all beings see that their spiritual lives and their daily lives are one.
May all beings see the suffering of others as their own, and use it to relieve suffering in their own hearts and in others.
To find out more about Deer Park Institute, which is a center for the study of classical Indian wisdom traditions, hosts retreats and programs throughout the year, and runs various socially-engaged Buddhist projects , please visit: www.deerpark.in
To learn more about Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, who is the founder and abbess of a Tibetan Buddhist Nunnery in India, please visit www.tenzinpalmo.com
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