What tastes better?

Imagine in front of you a shot glass and a pitcher, both filled with water. Maybe even do this experiment yourself.

Take one teaspoonful of salt and add it to the shot glass. What happens?

The water is cloudy and a lot of salt settles on the bottom and stays there.

Take one teaspoonful of salt and add it to the pitcher of water. What happens?

The water remains pretty clear, with a little cloudiness at the bottom and a little bit of salt remains on the bottom.

In which container will the salt completely dissolve more quickly? Obviously the pitcher.

Here is the real kicker, which water tastes better?

The shot glass of water tastes terrible. Gross. The pitcher of water tastes like regular water.

What's the point of this little exercise?

Our mind is the container through which we experience the world. When we are narrow-minded, or small-minded, our minds are very easily overwhelmed. That very same suffering, problem, or challenge, when met with an open mind is very easily dealt with and resolved.

What is a small mind? A mind that is rigid, fixated, agitated, tired, hungry, unfocused, restless.

What is a open mind? A mind that is understanding, tolerant, patient, resilient, kind, receptive, present, aware.

And here is the good news, we can train our minds to be more open. We can make it a daily practice to develop and embody this type of mind. We can also learn to recognize when we are being small minded, and we can learn to take those moments of recognition as reminders to practice.

What is the point of training your mind? You will enjoy your life more, and the suffering that you experience will not overwhelm you. Of course you will still experience pain and problems, but they won't taste nearly as bad.

Moving through the four noble truths.

Fully understand suffering.

Let go of arising.

Realize cessation.

Cultivate the path. 

Adapted from the Dhammacakkappavattana sutta
translated by Stephen Batchelor

The Dharma is vast and complex. There are various philosophical traditions and practice lineages, as well as various presentations of the path. The challenge of deciding how to start can seem daunting. 

Start where you are. 

The four noble truths can be interpreted as a process that we move through. 

Fully understand suffering.

Look at your current situation. Look at the ways in which you are unhappy. Look closely at your body, how does it feel? Where is there discomfort and pain? Look at your emotions, where do you experience sadness or fear? Look at your perceptions, how do you view your self and the world around you? Look at your habits and inclinations, where are you stuck? 

Fully understand your suffering. This is the first noble truth. It is not a Truth, but the truth of your experience. Understand it. Embrace it. 

Let go of arising. 

What are you holding onto in your experience? What are you accepting or rejecting, holding onto or pushing away? Fixation and grasping are subtle and pervasive, you won't even realize what you are holding onto until you can calm your mind and look. Meditation is the practice of creating a calm and clear mind, so that you can see the various levels of your fixation and grasping. When you see your fixation, whether it is feelings, appearances, concepts, whatever, let it go. Relax. Release the tight knot of grasping and reactivity. 

This is how we train. This is the practice. This is the truth of the arising of suffering.  

Realize cessation.

Cessation means attachment, aversion and ignorance have ceased to control your experience and understanding of your self and the world. What is left in the wake of the cessation of ignorance, attachment and aversion? Is it a void, a blank nothingness? What do we realize in the truth of cessation? 

A vast equanimity. All that appears and exists is naturally present and free in its own place. Nothing to accept, nothing to reject, we abide in complete openness. 

Cultivate the path. 

You thought you were done? Cultivate the path. Do the work. Walk, share, be present and kind in the world. It takes effort and patience. 

You will fall back into suffering and confusion, and you just keep on repeating the process by contemplating your suffering. Give yourself a break, failing means your making progress. (Unless of course you are just skipping over the first three truths and just cultivating the path, in which case you are avoiding the truth of your situation and living a fantasy.)

This is the truth of the path.

Unhappy mind.

A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

Without a clear intention, the mind drifts endlessly. Mental states come and go, thoughts flow like an unending stream, pleasure and discomfort ornament our days.

A wandering mind is reactive, restless, easily hooked. Lacking clarity and awareness, insight fails to illuminate our own condition. Freedom to choose, to act, escapes us.

A wandering mind is not present. There are no lights on. No one to listen, no one to respond.

A wandering mind suffers a miserable existence. It longs for peace and contentment. It looks forward to the day that it feels vibrant and alert again.

A wandering mind longs to be a healthy mind. But to be healthy, you must train.

The main point is to do your practice. It takes work, but it is worth it.

The foundation of compassion.

Compassion requires that we are present, that we remain open and responsive to others and the situations that we find ourselves in. A compassionate mind is engaged, connected and available. A compassionate heart hears, acknowledges and understands.

All of us have some measure of compassion. Often that circle is small and narrow, but we can train ourselves to develop great compassion. We can train in generating a mind that has compassion for all beings, everywhere, regardless of their circumstances.

The foundation for generating great compassion is self-awareness. If we can't be open and non-judgemental with ourselves, how can we remain open and present with others.

Self-awareness is a lens through which we see our own mind, thoughts, emotions, fears and neurosis. Self-awareness knows our present state. As we engage in meditation and strengthen our mindfulness and vigilant awareness, we start to see and appreciate the various levels of the self. We start to gain more agility in dealing with strong negative emotions and thoughts. Mindfulness and vigilant awareness deepen our self-awareness, which allows us to be more open and perceptive to who we are and who we are not.

As we train in compassion, we are really training in how to remain present, open and responsive. If we find ourselves shutting down, turning away or tuning out, then our practice of being compassionate has slipped into the mire of self-focus and our own agenda. Self-awareness allows us to assess and manage that process of shutting down and turning away, it allows us to see what we are averse to and to try to let go of our fixation.

A simple practice to work with this practice of self-awareness and compassion is tonglen, or giving and accepting. In this practice, we can see where we start to shut down to others pain and suffering. We can see what kind of situations we tend to turn away from. It might be easy to practice tonglen with a loved one in mind, but it might be very difficult when that person is a homeless man or someone who causes you a lot of trouble. It might also be easy if someone is suffering from certain mundane problems, but very difficult if that person has a debilitating cancer or illness.

Where do you start to shut down in your practice? In your daily life? Use the power of self-awareness to catch yourself as you start to tune out and turn away.

The practice of compassion extremely powerful and includes all aspects of the path. Everything is connected, and so are we.

Training the Mind.

The fifth stage of the nine ways of resting the mind is called training the mind. When we have arrived at the completely settled state, our mindfulness can hold our object of meditation continuously without being distracted. We still notice thoughts, sounds and sensations arising in our peripheral awareness, but those appearances aren't strong enough to distract us from our focus.

In the fifth stage, we are primarily focused on overcoming subtle dullness in our meditation. As we are resting in the completely settled state, one of the errors that we can make is that we fall into a state of dullness or numbness. We might be focused on our object, but we've sunk into a mental state that is narrow and without clarity. We are focused on our object, but not really. There might even be the comfort and pleasure of a cozy, peaceful meditative state. We should recognize this error and try to prevent it.

The main goal of this state is to prevent that subtle dullness from overtaking our meditation. The way that we do this is to maintain and strengthen our vigilant awareness. As subtle dullness starts to set in, vigilance starts to collapse and weaken. Our alert awareness starts to shrink, to close in on itself. Everything starts to collapse onto our object of meditation, and we lose the vibrancy and alertness of vigilant awareness. We might maintain our attention on our object for a bit, but eventually this subtle dullness gives way to gross dullness or even sleep.

If we can catch vigilant awareness as it starts to weaken, we can make a correction and increase the intensity or the scope of awareness. We can expand our peripheral awareness, exert a little effort to make it more clear.

As we train our mind, we can eventually notice when subtle dullness is starting to creep in and make the necessary corrections to prevent it from arising at all. When we have eliminated subtle dullness, we move a little closer to resting in the single-pointed state.

Shamatha and vipasyana.

ཞི་གནས་
Tibetan: zhi-nay
English: calm abiding, peacefully resting, resting in serenity

ལྷག་མཐོང་
Tibetan: lha-thong
English: penetrative insight, clear seeing, higher perception

Meditation is the science of training the mind. It is a vehicle for awakening to our own true nature and the nature of reality. What we often call meditation can be categorized as two types of meditation, shamatha and vipasyana. Shamatha, or calm abiding, is the practice of bringing the mind to rest. The practice of shamatha involves choosing an intentional focus, whether it be the breath, an object, or even resting in the nature of mind.

The goal of the practice of shamatha is to cultivate an effortless, joyful, and peaceful equanimity that is accompanied by a very powerful and sharp mindfulness. When this mind that is resting in shamatha is combined with the practice of vipasyana, it can give rise to very clear and profound insights; insights into our own mind and the nature of the world in which we live.

We are all familiar with brief flashes of insight. We may be moving throughout our day and suddenly, catch a moment of clarity. These moments come and go, and they can fuel our well-being, joy and creativity. While we may have these insights frequently, they are often not transformative. The transformational power of the higher insights into the true nature of the mind and the nature of reality only occur when the mind is resting in shamatha.

The union of shamatha and vipasyana give rise to moments of awakening, as well as the final awakening to our true nature. These moments of awakening and higher perception are unpredictable and depend on certain conditions and the depth of your practice. The way that you can impact your chances of gaining these higher insights is to practice more.

Sit. Train your mind. Develop familiarity with bringing the mind to rest. Familiarize yourself with the stages of bringing the mind to rest, so that you can continuously and regularly rest in shamatha- a powerful mind that is joyful, effortlessly resting in peaceful equanimity. From this place of calm abiding, we can direct our discerning awareness to questions that explore the mind, our experience and the world around us.

Fix your house.

So many people are overwhelmed with where to start.  They want to make a difference, make an impact, live a purposeful life, have a job with meaning, but don't know what step to take next. 

Fix your own house.

Fix a leaky faucet.
Fix a crack in the foundation.
Fix your roof.
Fix here.  Tweak there. 

Once you become more confident with fixing your own house, it won't seem so daunting to extend yourself to others.  You'll know where certain mistakes tend to come up, you'll have some experience dealing with problems and have a better idea where to go when you are stuck. 

Fix your own house and you will learn how to help others fix theirs. 

The same goes with training your own mind.

Four thoughts that turn the mind towards genuine practice.

We are very fortunate to have this life,
to have some freedom and opportunity,
to have some leisure and resources.

This life has great potential.

But, it is also momentary.
The days, weeks and years keep moving faster.
This life is like a fragile vessel,
one in which we can cross a great sea,
but must be left behind upon reaching the far shore.

Which is why our actions are important.
Our thoughts and actions can lead us astray, change our course.
Our actions create our world and influence innumerable worlds.
Our situation is not a prison in which we are stuck,
it is an opportunity to liberate ourselves,
an opportunity for awakening. 

But time and time again we get hooked.
We get wrapped up in our problems.
Our minds become ensnared in fear and uncertainty,
giving rise to waves of negative thoughts and emotions.
We are plagued by discontentment and easily slip back into dissatisfaction.

We have the opportunity to care, to be generous and kind.
We have the potential to do something meaningful,
but we need to actually do the work.
We need to actually practice.

And we need to do it today.

Hard to fight the urge.

It is hard to be patient when you have a full bladder.
It is difficult to focus and do your best work when you haven't eaten all day.
It is a challenge to be kind when you are stressed out and running short on time.

No one ever plans on getting angry.  It just happens so fast and it is hard to fight off the urge.  It is usual and customary to prepare ourselves by going to the bathroom, making sure we have eaten and giving ourselves the time we need to do things right.  We prepare our bodies and our environment, why don't we prepare our mind?

Practice.  Meditate.  Generate compassion and kindness.  Set your intention.  Focus. 

These will enable you to fight off anger and aversion.  They'll even help with a full bladder and an empty stomach too!

#DoNoHarm

Where does clarity go?

Clarity is a natural characteristic of our mind.  In its natural condition it is like a mirror in which we can see perfectly without distortion.  Clarity is by its very nature vivid and unobscured.  It has a transparent quality, allowing us to see connections and draw out implications. 

When we meditate, we are trying to cultivate a calm and clear mind.  Many people are drawn to a calm mind, because it is peaceful and provides a respite from the normal turmoil and stress of our day.  When we calm the mind in meditation we discover its natural clarity, just as when clouds disperse the clear and open sky is revealed to be naturally present. 

So where does clarity go?

We lose clarity in two ways.  Dullness and agitation.

The first is dullness.  We sink into darkness, laziness and the murkiness of ignorance.  Clarity becomes shrouded in narrow views and biased perception.  We experience this loss of clarity as a sinking dullness and sleepiness.  It is something to be abandoned. 

The other way we lose clarity is in agitation.  When clarity becomes too intense it leads to restlessness and agitation.  We can experience this as a proliferation of thoughts or dialogue in our heads.  We may also experience this as physical and emotional agitation, such that we want to turn away from the intensity, get up, get away. 

That subtle level of aversion is the basis of anger. 

When the situation gets too intense we often don't know how to sit with it.  We have lost that transparent quality of clarity and now things seem real.  Very real.  We start to struggle.  We push back.  We react.  We want to know the answer, but often we don't have time to think.  We can't see the answer and sometimes even if we can it is too risky.  Better to be safe, better to run and hide. 

What other option do we have?

Train your mind.  Learn to work with clarity.  As we become more aware of the transparent aspect of our own mind we won't fixate so heavily on our experience.  We will cultivate a little wiggle room, a little room to keep working.  At first it might not be much, but it might be just enough.  Enough to make a difference. 

#DoNoHarm

The ideal location.

On mountaintops, in forests, on islands and the like, 

Places that are agreeable to the mind and suitable to the season,

Cultivate single-pointed and unwavering meditative absorption,

On the clear light nature of mind, free from conceptual elaboration.

~Longchen Rabjam

Our environment has a significant influence on our mind.  The outer conditions can either aid us or hinder us in our practice.  As your practice develops more stability and you gain confidence dealing with problems and resistance the outer conditions become less important, but it is important to consider your practice setting at the beginning.

Mountaintops are awesome and inspiring, our minds become expansive and clear and we encounter few obstacles.
In forests, our minds are still and develop stability with ease.  Perfect for developing meditative absorption.
Riverbanks and streams remind us of impermanence and engender a focused mind.
Charnel grounds bring many obstacles for beginners, but can be powerful places for swift accomplishment.

It is important to assess your practice setting, to be aware of the qualities it will lend to your practice.  Examination is important, but don't spend all your time looking for the perfect setting.  

The ideal location for your practice is right where you are.  

Get to work!

Life and death.

When a soldier trains, he understands that it is a matter of life and death.  He knows that his hard work and practice may be the very thing that keeps him alive, allows him to take his stand and fight the battle.  The soldier may not know if the battle is tomorrow or never coming, he trains the same. 

We don't have that same sense of urgency.  Our battles don't seem to hang on the precipice of life and death.

But how many lifetimes have we let pass?  How many moments do we let slip away?  How many days, weeks, months and years?

Train.

Train with the intensity, precision and focus of a well-trained soldier. 

Privilege.

You have an opportunity available to you.

It may not always appear to be the case.  You may look around and wait for others to go first.  You may think that your situation is too hard, too unique. 

But that is the thing about privilege, when you have it you should take advantage of it and advocate for those who don't have it.

You have the privilege of being able to be generous and kind.  You have the privilege to treat others with respect and honesty.  You have the privilege to do the right thing, to be a good person.

You have the privilege of being able to help others- Don't waste it.

An extension of you.

The samurai's sword.
A mother's child.
Your practice.

Don't drop it.
The ability to wake from a deep sleep and still have a firm hold is a sign of accomplishment.

How to tame a horse.

Our minds are much like a wild horse.  It is unpredictable, hard to manage, often uncooperative and at times even dangerous.  It is also beautiful and needs to be respected.

Our minds are often left to wander and run wild, to do whatever they please.  Very few of us have really spent any significant time or energy to tame our minds, to render them serviceable and attentive.  In order to train the mind, there are a couple simple rules we can follow:

1. The initial approach.
You will find that when you first sit down to attempt to train and tame the mind it is quite agitated and restless.  This is normal.  Be patient and have compassion.  It has been habituated to running freely, is probably a little skittish and doesn't fully know how to rest with the confidence and ease of a well trained mind.  Your experience and confidence will grow as you become accustomed to this type of work.

2. Be a strong leader.
Your mind probably won't do what you want it to do right away, so you need to direct it again and again back to its focal point.  This is called mindfulness.  It is normal for the mind to act up, to stray and get excited, your job is to remain alert and maintain the discipline that the training requires, this is called vigilance.

3. Making the transition.
Initially the corrections that are required during training will require a lot of effort.  As the training progresses these corrections become much more subtle.  At some point wandering triggers an automatic reflex that auto-corrects itself such that there is no straying, this is when you enter the phase of effortless training.  While mindfulness may have entered into the effortless mode, it is still crucially important that you maintain vigilance, lest the entire training unravel and the horse makes a run for it.   There is nothing quite so embarrassing as thinking that you have a well trained horse, only to find them in the neighbors pasture the next morning.

4.  Setting out to work, with an attentive, trained horse.
A well trained mind never wavers from its discipline.  It is attentive, confident and relaxed.  It is patient and willing to bear considerable burden.  With such a vehicle, you can definitely accomplish your own aims, and you can passionately work to benefit others.

Breakthrough

The reason that it is hard to assimilate your practice with the entirety of your life is that there is no manual.  

Monks had a manual.  We will plug you into the monastery for your education and training, send you off on a three year retreat and you come out a Lama.  Rank high in your class and we will give you some extra titles.  A recognized reincarnate master?  We’ll put you on the fast track from the beginning.   Go through this process and you are considered worthy of enlightenment, qualified to share your wisdom and compassion with others.   

You, not so lucky. 

You don’t have a manual and everything seems to suggest that it's not in the cards for you.

Artist? In your dreams.
Builder? Your kidding right?
Doctor? You wish.
Entrepreneur? Sorry, can't win this project.
Graphic Designer? Yeah right.
Homeless? Not a chance.
Paralegal? Too bad.
Physicist? Afraid not.
Teacher? Get real.
Need we even mention those who are sick and suffering?

Do you really think this is the case?   

The great mahasiddhas of the past didn’t think so.  They rejected the notion that liberation was only for a chosen few, that your circumstances restricted your practice.  Their ordinary life was the foundation and principle nourishment for their realization.  They were practical, committed, creative and engaged with their world.

I challenge you to follow in their footsteps.

We are all waiting for you to unlock the wisdom of your life and situation, to prove that it can be done. 

What would your life look like if this were possible?  What would our communities look like? 

The difficult part.

The difficult part of having a spiritual practice is not the practice itself; that is a joy and a blessing.  The hard part is figuring out how to included everything else, how to integrate the practice with the rest of your life.

The hard part is not trying to exclude resistance, problems, pain and defeat from your practice.

In order to overcome the hard part, you need an example; fortunately or unfortunately, you need to be that example.  To be the example, you'll need a strong practice; one that allows you to bring all negative situations and problems onto your path.

To be the example, you will need to master your practice.

It's a trap.

The endless variety of sights and sounds, experiences and feelings.  The unceasing stream of thoughts and ideas, memories and wish lists.

We rely on mind as the basis of experience, even if we train the mind it is still mind on which we rely.  Relying on mind, we cannot escape mind.

It is the ground that we walk on, no matter how much we train, how fast we can run or how far, all we experience is a temporary rush and a fleeting high.  We can never expect to fly.

You need to create a distinction between mind and the nature of mind, between ordinary mind and naturally occurring timeless awareness.

You can chart and explore the earth for ages, and you should.  But you also need to see the view from space. 

Practice ain't easy.

It's easy to practice when everything is going right.  Hard to practice when everything is falling apart.  And that's why they call it practice. 

Take patience for example.

It is easy to be patient when you have time to spare and plenty of space.  Easy to be patient, relaxed and easygoing when it is a nice day, your to do list is finished and you have a patio seat with a view. 

Much harder to practice patience when you haven't eaten, have to go to the bathroom and things just aren't going your way.  When reality and people seem to be intentionally scheming against you, when the conditions aren't right and you wish you had just a little more time...that is when you practice patience. 

That is when you are really practicing. 

Your practice is to meet adversity and dance with it.  It is to make friends with your enemies and to participate when you feel like giving up.  Real practice doesn't come with a timetable and a map, it is raw, emotional and difficult. 

And when we see you practicing despite all of the chaos, we are impressed.  Then we don't hesitate in calling you a practitioner. 

Keep practicing. 

How does transformation occur?

What is the basis for transformation?  How does it happen?

Is it a miracle?  An act of god?  Is it luck or simply a chance occurrence?

When we talk about transformation we need to look closely at what is being transformed.  Our habitual mode of relating with reality is to ascribe identity and characteristics to things.

This is a car.  It is a blue Ford.  Leather seats, fancy gadgets.  That is what it is.

We don't really question this version of reality.  This is the world and that is just the way it is.
Or is it?

When we break a car apart, we end up with a bunch of parts and pieces.  Are they collectively still 'car'?  I don't think anyone looking at a pile of parts and pieces would call them a car.  So when does 'car' come into being, and when does it cease to exist?  At which point in the dis-assembly do we go from having a car to not having a car?  It is kind of a weird question to think about.

In our life, when we encounter a problem, where is the problem exactly?  If we take apart the problem into pieces, is it still there? When we come down with illness or disease, we get stuck on the permanence of that disease.  Is it really permanent?  Will it ever change?  Is there something we can do to change it or are we simply a choice-less victim?  

Who we are, the quality of our mind, our well being and identity; all these are in a constant state of flux.  It may not be readily apparent, but time and the impermanent nature of all things has already shown this to be true.  We already have this knowledge.  

Reality is not fixed.  It is not permanent.  Our minds are not fixed, they are not permanent.  If we understand that the basis of all things is impermanent, changeable and dynamic, transformation becomes possible.  Actually change and transformation are happening all the time, day and night.  If we are able to use discernment, insight and clarity we can actually impact that change.  Through intention we can transform negative situations into strengths, we can transmute the pain and suffering of our present circumstance into an opportunity to show others how to walk this path. 

Do you think this is impossible?  I'll show you that it's not. That is what we are doing here.  Our life is the example.  We are the example.  How do you transform the ordinary into the extra-ordinary?  How do you transform the mundane aspects of your life into something meaningful?

Don't confuse transformation with being magical.  The real magic lies in its simplicity.  The extraordinary starts out as ordinary.  Transformation isn't about turning iron into gold, it is about turning your life as it is right now, into a life of great purpose.  It is about transforming your mind and your intention.

And it is possible.