Book

I believe it's time to write a book out of all of this.

I've been feeling a shift in my practice since I started in the Goenka sangha. This community is so strong, I know that I have such sustained support for my ongoing practice now that impossible for me to imagine it being de-railed.

The tree is strong and stable, nothing short of an ice storm will kill it.

Yesterday I had a self directed retreat.  No digital devices, just sitting in my growing sense of equanimity and non-duality.  Ended the day with the Sunday night weekly one hour sitting in my neighborhood.

Didn't do much writing, but scratched out a mind map in my Zap book journal.  Whenever I started to feel bored, I took the time to feel the anxious edgy emptiness beneath the craving for some new thought, some new idea.  If I sit with it for a bit, the anxiety passes and what I'm left with is that lake of equanimity that Mingyur Rinpoche talks about. Just quite, peaceful openness.  Just the raw joy of possibility.  What is on the horizon for me if I'm not longer locked into these loops of conditioned obsession and neediness?

At the end of the day, walking home from my meditation, that recurring belief and fear, that it I don't give into the craving, it will rear up stronger.  And yes it will, but then it will subside like a wave that's a little higher than the others, until it is low tide again.  I need to remember the other side of that cycle.  I need to remember it long enough, so that the cravings can start their path towards extinction.

This morning I woke up after that wholesome day with such a strong sense of this lake. It wasn't a perfectly still meditation, but there were some moments unlike any I've ever experienced.  I felt a clarity, but it was like the clarity of underwater sunlight emerging between two caverns.

Eventually it settled into visions of lakes and lotuses.  But it was different.

It felt like the beginning of a new adventure.

Mental Stability

Yesterday I went to a one day Vipassana retreat, a kind of booster shot for the 10 day course I took in September. Once again I was immersed in the power of equanimity.

Equanimity used to seem to me the dullest of the four qualities.  Intellectually I could accept that it was important, but who chooses equanimity over the more visceral sounding immeasurables like compassion, lovingkindness, and joy?  But more and more every year I see how none of those qualities can thrive without the underlying force field of mental stability.

Throughout this journey, from my first experiments with standing, to my sustained weeks of sitting, everything has been about testing and believing in the power of stability, stillness, unflinching balance.

For a long time I thought that balance meant never losing your footing, but I'm coming to understand that it means building and maintaining the ability to regain your footing.  Equanimity isn't just sitting still, although sitting still certainly helps.  It's also about being able to surf the waves of intensity, it's about the emotional and mental agility of non-duality, of liberating the mind from its constant self consciousness.

Above all it's about the strength and courage to sit with the hostility, the cravings, the inner habits from another time that risk de-stabilizing us.

Protect the dharma, says Goenka, and the dharma will protect you.

Waking up

This morning I felt the thing I've been wanting to feel most in the eleven years since I've been writing this blog.  I felt the lucidity of being awake interrupt the blah, blah story (as Gary Webber calls it) on its own.  I didn't have to consciously notice I was storifying.

I believe that enlightenment it the process of making this lucidity intuitive, a place that is not only easy to get to, but a place that the brain goes to almost immediately the minute it starts to feel the agitation and dis satisfaction that leads to suffering.

Programmed properly this dynamic will happen so fast we're not even conscious of the spark of suffering that would trigger it.

But you can't rush it. Decomposing suffering is a gradual process, and I think Webber is right that even if we invented a machine that could immediately shift us out of that part of the brain that keeps us in the grip of suffering, most people might not have the supporting skills, or live in a culture that could  sustain the peace. For many people it might feel more like dark night of the soul, than a liberation.

As I've learned this year.  I have a bot that will clean my floors, but there is something still strong in me that doesn't want to use it.  I have the technology, but it doesn't matter if the belief that I need and deserve a clean and pleasant home isn't strong in me.

I wonder, even if we had the power to implant something in our brains that would give us emotional intelligence and stability, would we have the ability to adapt to it? Would our society want to actually pay for this in a culture than cannot imagine an economy based on anything other than craving and manipulation of craving?

It's a good question, one we may even be facing in this lifetime.  But I will take Yuval Noah Hariri's advice, and continue to cultivate the two most important skills of the 21st century: emotional intelligence and mental stability.

Lucid Joy

What I'm feeling these days as I intensify my practice is close to what is felt when you wake up from a dull or distressing dream. A gratitude for my sanity, strength, grip on reality.

I'm keeping up my commitment to 2 hours of daily meditation.  I'm spending weekends mostly in self-directed retreat. I'm also following Mingyur Rinpoche's course on reality and reading a great book on the stages on emptiness.

In recent weeks I've been contemplating and meditating on how suffering cannot co-exist with wisdom.  Resting in the knowledge that there is a mind that is outside concepts of time and self, is deeply liberating. Lucidity grows every moment I stay in that place.

I love the intensity of Goenka's Vipassana technique, the constant and determined body scanning.  But I realized yesterday that I was missing something important.  Joy.  I'm still falling too easily to intense cravings for food and drama.  But gratitude added to equanimity makes hard for cravings to thrive.  Joy tells the mind and the body that we have enough. I think that cravings are a sign that life has become joyless, so the distorted pit of dis satisfaction grows.

Joyful wisdom is truly the antidote to most of what has plagued in my life.

May I not forget that. May I find a way to share that insight with others, especially Ben.

Post Vipassana

Two weeks ago I finished my first 10-day Vipassana retreat.  I'm still writing it up.  I'm still processing it.

At the risk of reducing a complex adventure into bullet points, the most profound insights I had were the high level of stress, misery, and hatred I have been living with all my life, and the power of equanimity to reduce this suffering.

Post Vipassana, I'm realizing how deeply in grip I still am to the deep cravings I've lived with all my life.  I didn't experience much in the way of craving while I was in retreat, which is surprising given that I had to give up internet, reading, writing, and eating anything substantial after noon.  Very little of this bothered me,  perhaps because I was more than distracted enough by the habits of petty aversion and ruminative memories of anger.

I've given up meat. And for a good week when I came home, I didn't feel any strong need to watch Netflix, or binge eat.

Craving found it's way in through the Kavanaugh hearings.  Like many North Americans, particularly women, I was glued to the television, as though somehow the confirmation, or shaming of Brett Kavanaugh, will wash away all the shame I experienced as a lost teenager in the era of private Catholic schools.

By yesterday I was watching, non-stop, the last season of Nashville and inhaling a bucket of pasta in cream sauce.

This morning I woke up with a bloated stomach and a headache, feeling as though every thing I had learned had been washed away.  But I sat, and it suddenly hit me how intense the sense of peace and balance had become in my life as well. I was able to rest in equanimity, make a vow to correct, maybe by visiting the weekly sitting in my neighborhood, and giving up food this evening.

I've only got one episode of Nashville left.

What I learned at M.I.T

Last week I gave an "ignite" talk at a ed-tech conference at M.I.T.   Five years ago, I thought of myself as a writer. These days my job is closer to "thought leader." So I've been thinking about what kind of thoughts that I want to lead with.  I'm nailing together a sort of code for life.  In the spirit of five, I will keep this a five point list that helps keep me moving in the right direction.  So far it is this:

1. Delight in calm

Again and again I come back to a theory I heard about on the NPR show Invisibilia, that we really only have two emotions: calm and agitation. All of our "feelings" are how we interpret this data and over time those interpretations become the way we see the world. I can't say if this is true, but this very much appeals to me as a computational thinker, this idea that our feelings are essentially an endless improvisation on binary code, with the heart as a genius compiler.  The first goal of meditation is to get us back to the binary, to notice the calm again and decompose the endless dance of agitation to its tiniest bits. The next goal is to build a new emotional framework that will protect and nurture this interplay.  Delighting in calm means just that. Take as many minutes as you need in one chunk, or throughout the day, to observe that calm. Then take the next heartbeat to be happy about it.  Not over excited. And not overattached.  More like joyful tenderness you might feel towards a newborn baby who has found something to laugh about in the dark.  More like the joy you feel on from your best friend, who you would never then force to move in with you. The ultimate goal of meditation is how to make that calm available to others in such a way that they cannot help but connect with its profound power. According to this theory, compassion becomes the technology of feeling the agitation of others and doing what can be done to de-iterating it so that they can find their own peace.  Enlightenment, I think,  is the moment this compassion "technology" becomes  intuitive.  Or perhaps, the moment that we see that it always was and still is.

2. Walk, Run, Sit, Stand

The older I get, the harder this one is to keep, but the more essential it becomes  Carving out time to do what needs to be done to keep the sap flowing is a tough one.  But today I've been standing and again and I am amazed how powerful the flow of energy.  I think a life doing all these things as regularly and routinely as you can is the best way we can to express our appreciation for this wonderful body we were born with. Everyday we don't consciously connect to the physical vitality that is our birthright feels a  day wasted. The effort is always worth it.  So if I can't find the motivation to do this for myself, maybe I can find the urgency of doing it for others.  I dedicate all of these hours of exercise to the well being of everyone.


I have three more that I will discuss in future posts. So far:

3. Share something
4. Learn something
5. Believe in patience

The technology of joy

I'm back from four days travelling through Newfoundland, a bucket list experience. Such a beautiful, friendly, magic experience. One day I will go back.

I was there teaching computational thinking and again I am struck with how much of it is there in meditation. We decompose this massive, overwhelming mind into its tiny component actions, breathing, noticing, feeling.  We see and look for and create patterns.  We develop routines. We apply logic and conditions. Mingyur Rinpoche has said that compassion is like the technology with which we use the energy released by calming the mind.  In six weeks, I head off to 10 days of Vipassana. S.N. Goenka also believed that meditation was a technology, a tool, for optimizing the mind.

This week in my course on the paramitas, I am looking at joyful effort.  My practice is, of course, cleaning.

MR says that the essence of joyful effort is motivation, inspiration and meaning. But I have tried so often in my life to motivate myself to maintain a tidy, clean home.  What I've been trying in recent months is compassion, not just for myself, or Ben, but for anyone who is struggling to motivate themselves to do the routine work. I think of how trapped they feel in their shame, and faint hearedtness. I think of how overwhelmed they are and I dedicate a short period of cleaning to them. I don't know these people, but of course I know what they feel, because I feel it myself.  I know how hard it is for them to stay dedicated to this.

Once I've done some practice, I want to take the time to sit with it and assimilate it.  Be so happy that I am connected with basic goodness, know how precious this ability to motivate myself is.

Clean bot

Here is something that I wrote a few weeks ago, but didn't publish:

Don't meditate. Don't get lost.

These are the words that now ring through every practice. Whenever I find myself getting caught up in obsession, or even pleasure, the feeling of purification, and all the cool and new sensations that a renewed commitment to practice brings, I hear these words.  I want to surf, not get caught up in a wave.

I need to meditate on the desire for purification.  Wanting purification isn't enough. I need to be committed to it, and I'm not. I look around at the chaos and dirt in my house, and I know that whatever I've achieved after a decade of meditation, I'm not pure. Or I certainly don't feel pure.

And yet I want it so much.  I really want to feel the joy that others feel in putting effort into their environment. I want to feel that basic goodness that we connect to every time we wash a dish, or pick up clothes, put out the garbage, fold laundry.

This is meditation too.

Perhaps the place to start is compassion for anyone who is in the same situation, and to be ready to receive wisdom from anyone who has ever been there.  To look at my fellow slobs and fellow ex-slobs as my spiritual companions. To appreciate anyone who has ever helped to be clean or inspired me to be clean.

This week I am working with patience.  Mingyur Rinpoche says that the essence of patience is openesse, flexibility and resilience.  I have to learn to be patience with my impatience, with my poor habits, with the consequences of my poor habits.  These will not be unlearned in a day, maybe even my lifetime.

I'm going to meditate for 30 minutes on whatever energy it is I'm struggling with right now when I think of my environment.  I will sit with the question, what can I do to really change this situation that creates so much suffering in my life?  I will return with the best answer I can come up with.

30 minutes later.

I think the single most impactful habit I can cultivate is my bot vaccuming every evening at 8 p.m. 

First because I can automate the decision. If I leave it up to myself to trigger.  it's a little harder. But  today I can commit to cleaning the kitchen floor so that at 8 p.m. everything is ready for the robo cleaning. Then I'm likely to keep this going for the next few weeks.  I can add 15 minutes of joyful effort to it. The sound of the bot can be the thing that gets me started in the evening, and before long, the place will be cleaner. I'll experience the consequences of clean and want to maintain them.

I will treat my cleaning bot like a meditation gong.

Let's see what happens.

Knowing

Last weekend Mingyur Rinpoche came to Montreal.  I followed him around like a groupie. First for a six hour day of introductory lectures and guided meditation (I sat with my mother in the second row.) Then a talk at the brain imaging centre at the Montreal neuro (where my mother had recently had a brain shunt put in), and finally for a two hour White Tara empowerment ceremony.

This ceremony was very different from the low floor secularism that Mingyur Rinpoche has become famous for.  It was closer to the mass I have known all my life as a Catholic.  There was chanting. There was a high and elaborate ceremonial hat. There were white diaphanous scarves that were placed around our necks. There were offerings and communion food. But there was a lightness that made it substantially different.

"I wish you all had this hat," he joked in the middle of the ritual, in which we all imagined the "White Tara" the embodiment of the female buddha nature sitting above our head, and imagined feeling what she felt, and knowing what she knew.  The communion was a procession of nuts, fruits, and finally cheezies.  Yes, that's right, instead of the tasteless wafer I have known, so carefully designed to leave the mouth drier and hungrier after its dissolution, this white Tara ceremony ended with a puff of artificial cheese flavour, designed in its way to bring you to a bliss point that will also leave you wanting more.

But without the lovingly cultivated bliss of a strong and stable practice, whatever "more" we achieve it achingly transient.

We are enlightened, but not allowed to tell anyone, jokes my Rinpoche. It is believed in Tibetan Buddhism that everyone is fundamentally good and perfect. That we don't recognize our own enlightenment.  Through practice, we recognize it from time to time, and through extended, disciplined and authentically loving practice, we can make this recognition intuitive, which is the best definition of enlightenment I can offer right now.

Through this ceremony, I have taken the boddhisatva vow. I will practice every day, and work to increase my hours of practice in the hope that I can make this knowledge intuitive for all.

Practicing Generosity

I learned a new take on tonglen this week, the Tibetan practice of giving and taking. The way I've been doing it in the last few years, is to imagine myself taking in the suffering of others on an in- breath, and then imagining myself sending out liberation, comfort, just the feeling of release. But in this online Varajana course I'm taking, I've learned that we practice generosity by breathing out our virtues, our skills, our ability to love.

That is practicing generosity in meditation.

Practicing generosity in daily life is quite simple, being more gradually willing to let go of possessions, ideas of the self, resources.  Mingyur Rinpoche demonstrates it by shifting a coconut from one hand to the other.  It's not being attached to things, but also not to the fruits of our skills.

For me these days, generosity is practicing the letting go of my usual comforts to focus on cleaning, then dedicating any energy, skill, comfort I get from cleaning to anyone who is struggling to find the motivation and energy to take care of themselves. Yesterday and this morning, I gave up the twenty minutes of blissful meditation to pick up stuff.

This is an extension of last week's insight into the difference between anger and hatred.  Anger is the emotion that arises. Hatred is anger in practice.  To begin to untangle and de-iterate this habit of hatred,  one needs to look at how to iterate love.  Ther is love the spontaneous feeling, and love the practice. When I look around my chaotic home, I see the I am not practicing love in this domain. I see myself surrounded in learned helplessness. I think of everyone who feels helpless, I clean, and send any motivation I am accumulating through these increased minutes and hours of cleaning.

An interesting thing happened this weekend. I did a cleaning meditation that started with picking up all the paper, chip bags, light squalor from the floor, feeling the resistance, and sending out any good that might come of this.  And suddenly, in the middle of his online video game with a friend, my son turned to me and said, "is there anything I can do to help?"

The impact of generosity.

Generosity

Mingyur Rinpoche says that the essence of generosity is letting go.  We tend to think of it as giving, but to give that which a bodhisattva most deeply wants to give, enlightenment, we have to let go of all that muddies this joyful wisdom that is our birthright.

Anger, resentment, envy, I continue to struggle with these everyday, as do most people living in the world. The best way to let them go is to be with them until they dissolve, but this is hard work, and that is where the generosity comes in.

I need to let go of the cravings that burn up the time I could be putting into letting my anger, resentment and envy go.  So this week I devote time to letting go.  Letting go of bad food.  Letting go of bad habits.  Letting go of lethargy and binge watching.  Letting go of fatigue and poor health.

Later:

2 hrs of meditation later.

I started a meditation on anger, but I realized later that really the emotion I need to let go of if I'm going to be generous is hatred.  Similar, but different.  Anger is the emotion that arises, hatred is that emotion applied to an object, now seen as the source of the anger.

Hatred is what makes the anger seem solid and material.  So to become more generous, I'm going to take some time today, and this week to recognize and release the hating habit.

Re-reading some of my past posts on hatred, I found some forgotten insight:

First, this one on the recursive power of hatred.  If you apply just the right amount of hatred to hatred, it becomes like a de-iterating loop, ceasing at the point of equanimity.

And just before that, a night when I started to move away from self-hatred. Clearly, I've been down this path before, and there's a wonderful place at the end of it, that I can find my way back to.

New Stage

With the commitment to bodhichitta, my practice has entered a new stage.  As I make more habitual a dedication to enlightenment for all, I feel a force field build and emanate from me.

Writing this feels grandiose. But living it doesn't feel grandiose.  Maybe it's wrong to write that it is emanating from me.  More accurately I am surrendering to a force that supports and emanates from anyone who is aware of it.  It's both me and not me at all.

As I enter my third day of retreat, I feel a deep thriving in my heart. Every hour I meditate is like a deep diving expedition.  I go down and find a sharp shell of self-hatred or despair.  I work at it until it unlodges and boom the energy lifts me up.  I feel an anchored and abiding motivation to do whatever needs to be done to make my life happier. Clean my home, exercise, eat more vegetables.

I feel more open.  My mind is naturally quiet. My job is now to get comfortable with it. Assimilate it as a trait, the way a superhero gets used to having power.

Bodhichitta

The best way to achieve emotional stability, freedom from hatred, self-hatred, craving, and all the suffering that controls us, is to deeply and truly desire these things for everyone.

Earlier this month I started a course in the six paramitas. These are qualities, like the four immeasurables (compassion, loving-kindness, joy and equanimity) that cultivated, over time, become bodhicitta, the spontaneous and natural love of all beings.

It's been such a busy year, which I can see by how little I've been writing. Once again success threatens to derail my spiritual development.  But it's certainly not the self-sabotage I've seen in the past.  I'm still managing to meditate every day.

This weekend, I've decided to retreat and log some hours.  I've signed up for Vipassana in the fall, a  10 day retreat. I want to be ready for that, but also I'm feeling the build up of work related emotional poisons.  A lot of envy, pettiness, need to control.  I don't want to add to the confusion that already exists.  I need a strong heart and clear vision. For myself, and for everyone that I work with.

Wanting for other people, the same things that I want, happiness, freedom from suffering adds power to my wanting.  It has a massive impact on my practice.

Pity and Compassion

The last couple of weeks, I've continued my work with emotions.

I've had a particularly difficult week, where I've had to really assess the difference between pity and compassion.  I have to let go of an employee at my non-profit, and I have to balance my pity for the situation she will be in, with my compassion for my fellow employees who have to deal with the destructive emotions she introduces to the workplace.

My practice has really helped. And staying close to the mechanisms that Mingyur Rinpoche teaches has helped especially. First I rest in basic awareness, free of all objects, like the image and imaginary conversations I continue to have with this person and my peers. Then I allow whatever I'm feeling to come up, let's say pity.  And then rather than focus on the object of the pity, I focus on the pity itself.  Slowly the pity and my emotional pattern of pity start to naturally deconstruct.

I've felt a few things. How pity is a substitute for genuine grief and sadness. And also how pity is a stumbling block on gratitude.  If I'm focused on what other people don't have, e.g. job skills, emotional control, insight, good judgment, I'm not able to be grateful for having these qualities or to be grateful and respectful to the people who have them.

Still, it's tough. I'm putting someone in the same place I was five years ago. Without work, without money, experiencing the consequences of work that isn't stable. I was able to pull myself together, and then some. I'm so much better off financially than I was back then. That job was a rut for me, and this job is a rut for this person. I know she will never advance here.

Encouraging her to leave, and giving her the opportunity to assess the consequences of her behaviour, is the path to compassion.  I have to have faith that she has it in her to turn her life around. I did, and she has the same essential qualities as I do.

The small emotions

This week I am meditating on emotion. It's been a while since I've listened to Mingyur Rinpoche's teaching on this. I'm struck by how much I've forgotten. Particularly the teaching on starting with the smaller emotions.

I was struck by the wisdom of this yesterday when a fight erupted with Ben.  A big enough fight that I found myself retreating to my room, trying to sit with anger and follow the instruction on how to make the destructive emotion the object of the meditation, not the object of the emotion.  In other words, feel the anger itself and watch it de-iterate, rather than focussing on the object, which will only cause the loop of anger to grow stronger.

Later in the evening I watched the teaching on small emotions and I realized that if I'd been working with smaller emotions, I might have caught the irritation, the spark that started the fight, and I might have seen a better solution towards negotiating what it was that was irritating me.

This fits interestingly in with the computational thinking principle we've been teaching recently, decomposition.  Take big problems, like a lifetime of chronic and intense anger and break them down into smaller parts, irritation.  See if you can catch things in the irritation moment, and slowly, I hope, I can find myself caught less and less in the bigger more draining situations that my anger takes me to so often

Sound and Thought

I seem to be writing less and less.  That's what a full time job can do to your writing and meditation practice.

But I have been sitting.  I've been following Tergar and exploring once again the practices of visual objects, sound and thought as support for meditation.

Sound is always a revelation because of course sound has been the source of a lot of trauma in my life. I was the victim of a lot of screaming and bickering when I was a kid, and I have struggled to spare my son that, but I know I haven't always succeeded. Slowing down and listening to my own words and thoughts has a very strong impact on my growing feeling of well-being.

Then there is thought meditation, the meditation that I''m the worst at.  Or at least that feel is the most challenging for me.

So far my favourite meditation is still "non-meditation."  Don't meditate, don't get lost. Just be aware of what the present feels like, and keep going there.

body awareness

Today I'm struggling with frustration, anger, disappointment with someone close to me.  Someone who seems to have lost the will to take care of his body and mind.

It's a challenge to meditate because I haven't slept well.  This week in JOYL1 we are focussing on the body, feeling present, noticing sensations, and as we always do, alternating with objectless meditation.  For most of it, I was in the raw, rigid anger and despair I feel, and being with the belief that my happiness is dependent on whether or not he is happy.

And then for a moment, I was able to pull back and really feel as close to pure awareness. That silky, calm joy.  I felt for a moment that I could be happy even when I was unhappy.  I can be sad that he is making poor choices, but I can know that at the core of my being is a happiness that can not be wrecked by anything or anyone.

The closer I am to that realization, the closer I am to the insight that happiness is and will always be available to him too. The best I may be able to do is hope that he is able to find it. 

Giving Monkey Mind a Break

I'm going back to fundamentals in my meditation practice by redoing Tergar's Joy of Living 1.

Since starting, I've had a number of insights, but this morning I am excited about this one. That when I meditate I am simply giving the monkey mind a break.

 Most of the day, despite so many years of meditating my jumpy problem solving, problem creating mind is still in control.  When I meditate, I relax, much in the same way I relax after a job, or a challenging task.  Monkey mind is exercising hard all day, meditation whether formal or informal at its simplest, and most effective level is a way of saying, okay Monkey here's a nice spot on the grass, for the next ten, twenty, thirty minutes, lets be a little more like lions and just hang out, feeling as we are, safe enough.

Reconnecting with my mission

It's January, so a good time to re-visit my mission and put it somewhere where I can make it part of my daily planning.

My mission is to cultivate emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical and financial wellbeing every day--for myself, for the people around me, and for the world I live in.

I do this first and foremost by grounding myself in awareness and  recognizing and appreciating the basic goodness that exists in myself and everyone. 

My first responsibility is towards nurturing and maintaining the joyful wisdom that emanates from simply being.  In bringing this energy into the world I am best equipped to help liberate myself and others from useless suffering.  I work to stay aware of and spread the fruits of absolute well-being. 

My second responsibility is towards my son and supporting him in whatever way I can to cultivate his own well-being. 

My final responsibility is my friends and colleagues, the country and the society that I have been born into.

Word of the year, gratitude.

Read a very interesting article in the New York Times about the impact of gratitude on self-control.
More important than grit, gratitude helps us to avoid temptation.  It's easier to say no when you feel full.

I decided yesterday to make gratitude my word of the year.  It's tough because my monkey mind prefers to believe that the only way I can have love, respect and connection is if I have those things that will make people love me. I can only have them if I want them, and if I stop wanting, where will my drive come from?

Well it could come from motivation, and it could come commitment. 

Today I read these wonderful words from Tsoknyi Rinpoche. He is candid about tulkus. They are susceptible to temptation and delusion as well. But they have an advantage.

"We're trained from a very early age to do the best we can to help others break through whatever ideas they learn and lead them to discover the spark with which they are born.  We're trained to love every living creature until he or she can love themselves.  Until every person on earth ceases to view one another as a threat or an enemy; until every person, in every job, every relationship, every encounter, can see the wonder, the beauty, and the potential in everyone with whom they come in contact. Until we show people how to let go of their stores, then fill within themselves the sense of disconnectedness, our job is not done."

That's plenty to want right there.