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.

How To Be Comfortable With Everyone

Didn't get around to writing anything this week, but came across this inspiring post by Shinzen Young. So I'm reposting to keep it in the archives. 

How To Be Comfortable With Everyone

It’s very common for people on a meditative or spiritual path to develop a kind of sensitivity to the poison and pain of others. Sometimes it’s formulated with the phrase “I pick up all this negativity.” Sometimes it’s formulated with the phrase“People drain my energy.” A closely related perception runs something like this: “Now that I've developed some spiritual maturity, I find it difficult to relate to old friends/family/ordinary people; they so cluelessly cause themselves unneeded suffering; I no longer have much in common with them.”

Regarding such sentiments, there are several things to keep in mind. First: They represent a temporary stage that the practitioner eventually grows out of. Second: When you do grow out of it, it’s replaced by its exact opposite: the more clueless and messed up people are, the more you enjoy being around them. You can make the transition from that temporary stage to its opposite by realizing this:

When we’re around other people, we pick up on where they’re at. If they’re in a bad place, we pick up on that. One might refer to that as exogenous discomfort. It's discomfort whose origin (genesis) is from the outside (exo), i.e., you’re feeling uncomfortable because of what is going on in someone else. The term exogenous contrasts with the term endogenous. Endogenous discomfort is discomfort due to our own stuff. The main point to remember is that the discomfort, endogenous or exogenous, typically comes up as some combination of mental image, mental talk, and emotional body sensation. To the extent that one can experience that sensory arising completely, to that extent it does not cause suffering. It doesn't matter one wit whether the source of suffering is exogenous or endogenous or some combination of both. By “experience it completely” I simply mean experience it mindfully, i.e., experience it in a state of concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity.

When the discomfort is endogenous and you experience it very mindfully, it doesn’t cause much suffering, it “tastes” like you’re being purified. When the discomfort is exogenous and you experience it very mindfully, not only does it not cause suffering, but it tastes like you and the other person both are being purified. In other words, how your consciousness processes another’s pain subtly teaches that person’s consciousness to do the same. The other person may not be aware that’s happening, but you’re aware of it. You’re aware that you are nourishing that person, and that subtly nurtures you. That’s why you eventually come to enjoy being around clueless messed up people. Paraphrasing the Blues Brothers, you’re “on a secret mission from God.” You walk through life like a giant air filter picking up the psychospheric pollution and automatically processing it, extracting from it energy and then radiating that energy as positivity. You know your job and you love it: recycling the karmic trash.

By Kevin B

Needless to say, it may take a while to work up to this, but everyone on a path should aspire to this perspective.

This situation contrasts in an interesting way with the goals of psychology. In certain therapeutic approaches, the goal is to get the client to the point where they can distinguish “what’s me” from “what’s them.” In contemplative-based spirituality, the goal is to get to the point where you no longer care about that distinction!

Toxic emotions

Okay, by this I mean shame.

This last week my practice has been derailed by my obsession with The Woody Allen case.  I'm not alone. It feels like everyone is weighing in on one side or the other.  But I can't seem to get it out of my head.  I don't want to get it out of my head.

This is probably because is churns up the darkest most difficult emotion that I've yet to really deal with in my meditation practice.  Shame.

I have many shames. Some deep. Some shallow.  I'm not alone in this, but it is the power of shame that we always feel alone. We always feel like we're the only person to do something wrong or dishonest or to let other people treat us poorly.  Grifters, abusers, molesters, bullies. These people all take advantage of our shame.  They take advantage of our shame because the way they are trying to rid themselves of shame is to offload it onto others.

That is the why we're all so mad at Woody Allen. Because for one day, or week we get to think about someone else's shame. For one week I get to feel righteous and strong. I get to feel compassionate towards the woman I believe was his victim.  And I get to visit my own shames and make them feel small in comparison.

Meanwhile this week I made a stupid mistake that ended up reflexively covering up for. Something that is going to cost me and others time and money. And I don't have the moral courage to own up to this.  So it's probably going to haunt me for a while.

I'm going to use this haunted time to examine the toxic effects of shame in my life.

This is a very, very difficult emotion to deal with. Nobody wants to sit with shame, know it, work with it. I certainly don't.

This might be a good time to practice tonglen.  Breathing in shame and breathing out compassion and courage to everyone dealing with shame in their lives.  Which is a lot of people.  It's the most human emotion.

Joy of Living 2

Just finished a weekend retreat and the second part in Tergar's Joy of Living.  The course was led by Tim Olmsted, the director of the Pema Chodron Foundation. Tim is a dynamic, powerful teacher who reminds me a little (from the nose down) of the actor William Devane.

Structurally I find a lot of similiarities between the Tergar meditation program, and my Zhan Zhuang program, in that the first part is about cultivating a center of calm energy, while the second part is about cultivating power, the ability to do something with that energy.

The second part hinges on four "immeasurables": love (or loving kindness at it is usually used in westernized forms of buddhism), compassion, joy and equanimity. It also introduces certain intermediate meditation practices like tonglen, the practice of breathing in the suffering and stress of others and breathing back out the energy, love and power that we've cultivated so far.

After the first weekend, I remember vividly (or as vividly as I could), how sleepy I was at the end of the weekend.  How all that calm energy was sending me into unconsciousness during my meditation, and how hard it was.

At the end of this weekend, despite the fact that my downstairs neighbour had kept me up most of the night with a birthday party, I was energized.  I was ready to go out and take on the world, start meditation groups, build a whole new movement. Tonglen especially was a revelation, although I agree with Tim that this is not something you would want to teach to a beginner.  You need to have that base of calm energy before you know what it is you're sending out.  But once you've built that base of energy, tonglen is like a shot of espresso.  Rather than spend your day, as we usually do, ignoring stress and suffering, tonglen encourages you to suck it up, in a healthy, not repressive way.  Suck it up and send it back out into the world as a peaceful vitality.

An excellent metaphor for tonglen, is the powerful process by which trees take all the pollution and dirt and muck of the world, and send it back out as fresh air.  As Tim pointed out, it's also worth noting how the trees themselves are enriched by this process.

We think we are doing nothing in meditation, but if we are using it to open our hearts and transform misery into healthy energy then what we are doing is radical and essential. As radical and essential as anything on this earth.