Portland Buddhist Priory

(From the April 2016 Newsletter)

By Rev. Leon

As I look at my own mind, and what others seem to be going through during this time of significant change both at the Priory and in the wider world, it seems good to say a few things about training with the arising of fear in its various forms. Training with fear has many facets and I will try to take them up as they come to mind over the next while. In this article, I talk a little about how I work with fear in terms of meditation practice.

As I embark on this new project of being Prior here in Portland, I mostly feel quietly confident and optimistic. On occasion, though, I see my mind wander over into anxiety and worry about various things: will they like me? Will I be able to meet the needs of the temple? Will my health limitations get in the way? Will my inexperience put people off? Will they like me? Will I be enlightened enough? Will they like me?

At the risk of over-sharing, I thought it might be useful to go through, in some detail, an example of how I train with this. The other day I was feeling particularly out of sorts, all anxious in a buzzy kind of way and not quite able to settle. Throughout the day, I just kept trying to bring my mind back to what needed to be done and doing what seemed to need doing; by the end of the day, the feelings had not yet dissolved, although I had learned a little more about how acting out of fear doesn’t really work so well. The next morning when I woke up, I noticed the anxiety again.

(As an aside, there is an interesting thing of importance that I have noticed over the years, about that brief twilight period just as I am waking up. I have often observed a mind state move in like a cloud bank and settle in, in a way, like what I am going to be dealing with that day has arrived and I get the opportunity to work on sitting still with it, and sometimes below it, and I get to work on keeping myself from getting tangled up in it right at the very start of the day.)

So, this anxiety arrives and I notice it, and I work up a little resolve to sit still right in the middle of it. I work on that right through my morning activities and meditation, putting a little extra effort (gentle effort) into being still (by being still, I mean not doing anything with the fear, not trying to get rid of it, just accepting it, just feeling it). From this resolve and effort to sit still and feel that fear and let it go, I sort of get to a place in myself where this little nugget of holding on appears: I want things to go well so that people will like me and from this liking me, I can get a little more evidence that really, I am ok. And so, we get to the heart of the matter, the question “am I really ok?” and the fear that somehow, all my weaknesses and limitations mean that I am not ok, I am not part of The Great Buddha.

And there is the fear that if I let this go, let go of my attempts to grasp after various ways of proving externally that I am ok, I’ll discover something terrible. (The irony is that though I can spend a lot of energy trying to avoid the terrible, it is only knowing what the truth about myself is, no matter how terrible it might be, that enables me to take steps to change myself, if necessary: so I say to myself “let’s find out the truth”.)

From the outside, I know that this whole situation is based on a couple of mistakes: the Dharma, our practice and the teachers teach that we are fundamentally Buddha, we are fundamentally ok, fundamentally not separate, even while we have faults, weaknesses and shortcomings which call out to be trained. Knowing this is a little helpful at the point of being confronted by letting go of something we are familiar with and stepping into the unknown. This knowledge about the teaching can help me to generate the courage to take the next step. Really, the thing that needs to be done is to sit still, look up and let go. For me, in this case, it means sort of saying, “ok, I am willing to not be liked, to be embarrassed, to die, even, but I am going to let this go, give it up to the Buddha.”

Interestingly, when I do this, and this happened in the case I am talking about, the fear dissolves and I return to a more normal state of mind. The process I have described above is one aspect of what we call converting karma and the process is the same whatever the fear or confusion or misunderstanding that underlies our present feeling is. For me, in this case, it is the fear that if I look to closely, I will finally discover the proof that there is something fundamentally wrong with me. For each of us, it will be something slightly different and we discover it for ourselves by doing the process of practice.

The process is to notice and be aware of the feeling, take responsibility for it (notice how I didn’t get all wrapped up in thinking that it’s everybody else’s fault that they don’t like me or whatever, it is just a feeling that arises in my mind that is probably produced by me), try to be still in it and feel it, allow it to arise and pass away. Be still with patience and kindness until I see it clearly and let go of the cause of the thing or until it dissipates on its own.

I recognize that this is the thing that we are doing, with “gentle kindness and friendliness”, together, each in our own way, and whether I am liked or disliked, or adequate to the task or not, I am fundamentally ok and the practice is a sound refuge.

At the heart of the thing, helping people find this fundamental ok-ness is what the temple and my job are all about and I can and will do that.

(From the December 2015 Priory Newsletter)

By Rev. Leon

In the traditional story of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, there is a scene from just before the time when the Buddha sits down for his final effort. After realizing the futility of ascetic practice and already understanding that indulgence doesn’t help either, he has taken a bath and eaten a meal provided by a local woman. He cleans his bowl and it seems that a question arises in his mind: will I be able to do this ambitious thing that I have set out to do? Thinking this, he throws the bowl into the middle of the river and says, “If this bowl floats up stream, I will awaken to the Truth”. And the bowl does in fact float upstream.

That floating upstream is worth paying attention to. For each of us, there is an element in our practice of the Dharma that is like floating upstream against the current, the current of day-to-day events, the current of social pressure, the current of getting things done. But mostly it is the current of our own mental forward momentum. For myself, an aspect of training my mind (going against the current of my mind) is cultivating the willingness to be with what is difficult to bear, a thing that I would mostly like to avoid, whether it be a difficult relationship, an unavoidable obligation or some aspect of our own selves.

I often feel a little overwhelmed by the number of sweet things that are available at this time of year (because, of course, I find myself eating more of them than might be best) and I was reminded of an idea that I understand comes from Chinese culture: what they call eating bitter. This is not usually the literal eating of bitter things, but more a way of teaching how to relate to adversity or to things that are difficult to bear.

(Before I go much further, I might add, as a sort of disclaimer, that someone once said that in order to be successful in the long term as a monk, you must become a connoisseur of bitterness. I suppose, in my mild way, I am becoming that connoisseur, and I am not suggesting you should become one in turn.)

So, I think many of us find that the holidays can be a mixture of things we enjoy and things we might like to otherwise avoid and I find that each year I have to brace myself with a little encouragement to be extra willing to practice making the offerings of patience and kindness. Normally, it seems that when we think of practicing patience, we think of the aspect of enduring an unpleasantness, looking forward to the time when it will be over. In the context of meditation practice though, I find it helpful to think about it in a bit different way, more along the lines of patience as “being with” what is difficult. This is like digesting some bitter thing, difficult to swallow.

The thing about this idea of eating bitter, is that we allow what is bitter to affect us and, in doing this, it becomes a part of us. While this is generally good, it needs to be handled carefully: in this sense, the Dharma is like a digestive enzyme that helps us to see clearly how to handle what is difficult and digest it. The “how to handle it” is mostly just the being with it and not trying to do something about it or with it: just let it arise and pass away, seeing it as clearly as we can. Sometimes, from this place, we might get an insight or sense of some thing that we could do to help the circumstance and often that is good to follow up on, always returning though, to the adequacy of “just being with.”

This “being with” is how we bring compassion into the world and into our own hearts. The word compassion, when you break it down into its root parts means with (com-) suffering, (-passion, from its old meaning and Latin roots). So just being willing to be with whatever difficulty arises either in us directly or in those around us immediately, or in those farther from us, is to bring compassion into our immediate life. To be still and aware and to have an attitude of open-handed letting go, is what allows us to digest what is bitter without getting stuck with it or becoming bitter ourselves.