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Talk Notes
You all probably know or you've guessed by my accent that I'm not a true Pacific Northwest native. I was born and raised in Germany. And just like we have our own personal karma to deal with with how we grew up, what we liked and disliked when we were kids, what stories we were told when we were children. So we have a family karma. We are born into a family. We don't get to vote about this and then we deal with it and live with it and grow up in it hopefully. And then we have this family karma. And then we have a karma that comes to us through our language. And each language expresses itself differently.
And so I didn't vote for that. I got stuck with a national karma being German that at times was a bit problematic.
And I always wondered what would I have done if I had been 30 years older, if I had grown up in Nazi Germany, how would I have handled it? Would I have conformed because it was comfortable and all your friends did it? Would I have been a rebel? Would I have protested because those things happened in Germany too. It's not the dark ages. It's just like last century, right? And so I have come to realize that my ancient twisted karma, it's like a wound and a button that I came to realize triggered me. It just triggered me out of out of habit, out of my conditioning. So, I grew up and I lived a whole life, I'm hitting 69 in a couple of months, was the idea that that autocracy and strong men in politics are kind of evil. I grew up with that. That's what I was taught. And so watching what has been going on in the United States actually it it just affected me beyond what it is worth.
We all have a karma that makes us think this is good and that is bad, you know. But we are also challenged through our practice continuously to look behind the curtain to not just say I will take curtain B and then just grab it and run with it. No, we we have agency. We can say ah I don't like curtain B. let me look what's behind the other ones. And so partially my dharma talk came from that place of thinking that place of thought and if I have bothered any of you with my political views or absence thereof I apologize. So my talk is going to focus on two old friends, Dharma friends of mine. One has the name Shantideva and the other one has Cheri Huber. How I forced the two of them under one hat is kind of sad too, but I'll try to make up for it by starting with a poem by Gina Puorro. It is called Feel it All.
Can you sit with this ocean of grief? Can you feel the gravity of what is happening without rushing towards silver linings or happy endings? Let the wound bleed a little longer without running to cauterize it with certainty or guarantees. Let the lacerations cut a little deeper, carving lessons of the great mystery into your flesh and lean in close to the pain. Can you soothe it without numbing? Feel the deep and raw somatic sensations that swell and ooze through each subtle body layer. Paint new landscapes with your fright nerves as your tongue searches for words in a language that you have never had to speak before.
Feel the searing truth that nothing is certain. Not today or tomorrow or not the very next breath. It never was. But in this moment, we cannot ignore that death sits close right now. We have a front seat to the cycles of living and dying. Feel the shakiness of your trust, the knowing fear, the sting of loss, the burning anger, the confusion leaving you grasping for why and how and when will this end? Dissolve into the still point beyond thinking and doing and feel the exquisite ache of the heartbreaking heart opening act of surrender.
Thank you Gina Puorro. Another nice poem. So tonight I want to speak about patience, anger and how we live in a world we did not design.
And I did draw quite a bit from Shantideva's chapter on patience in the Bodhicaryāvatāra also known as The Way of the Bodhisattva. It's one long poem. I strongly recommend it.
And I also helped myself to an essay by Cheri Huber from the book Trying to Be Human. And the the specific essay is titled A Project for Saving the World.
I picked those two because they're very practical. They speak to us as plain simple human beings who live in a world and we would like to tweak it a little.
Both are unsentimental and both ask us to look honestly at how we meet what is difficult. Shantideva does not coddle us. He does not say I get it that you are angry. He does not say it's healthy to express your anger. He basically says if anger were a good thing, the Buddhas would have recommended it. If you find that passage in the pali cannon, please let me know. I'm interested. But I don't think they did. So that to me means maybe we should take a look at what happens when we indulge our anger.
So Shantideva says that anger is not that helpful. In fact, let me read you the opening passage of the patience chapter. It's a very it's famous chapter six. It's interesting that Pema Chödrön's in her book No Time to Lose which is a commentary on this book titled the chapter anger not patience. So it starts out all the good works gathered in a thousand ages such as deeds of generosity and offerings to the blissful ones. A single flash of anger shatters them. No evil is there similar to anger, nor austerity to be compared with patience. Steep yourself, therefore, in patience, in various ways, insistently. Those tormented by the pain of anger never know tranquility of mind. Strangers they will be to every pleasure. They will neither sleep nor feel secure. And that's just the opening.
So Shantideva says in that chapter very clearly that anger is never helpful. It harms us first. It burns the heart. It narrows our vision. It convinces us that we are right. Damn it. And someone else is wrong and they don't get it. And that this story is the most important thing right now in the universe.
We know it's territory. The jaw tightens, the chest contracts, the muscles tighten, the mind loops, we rehearse our grievance over and over again. We have entire conversations in our head that actually never happened. We also replay conversations we did have and finally insert that smart ass answer we were always looking for.
We collect evidence. We build the case. We become very convincing to ourselves.
Then Shantideva offers a famous image. He says, "If I wanted to cover the whole earth with leather so my feet would not be hurt by thorns, I would need an impossible amount of leather and labor and no can do. But if I simply go ahead and put on some shoes, just cover the surface of my feet with leather, I am creating the same effect. I'm now safe to walk.
So how can we translate that into practice?
There are billions of people out there. Each one of those persons has their own agenda just like me.
So, how do I convince all of them that I'm right?
I'd say that's pretty much impossible.
So what can I do? I can influence one person and that happens to be me and I can practice I can practice with my anger. I cannot control the world. It probably would not be very good if I could to be honest. I cannot make everything safe or fair or reasonable. But I can work with this one mind. I can train my heart.
This is not resignation. This is radical responsibility. Shantideva is saying start where you actually have power. You have power in your life.
Start with this reactivity that you have and I promise I'll work with mine.
Maybe a good place is blaming other people for whatever.
So when you feel that urge, maybe stop it.
Start with the story you are telling yourself right now.
And then Shantideva gives us another line that feels almost shockingly practical. He says, "If you can do something about a situation, then you will do it. So why be upset? And if there is nothing you can do about it, what are you changing by being upset?
If there is nothing you can do, being agitated does not help. It only adds suffering.
So then often, maybe not everybody, but I used to think that my outrage actually was productive, that it would change something somewhere and that someone certainly would understand why I'm so upset and fix it.
So that means that we're confusing intensity with effectiveness.
Shantideva however is pointing out that upset is not the same as action. We can act without burning ourselves. We can care without poisoning our own heart.
So, a little thing you might want to think about in this coming week. Let's say you have an ex partner and you're still a little bit raw around it, right? And you're just having a lot of upset towards that person. and watch your body and what happens when you get kind of sucked into agitating about that person.
Your muscles will tighten. You you will maybe curl in a little bit. Your heart will beat a little bit faster and you'll see kind of red. And your part your ex partner in the meantime is vacationing in Hawaii, has an drink with an umbrella in it in the hand.
And think what's happening. You are getting all wound up. It's really not healthy to be angry. And the other person doesn't even know it and wouldn't even care. So in in Buddhism we call this drinking poison in the hope that your enemy dies. It's I've tried it's not working.
So now I would like to talk a little bit more about reality.
Reality has a terrible habit of being exactly what it is. No matter what we think about it, doesn't matter how we feel about it, no matter how strong our opinion is. Reality, reality does not check in with us first. It does not ask for permission. It just keeps showing up as itself.
Weather happens whether you have planned a picnic or not. Bodies age whether we like it or not. Governments govern lives.
Even when we have good arguments why things should be different,
we spend a surprising amount of time and energy argue with arguing with what is as if reality might eventually say, "You're right. You've been right all along. Let me change." But reality never does. Fighting with reality is a losing battle. It's like yelling at the river that it's flowing into the wrong direction. You can do it, of course, but it's pretty exhausting and useless. The river was not impressed.
So practice does not mean that we can change reality, but we can change how we relate to reality.
We stop turning away. We stop making more suffering by resisting what is already happening, what is already real.
Instead we turn toward that which is difficult. We lean in. We get curious. We come intimate with it. Not because it is pleasant but because it is true.
This is very different from resignation.
Being intimate means we actually feel what is here. The grief, the fear, the tenderness and we let it move through us while we stay present. We feel the fear. It is real. But instead of eating chocolate or playing another computer game or drinking or using drugs, we just lean into it a little bit more. What's behind that curtain?
What can I learn from it? What can I learn about myself from it?
So practice is not about creating a better reality. Reality is already perfect just the way it is.
And when we do that, then what happens is no longer the enemy.
It becomes a part of my life, something I can meet, something I can learn from, something I can respond to.
So again practice is not about creating a better reality. It is about meeting this one, this moment, this breath, this imperfect, complicated, heartbreaking world.
And from being intimate with it, something honest can arise.
So now I'm going to change a little bit over to Cheri Huber's essay.
And in this essay, she starts out that we often think hatred is helpful. I hate pollution. I hate traffic. I hate global warming. I hate the people who should be doing something about this.
Let's take global warming. It's real. And still I'm driving around with my car and sometime next in a couple of months I'm going to fly to Germany to visit my mom. Yeah, it's a carbon footprint like Bigfoot, but I'm going to do it and I'm going to feel part of me is going to feel bad about it.
So, we're constantly scanning for what is wrong or who is wrong, who is to blame.
Sometimes before we really work our way through this, we do believe that our outrage does fix things.
So Cheri Huber makes a crucial point.
The desire to deal with a problem does not have to be connected to feeling upset. caring. Our caring does not require rage. Commitment to a cause does not require that we hate the opposition.
Cheri Huber imagines a group of people who decide they are going to save the world. Not because they should, not because they believe something is wrong, but simply because they want to. So they adopt two rules.
Rule number one, they cannot blame anybody else. And rule number two, they cannot involve anybody else. They take complete responsibility. Their motivation comes from their own practice, from what feels alive and meaningful, not from indignation.
So she throws up a scenario. If we go about it in the traditional way, we are upset, we organize, we protest. But then she asks,
if we don't operate from a position of anger and upset, where do we get our energy? Where do we get the drive to do what's necessary? And it has to come from willingness.
Just like the Buddha wandered the plains of the river Ganges for many years, he didn't do it because he was upset. He did it out of willingness. And we need to find in us in our own self this place of willingness. Rather than carried by emotion, we have to bring our attention back to the present moment over and over again.
Cheri Huber brings up uh the example of meditation. When you go to your first sesshin, your first meditation retreat, you can't wait for it to start. You cannot wait to sit. But you know, after a while, it it fades. Usually around day three when your knees really start to hurt, you have to find your willingness because it matters to you. because it is how you want to live.
It does not seem that it is our job to fix the world.
Can we assume that another world is possible?
We've never experienced another world. This is it.
So what we do know is that people change when they take something on as a practice that is real, that is tangible and that is where transformation happens. And isn't it the funniest thing? When I change my my attitude, the whole world around me changes.
But back to Shantideva and the world we live in right now, the current political climate is designed to flame us intentionally. non-stop. As soon as we get over one statement, as soon as we've started to mentally cope with a slightly different world image, boom, the next thing happens and the next thing. And after a while, listening to the news feels like standing in the shower fully closed and all levers wide open.
It distracts us. It's a grand theater production. It feeds on outrage. It feeds on inflaming people. It rewards it. It trains us to reduce whole human beings to labels, to see them as idiots, villains, enemies. You pick it. And once we do that, it becomes very easy to justify our own anger and projected cruelty. How we think about whole sections of the population. Oh, they're this or they're that.
Shantideva is asking us not to take the bait.
Patience does not mean we become silent. It does not mean that we do not care. It means we watch our own mind as we care. That we notice when we are acting from clarity and when we are acting from reactivity. We ask ourselves, is this coming from my deepest values or the last sound bite I just heard?
If something, back to that line I quoted before, if something can be changed, then work to change it. If it cannot be changed, what is the point of being angry and upsetting yourself? Anger does not fix what is broken. It only adds more heat. So when we engage, we can ask ourselves some simple questions. Am I speaking from hatred or commitment? Am I truly listening or am I already mentally formulating my own attack? Am I trying to understand this person sitting across from me or am I just trying to win? This is where our practice gets real. Not on the cushion, but in conversations with our families and co-workers.
In the news cycle, am I listening to Fox or NPR or MSN Plus?
Patience means we stay grounded in the body. We breathe. We feel our feet on the floor. We remember that the person on the other side of the argument is also just trying to survive, trying to belong to someone and something, trying to feel safe. We can still disagree fiercely but we do not have to dehumanize and label the person.
Shantideva is not even asking us to be nice.
He's asking us to be free. Free from the reflex to burn ourselves with anger. Free from the compulsion to harden our heart. Free enough to respond wisely in a world that desperately needs wisdom.
And yes, how do we hold all we see and hear?
There is real injustice, real suffering, real harm. Don't turn away. But also do not let anger run your life. We can love this world and be devoted to changing it at the same time. These are not opposites. It's one reality. Acceptance means I see clearly what is here. I do not deny it. I don't have to like it. I let it touch me. Action means I respond from my deepest values, not from reactivity. From clarity, not hatred, from care and not fear. This is where Shantideva's leather sandals meet Cheri Huber's willingness. We cannot pave the whole earth, but we can work with this mind. You can notice what's going on. When you feel hatred and you are sure it's justified, please look again.
Notice your own edges. Where do you tighten? Where do you assign blame?
Why do you replay your stories but with better answers?
Put a little leather on your own feet.
Can you pause before reacting? Can you remember why you practice? This is the world we have right now. It is exactly as it is. Love it or hate it. This is it. Just this. This breath, this body, this sangha we can meet everything with clenched fists or with an open heart. We can dedicate ourselves to change without closing our hearts. That to me is patience. And this patience is not passive and it is not weak. Will you have the courage to be patient?
