Observations About Myself – It Helps to Keep Training By Brett Hanson I appreciate the dharma offerings I read from Reverend Masters Phoebe and Seikai, and it seems appropriate to make my own offering. I have taken the approach...
Observations About Myself – It Helps to Keep Training
By Brett Hanson
I appreciate the dharma offerings I read from Reverend Masters Phoebe and Seikai, and it seems appropriate to make my own offering. I have taken the approach of writing about my own experiences and how Buddhist training has helped me to understand my place in the world. Perhaps the reader will make a connection or relate in some way.
When I was a young adult, I decided that some of my emotions and personality traits needed to change. To manifest these changes, I attempted to control my feelings and thoughts and steer them in the direction that I felt would make me the best version of myself. Controlling thoughts and emotions did not work well for me. I was overly analytical and continually aware of my thoughts. I felt uncomfortable because I could not just be “myself” without evaluating my performance as a human at every moment. Since I could not do well at controlling my thoughts, I decided to control my actions in the physical world by exercising and eating well. My approach toward exercise was working out with weights and running more than was needed to maintain good health. I did not see bigger muscles because I lifted weights too frequently and did not get enough calories. My vigilance over my eating took the form of being very careful to eat only what I deemed to be very healthy food and to perform mental calculations on the number of calories I consumed. I underestimated the number of calories I needed. My lack of eating sufficiently resulted in binge eating. The binge eating meant I was out of control and created a vicious cycle.
This behavior was taking place when I began to practice Buddhism. My focus in training was to allow the thoughts to arise and pass without acting on them or passing judgement. This was very helpful and gradually I found a more balanced approach to my relationship with eating and exercising. I am also learning to be more accepting of myself just as I am.
When I look back at where I was, I find that now I am in a much better place. Of course, there is always more training to be done. I see that thoughts can be managed beyond simply letting them arise and pass. For example, I now see that self-criticism can be helpful to identify areas in which I can improve. It is the negative judgement of myself that is unnecessary. Now I focus on softening the self-critique and making room for a more positive assessment. Instead of concluding, “that was a dumb thing to do”, there is room for, “maybe that was not the best approach; I will try something different next time.” Making an effort to see my life through the lens of gratitude is another example of gently managing thoughts. Finding the positive aspects of a situation is yet another way in which I would coach my younger self on the benefits of “controlling thoughts.”
I struggle with anxiety. It seems that sometimes when a thought about something l dread, fear, or find unpleasant arises, I have developed a very fast (we are talking gunslinger quick!) mechanism for squelching the thought. This sequence happens so quickly that I do not even realize it has happened until I experience an uneasy feeling. I have not been able to reverse-engineer the process to get to the source. It seems that the anxiety I experience is a signal that I need to pay closer attention to my emotions as they arise. This has been a challenging reflex to observe in action. So far, I have been able to “catch” it just a handful of times. Habits of thought require ongoing attention. The difference between now and when I was younger is that I have learned not to force the solution and to judge myself less harshly. I have learned that the process of noticing is enough. I may observe the feeling-blocking reflex in action and allow the feeling to arise and thus decrease anxiety—or maybe not. I have developed faith that the practice is enough. This is where ongoing training is so valuable.
Another area in which I have lots of opportunities to practice is anger. When I was a young boy, my frustration would be expressed in the most severe swear words I knew: “pee-pee, potty, poo-poo!” I wish I could say I have outgrown this tendency, but alas that is not the case. I have strong opinions about the way events should unfold. When a thing does not go as I think it should I can become incensed. I have a few flashpoints; my anger can be quick to ignite because someone is not following rules of traffic and common courtesy. I can become upset when a physical action does not result in the expected outcome. For example, if I cannot loosen a bolt, I can be furious that it is not following my will. After all, I have very good reason for removing that bolt so it should cooperate with my plan! The commonality in these moments of daily living is that I can plead a pretty compelling argument for my viewpoint. Self-righteousness is very seductive! This is an area that still has lots of room for improvement. It is frustrating to observe that I am still quick to anger. I am always very disappointed in myself when I indulge in an anger outburst. The outward expression that explodes is not productive, nor is it helpful. It is frustrating to repeat what I know is not good to do. The best I can report is that slowly I am improving on noticing when a situation starts to unravel, and I am getting better at not adding fuel to the fire. Perspective helps here. I may not be a continuous example of equanimity anytime soon; perhaps not even in this lifetime. The important thing is to continue the work of finding balance.
Recently I was walking along a downtown area and on the other side of the street a loud altercation unfolded between two young men. One man was very upset and vocal about his anger, reaching the point of threating to kill the other. I could sense that when the threat was made, his anger was at a tipping point. It could have been allowed to lessen, but instead it was stoked. It can be hard to stand down at such a key moment; the emotion seems to almost demand to continue. I was grateful that two large men were hovering between the two angry parties in such a way as to indicate that they would intervene if the anger was expressed physically. I was distressed to witness the strong emotions, even from across the street. The argument served as a vivid reminder of how my own anger creates negative consequences. It inspired me to keep my anger in check. It also made me happy to observe that sometimes I reach the tipping point and even when I spark, I usually choose not to fan the flames that far.
Some five or so years ago, I saw a picture of myself in which my head was thrust forward. The picture gave clarity to a comment made to me years ago: that if I were an animal, I would be a turtle. Since then, I have been working to improve my posture from the shoulders up. My progress is going slowly. I am finding more and more occasions in which I become aware that I need to correct my posture. It seems that my default is head forward. The interesting part is my attitude towards the moment I realize that my head isn’t upright on my neck. I can be aggravated about it and think, “here I am again; back at square one.” In my better moments, I am grateful for the awareness and the opportunity to improve my posture. I think of it as a gong during mediation, reminding me to bring my attention back to the present. For me, this personal posture challenge illustrates why Buddhist training is simultaneously hard and easy. I think the hard part is when we realize that we need to make an adjustment in our thoughts/actions/deeds that will bring us closer in alignment to a way of living that reduces our karmic output. We might think, “I’m ‘doing it’ wrong! I’m inadequate. I am making such slow progress or no progress.” The easy part is that the recognition is enough; our Buddha nature will take care of the rest. The more our practice grows and our faith blossoms, we realize the “hard” part isn’t difficult. We let go of our judgement and ego and appreciate the insight. From this viewpoint, it is hard to imagine a life without training. I think this is why I have seen Reverends Phoebe and Seikai express surprise when someone says training can be hard. Life is harder without it.
Little by slow is the theme of my experience as a Buddhist and I have an analogy to describe why I think it is so for many people. Generally, one doesn’t see immediate benefits when starting a meditation practice. Much like dieting. If one is about to reach for another piece of cake, there is an immediate reward if the cake is eaten (this sure does taste good!). There is no immediate feedback in not eating the cake. A person doesn’t suddenly see or feel the body becoming leaner. It is disappointing to not experience the taste of the cake. If one stood on a scale after refusing extra cake, the needle would not drop a pound to reward the self-control. Only after weeks and months of declining the extra calories does one begin to see the results in the mirror and on the scale. As time passes, carrying less weight and having more energy are the reward. Training is the same way. As time passes we see things with increasing perspective and clarity. It does not happen immediately!
Years ago, my sister observed that emotions don’t have opposite and equal reactions. She noted that after being concerned or worried about something for an extended period, the relief did not last the same length as the preceding concern. She did not feel happy and elated for the corresponding duration once the situation was resolved. I thought of my own experience in school, being worried about doing well on an upcoming test long before exam day. After completing the test and doing well, I did not experience the corresponding amount of joy and jubilation to match all the worry I had felt, certainly not for the same amount of time I invested in worrying! I simply returned to my setpoint. This is the direction in which Buddhism points us, the middle way.
I am prone to dyslexia, which manifests in a number of ways. I rarely remember names of people or shows (or anything specific), and I get confused when directions consist of more than one or two steps. I am unable to remember specifics of a recent conversation. If I am given a verification code of 5 or 6 numbers, I frequently remember them out of order. I have a vivid memory of being given a list of words to learn to spell in high school. The list had 20 words or less and it took me well over two hours to remember how to spell them sufficiently to pass a spelling test. The common thread of my dyslexic experience is that I regularly experience an outcome other than what I expected because my thought/interpretation/mental formation is one thing, and the outward experience is another.
The way I have adapted to this untrustworthy aspect of my mental processing is to interact with the world based on the impressions I form, rather than specifics. I can recognize plots and characters, even though I can’t recall the name of the program or actor. I can recall the conclusion drawn or the message received in my interactions with others, though without the exact words. I either depend on someone else to navigate or I use the map/GPS feature in my phone. I triple-check my number recall and mathematical computations. I rely on the computer by using copy and paste and spell-check. I can usually identify when I have misspelled a word, even if I can’t summon the correct order of the letters. When I am able to develop processes and systems for accomplishing tasks, I am much less likely to make a mistake. When we all follow rules, it helps make things more predictable and I am less unnerved.
I have been writing this article over a period of months. As I reflect on what I have written, an insight occurred. The dyslexia I just described is the one of the reasons for my temper; it is frustrating when one thing is expected, and a different thing takes place. Frustration can quickly turn to anger. The anxiety I experience also has roots in my dyslexia: it is troubling when my internal mechanisms are not reliably consistent. Like almost all insights, it is helpful to have an explanation, but it does not change the work to be done. Insight or not, the solution is the same: continual training.
Happiness
By Rev. Master Seikai
Happiness is a subject that has been studied, analyzed, dissected, and debated for longer than we have a collective memory: we humans long for happiness and find it difficult to experience or hold onto for any length of time. And despite it being a universal human experience and longing, we cannot hope to agree on a precise definition of what it is in the first place. This being so, I cannot possibly add anything to the conversation that has not already been said many times, other than to share a few of my own experiences and whatever tiny gems of insight that have come out of them.
Some years ago American pop culture came up with a refrain: “Happiness is….” And then people filled in the last word with whatever it was that gave them happiness. There were lots of bumper stickers announcing what happiness is, perhaps the most common being “Happiness is being a grandparent”, grandmother or grandfather. In other words, as a society in search of happiness, everyone has to come up with their own answer as to what makes them happy, and then let everyone else know what that is. Still, the problem is that even if we find what makes us happy, we aren’t always happy: nothing works 100% of the time, and for that matter, nothing really works more than a relatively small percentage of the time.
That is a difficult conundrum for us humans, and we spend vast amounts of time and energy trying to come up with a solution. What actually works to make me happy? And even if it works for a while, it invariably wears off and then I’m back in the same boat, wanting to be happy. Religions and philosophies have taken on this problem and come up with every possible sort of solution, but you would think that if even one of them were foolproof, guaranteed to work, then everyone would do it and live happily ever after. Not only does that not appear to be the case, if anything people in the modern world, even with all its amazing technology, cures for illness, and material comforts, on the whole don’t come across as having found the key to happiness. One solution is to postpone the whole quest for happiness until after death, conceding that this human experience is just too difficult, in which case you hold out a formula for gaining rebirth in a happy realm when this human life comes to an end. Interestingly, some types of Buddhist teaching and philosophy do this very thing, like any other religion.
The other solution is to not give up on human happiness but come up with ways to cultivate it in the here and now—and there are thousands of approaches to that. Over eons of time, human cultures have all tried to adopt ways and means of cultivating happiness for the collective whole, always with varying degrees of success, the underlying problem being, as always, that conditions are constantly changing and even if a society succeeds for a while, things change—some neighboring tribe decides to invade your territory, some disease comes along to wipe out part of the population, or the climate changes and your Garden of Eden is no more. Right now, in Western society, we have discarded the old religion-oriented approaches to happiness and settled on a materialistic one. Happiness is….. usually having a lot of money, meaning you can buy whatever you want or need. But it can include fame, status, power, and having super-duper mind-blowing experiences! And hundreds of other options.
One of the most pervasive delusions of American culture is that winning = happiness. Everything is a contest and the goal is to come out on top, at which point you will, at least in theory, be happy. But we can look at the people around us and see that this isn’t actually how life works. I once watched a Super Bowl, at the end of which the television reporters interviewed the winning coach and players. Of course, most of them were yelling and pouring champaign over each other’s heads; but the head coach didn’t appear to be particularly happy, even in that joyful moment of having won the football championship. He openly said that he was already thinking about next year. That strange moment demonstrated one very powerful truth: you can’t be happy in any given moment if part of your mind is preoccupied with desire for something else. If we watch ourselves carefully in moments in which we are experiencing something pleasurable and ought to be happy, sometimes you can spot your own mind already drifting ahead to the next pleasure or the next high, meaning that you’re missing the one you’re in. And that same awareness can also lead to an equally important observation, which is the transitory nature of happiness and how quickly it tends to evaporate even if you are able to enjoy such a moment.
One common theme in America is to graft materialistic happiness onto religious happiness. You start with a firm belief in God and that he will grant you anything you truly desire if you have complete faith in him and agree to live by his word. For a lot of people this seems to work quite well at least up to a point. They actually do achieve all sorts of desired-for things in life and realize a degree of happiness as the result of their faith that they are worthy of it, and that God will bestow it on you if you ask him to. If you look at how this process unfolds over time, the materialistic part of it won’t actually be the real solution to the quest for happiness, for all the usual reasons, but rather what is really making the person relatively happy is that they are acknowledging the existence of something greater than themselves, and learning to let go of their selfishness in favor of conforming to a higher level of wisdom and intelligence than what they as a human being typically possess. In other words, if there is a solution to the happiness conundrum, it seems to lie in the realm of human beings giving up the search along the usual avenues of approach and turn to a religious approach in which one is able to touch a source of wisdom which allows us to experience a more durable sort of happiness than just getting what we want. That is pretty much where Buddhism takes up the challenge, the starting point.
In taking about the Buddhist approach to happiness, it is important to make a very clear distinction right at the beginning. This is that the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, didn’t set out on his own spiritual quest to find happiness per se; what he did was set out to find what would liberate him and his fellow humans from unhappiness. Whether or not that automatically included gaining happiness is another question, and indeed the Buddha didn’t usually talk about it. He did on occasion, but mostly he was concerned with the elimination of the causes of suffering. Interestingly, the word dukkha, often translated as ‘suffering’ or ‘unsatisfactoriness’, originally was derived from the situation of having an axle and a wheel to a cart which don’t fit together very well, and thus there is a constant grinding and squeaking sort of situation. That image is one we can all intuitively understand: the grittiness of life and how things so often don’t seem to want to work very well. So in searching for the causes of chronic grittiness, the Buddha had to identify why things don’t fit and why we react as we do to that state of affairs.
The football coach had desire already in his mind even within minutes of having won a championship. That desire just didn’t fit the moment and he gave away his own happiness in the process. But extrapolate that situation just a bit and you can begin to see what the Buddha discovered, which is that in any moment of life, regardless of the situation, desire gets in the way of our ability to be naturally happy. The reason children are capable of having such a great time doing simple things like chasing each other or climbing playground equipment is that they are totally in the moment and do not have a sack full of worries in the background like most adults. I remember reflecting on this situation when I was a kid and wishing I didn’t have to grow up and be given a big, heavy sack full of worries. My wish was not granted. But what I got instead was wisdom about how this whole process works, and this is probably even more precious. The real wisdom is that this one moment, right now, is the only moment in which we can truly be happy, and that as the Buddha taught, the important thing is to give up having desires for so many things. And because we desire so many things, we also give ourselves another big sack, this one full of aversion for anything which we imagine will get in the way of our imagined happiness. Desire, anger, fear and ignorance are the states of mind that get in the way. Can we actually get rid of them? According to what the Buddha taught about all this, the answer is yes. Within the answer being yes, we should also qualify it by saying that on a moment-to-moment level of human consciousness desires, anger, fears and ignorance occur to everyone, but we can become increasingly adept at recognizing them as such and letting go of them right away, rather than having them take root and turn into a big problem.
We should also make a distinction between happiness and peace of mind. What the Buddha was pointing to was peace of mind, or as his words have been translated, “unshakeable liberation of mind.” He was saying that you can liberate your mind from chronic states of fear, worry, anger, revenge-seeking, bitterness. Although you can never draw a clear line between happiness and peace of mind, happiness is somewhat ephemeral—it comes and goes—whereas peace of mind isn’t really affected by external circumstances. The ability to take everything in stride, knowing that you can rest securely in a place which is tapped into something infinitely deeper than temporarily feeling good, is the key.
Yesterday I met one of our neighbors who owns a house across the street and down the block. He and his wife were starting to clean up a mess left behind by some guys who had rented their house for three years and left behind an ungodly mess. When we arrived, to look at a discarded piece of furniture out on the curb, our neighbor was hurling epithets into space at his former tenants. I struck up a conversation about the guys who’d just left, and he slowly calmed down; then he said “excuse me for a minute” and had one last big blue streak of swearing. As our conversation unfolded and Rev. Phoebe and I disclosed that we were Buddhist monks who lived across the street, he was embarrassed that we had witnessed his outburst, but we assured him that it was completely understandable and that, in his shoes, we might do the same thing. Before we left he confessed that he had difficulty sleeping and what he really needed was peace of mind: how do I find it? We assured him it was possible, but that it would require some discipline. Intuitively he knew that but was still at a place where that very thing seemed out of reach. Having made friends, he invited us to his house a few blocks away up the hill, hoping that we would bring some more of that wisdom and calm with us.
The reason we meditate on a daily basis is to cultivate that deeper peace of mind. Most people think that good meditation would involve not having thoughts run through their mind, and because they find that impossible to do, they conclude that they can’t meditate. So I’m often in the position of explaining that what you’re really doing is just being aware of your mind, which includes all the crazy stuff going on, the swearing, the outrage, the embarrassment, the remorse—everything. What you need to do is to just accept it all. Coming back repeatedly to a place of simple acceptance of things as they are and of the mind as it is, something starts to change. You do not need to all of sudden change into a different and better version of yourself, but to have acceptance for yourself as you already are, which makes it possible to sit still on a deeper level. Compassion for oneself is like having a fountain in the center of your being; when life is difficult, when things go wrong, when we’re frustrated or worried, taking some time to just be with it all without self-judgment or condemnation turns it right around.
My Zen teacher had a couple of sayings she would repeat on occasion: “Training may not make you happy;” and “A dog lying in the sun is happy.” I can remember feeling a little bit disappointed when first hearing the first one; after all, wasn’t the point of all this to relinquish suffering and find happiness? But what she was trying to teach her disciples was that you shouldn’t expect life to be rosy just because you practice Zen. If anything, you are more likely to go through a period of things being really challenging, meaning that you have put yourself into a process of carefully looking at all the things that you do to yourself which rob you of peace of mind. I found that out for myself very quickly. And having immersed myself in that process of looking honestly at my own mind and accepting it as it was, I soon realized that this process was like peeling away the skin and layers of an onion to get down to the core of it, which was another metaphor that she used to describe Zen practice. And what is at the core as and when you work your way all the way down to it? Infinite acceptance and loving kindness.
I have at times felt envious of dogs that they can in fact lie in the sun and be happy. The ability to enjoy a very simple pleasure so often seems out of reach, probably because we humans carry so much excess baggage around with us and have trouble just setting it down. This points to another whole aspect of being at peace within yourself, which is the ability to hold things lightly. So often we take ourselves so seriously that it becomes hard to just lie in the sun and be happy. Over time one of the things I’ve learned about myself is that I literally need to sit in the sun, because if I don’t I tend to become depressed. Not everyone is this way, so I’m not advocating sitting in the sun to be happy, like a dog, but rather that all of us have things about ourselves that we may not be able to change; we are simply put together a certain way. Another thing I discovered is that I will be happier if I’m able to work in the garden on a regular basis. Literally being out in the earth on my knees, getting my hands dirty, making a place look beautiful seem to be a part of life that I should not deny myself. Once again, not everyone is this way, but on the other hand there have been studies done in recent years which demonstrate that all sorts of mental and emotional problems are greatly reduced when people are in touch with natural surroundings, and when they are able to do gardening in particular. There is something fundamentally human about being in touch with the earth.
Because full acceptance is always a challenge, it is helpful to question yourself regularly about exactly what you find unacceptable. I routinely ask myself: ‘well, if you’re not happy with this particular set of conditions, what would you like to change?’ Most of the time, this question will unmask a bit of ‘just wanting things to be different than they are, because that will make me happy’ kind of thinking. So then it becomes apparent that that little bit of insistence that things be a certain way is the real problem. Once in a while I can see that there is something I can actually do, at which point the doing isn’t typically a struggle, but what had to come first was acceptance of things as they are. Life flows so much easier if we are able to let it happen and not try to be in control all the time. And if needing to be in control isn’t taking yourself too seriously, then what is? If I’m not trying to be in control, trying to direct traffic, then life is usually pretty good. In other words, what a dog lying in the sun can teach us is to relax completely and just be. It is so simple we often don’t see it, but it isn’t anything more complicated than getting the self out of the way and letting go of control.
If it is true that the best approach is to not seek happiness directly, but rather to eliminate our various sources of unhappiness, do we then find ourselves in a naturally happy state of being? This is a difficult question because the answer is both ‘yes’ and ’no.’ As I have been pointing out, Buddhist practice doesn’t necessarily make us happy per se, but it does lead to peace of mind, which runs deeper and is far more durable than happiness. On the other hand, what I’ve found repeatedly in my life is that practice makes it far easier to be naturally happy. As with children playing or a dog lying in the sun, if we slowly but surely learn to let go of our sack of worries and concerns, and learn not to take ourselves too seriously, it seems that moments of joy or happiness are never very far away. The world being what it is, I find it hard to imagine that anyone could live totally without any concerns, worries, fears, apprehensions, or moments of frustration or anger; but the more adept we become at holding them lightly, not making them the focus of our lives, the more we can experience natural happiness. Which is to say that to a large extent, happiness is a choice we make in life: we have a lot of latitude in choosing what to focus on.
When I survived cancer 13 years ago, I made a conscious choice to “just try to enjoy life.” That decision was reflective of a past condition of life being somewhat burdensome—which, if you have cancer of some kind isn’t at all surprising. But on a deep level I also recognized that I held on to certain things and needed to let them go if I wanted to enjoy life more fully. Mostly what I do now is to give up trying and to just enjoy life. I’m someone who typically tries very hard, works very hard to get something done or arrive at some better place—which, in the end, can get in the way of pure being. Pure being doesn’t need anything added to it, which means that it is something we can experience as we already are, right now. We often employ the term “Buddha Nature” in an effort to describe this natural condition of being. I think it is probably as close as we can come to a brief but accurate description.
