Stopping the Wind
By Mark Epstein
The Abenaki Indians tell a story about a curious young warrior, an ancestor from
mythical times and something of a mischievous trickster, who sets out one day to
stop the wind. He had been trying to paddle his canoe across the river but the
wind kept blowing him back, making it impossible for him to get to the other
side. He goes after the wind, determined to find its source, and heads into it,
hiking over vast stretches of land. After a long search, he finds it high on a
mountain in the Adirondacks, in the form of an old wind-eagle whom he calls
Grandfather. He tricks Grandfather into falling into a crevice between two
mountains and thereby takes all movement out of the world. The weather gets hot,
the ponds dry up and fill with scum, the fish and animals die, and the people are
miserable. Stopping the wind makes everyone very uncomfortable.
In Tibetan Buddhism, and especially in the Tibetan medical system, “wind†is used
as a metaphor for mind because both are in constant motion. Anyone with what we
would call an emotional illness is said to have a “wind†disorder. There is a
prominent wind disorder that afflicts meditators who try too hard to calm the
mind, to force it into submission. The mind squeezes and tightens and “rises upâ€
in rebellion at the attempts to subdue it, and the meditator gets more and more
anxious and frustrated.
For the Abenaki people, their story is about how impossible it is to eliminate
any one aspect of the world, no matter how angry it is making us. The story
applies equally well in a Buddhist context. Just as wind is a part of creation,
so are anger, thoughts, or family turmoil. Stillness does not mean the
elimination of disturbance as much as a different way of viewing them. If we can
let anger rise and fall naturally, it becomes, in the Buddhist view,
self-liberating. We get into trouble with anger if we try to eliminate it too
perilously, through denial or avoidance, or if we turn it into hatred.
Using meditation or therapy to try to shut down parts of our experience is
ultimately counterproductive. We do not have to be afraid of entering unfamiliar
territory once we have learned how to hold experience within the gentleness of
our own minds. Learning to transform obstacles into objects of meditation
provides a much needed bridge between the stillness of the concentrated mind and
the movement of real life. As the practitioners of many martial arts often put
it, we must learn to respond rather than to react.
Read Mark Epstein's "Be Here Angry Now."
