Holding our suffering with compassion

https://chatgpt.com/share/ae51bd47-b058-409b-ad78-f75d0f156b72

Updated with reminder on Dogen's belief about meditation being the seat of ease and repose: 

https://chatgpt.com/share/ae51bd47-b058-409b-ad78-f75d0f156b72

Fwd: The Raft: Peace and Happiness

How can we live a happy and peaceful life in a world filled with suffering?

Translate or view in browser Inspiration from the International Plum Village Community May 2024 "Our life will be filled with happiness if we can help others around us. But if we spend our whole life building up our name and our fortune, we cannot find happiness. We might have a lot of money, a big house, and a luxurious car, but that's not real happiness. We can only taste real happiness when we can help others." Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is This Moment Peace and Reconciliation Brother Phap Dung of Deer Park Monastery gave a Dharma talk at Dartmouth College on peace and reconciliation: "The topic of peace is is always in our heart; our teacher, that's his whole life: he grew up during wartime with the French occupation, and then the Japanese and then the Americans bringing a lot of violence to our country in Vietnam. So his whole life was dedicated to try to find another option besides resorting to violence. There was a period when he was young, he was tempted to actually leave monastic life and and join the resistance movement to fight against the foreign French and American forces that were bringing in a lot of violence… [But] Thay wanted to find another way of peace so this is why he dedicated his life as a monastic to help people come to a place of nonviolence." Watch Can You Live a Happy Life? In this article on Buddhist ethics, based on a talk given by Thay in 2008/9, we look deeper into the use of Normative Ethics alongside our practice to help us determine what is "right" and how this can lead to a happy life: "Your way (of seeing) determines whether something is suffering or not. For example, when we clean the toilet. We can ask: is cleaning the toilet a pain or a pleasure? It depends on the person, right? There are people who don't have a toilet to clean. There are people who have toilets, but don't have soap or toilet cleaner to clean them. There are people who have a toilet, but don't have the time to clean it. And so these people may be very happy to clean the toilet. 'How lucky to have a toilet to clean, to have a clean toilet to use,' so while cleaning the toilet, happiness is possible. But if you think, 'Someone like me, cleaning toilets?' then you would be miserable. So whether suffering or joy, or happiness, depends on us." Read Q & A: The Art of Happiness During the Order of Interbeing retreat "The Art of Happiness" at Blue Cliff Monastery, a panel of the fourfold Sangha— a nun, monk, lay woman, and lay man— offered a Question and Answer session in which they addressed questions such as: How do you cultivate happiness in your daily life? When you feel discouraged, how do you get up and continue on this path? How do I transform my habit energy so I do not transmit my ancestral suffering to my children? It is wonderful to find happiness while walking in nature, but what about the people who work long hours and don't have time? Watch   Guided Meditation: Touching the Buddha Within This 23-minute guided meditation with Sister Dao Nghiem helps us get in touch with our Buddha nature, arriving one step closer to realizing understanding and compassion. By letting our Buddha nature act for us, we act from compassion and understanding. Listen Five Mindfulness Trainings Now in Twelve Languages The Five Mindfulness Trainings have their root in the Five Precepts offered by the Buddha. They have been expanded and updated so that they represent a way to bring mindfulness into every area of life. Rather than hard and fast rules, they offer us a path to cultivate and develop actions of body, speech and mind that can create a more healthy and compassionate world. With the latest addition of Hindi, they are now available in English, Vietnamese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Greek (Ελληνικά), Bulgarian (български), Chinese (中文), and Turkish (Türkçe). Read Retreats & Events We offer a separate email containing upcoming retreats, events, and community news. Make sure you are signed up by checking your email preference center. If you can't wait for the next events email, we invite you to take a look at these resources: Online Events Retreat Calendar Thank You We would like to share with you our heartfelt gratitude for your continued practice and for your support for our beloved monastics and the International Plum Village Community. As we say in the Plum Village tradition, "You are, therefore I am." We wish you and your loved ones safety, health, and ease.

Hugh Byrne (Feb 27, 2022) on Rilke, kindness towards self, overcoming fear with kindness towards self

Summary of Live Session, February 27, 2022: 

"It was good to be with everyone today and hold in our hearts and meditation the people of Ukraine at this extraordinarily difficult time. The theme of our session today was ‘Working Wisely and Kindly with Fear.’ 

I shared that while many people view fear and anger as ‘negative’ emotions, it is more helpful to see them as intelligent, survival-based emotions that allowed our ancestors to respond immediately to threats and be able to survive and pass on their genes. These emotions provide us with helpful information and continue to be necessary and useful to us today—particularly in situations of danger. 

These emotions can get us into trouble when we do not respond to them with awareness and, particularly, when we create fear-based, future scenarios that may never happen, but keep us locked in a fight-or-flight reaction. I used the image of the Zen monk in a cave, who painted a tiger on the wall and was terrified every time he looked at the image of the tiger. We often paint pictures in our minds—sometimes catastrophizing—and then become activated and fearful when we think of the pictures or fears we’ve created ourselves. As Mark Twain reputedly said, ‘My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’ 

So, when fear arises in the mind, rather than getting caught up in thoughts about what might happen, it is wise to stay grounded in our direct experience, particularly bodily feelings and sensations, and, meet them with kindness, letting them come and go. 

Two keys to working with fear are, first, to meet fear with awareness—making space for whatever we’re experiencing, ‘welcoming the guests’—and letting the sensations, feelings, and emotions come and go without resistance or getting lost in thoughts and narratives about the situation. 

The second essential way of working wisely with fear is to bring in the heart—to meet fear with loving-kindness and compassion, rather than with aversion and ‘fearing the fear.’ I shared the Buddhist legend of the origin of the practice of loving-kindness (metta)—of the Buddha giving his followers the practice of metta as an antidote to fear—and Sharon Salzberg’s reflection on the meaning of the story: that loving-kindness can penetrate and dislodge fear, but a heart filled with love and friendliness cannot be overtaken by fear. 

The stories and poems I shared include:

• Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’—where he invites his young friend to ‘always trust in the difficult’ and turn towards what we fear: ‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.’ And he adds, ‘Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.’

• Wendell Berry’s poem ‘I go among trees’

• W.B. Yeats, “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” (‘The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore’)

• Romain Rolland, ‘There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.’

• Some of Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’, Martha Postlethwaite’s ‘Clearing’, and Mary Oliver’s ending to ‘The Summer Day’—‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.’

Wishing you a safe and open-hearted week ahead. Let us hold the people of Ukraine in our hearts, prayers, and meditation—and do all that we can to support them in this hour of need. See you next Sunday at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🇺🇦💙 💛 🙏🏻

If it has terrors, they are our terrors -Rilke

~ Arrange our lives to always trust in the difficult.

~ the myths about dragons ...dragons are ultimately transformed into princes...acting with beauty and courage...opening to what is scary or difficult.

opening to whatever is scary...with courage, with kindness

Rilke on th emyth of dragons and transforming the scary into prince.

'this moment without judgment' ~  - Dorothy Hunt

may I be kind to myself....may I accept myself just as I am.

Perhaps everything that frightens us is helpless, wants our kindness ~ Rilke

Romain Roland   https://www.azquotes.com/author/12563-Romain_Rolland

only one true heroism...to see the world as it is, and to love it.

https://whatsmyquote.com/quote/there-is-only-one-heroism-in-the-world-to-see-the-world-as-it-is-and-to-love-it/page/2

Wishing oneself well, to love the world, we  must love ourselves first...lovingkindness and care towards self. Wishing this intention can plant the seeds of possibility... (include the people of Ukraine).

Kindness has no enemy...includes everyone. particularly today the people of Ukraine...even Putin himself. 

This is 'unconditional' ...for all beings.

Wendell Berry - I go among trees...It sings and I hear its song."

At Seven Mile Rapids - Su T'ung Po (1037-1101)

At Seven Mile Rapids

A light boat, one lone leaf,
a startled swan, two oars.

Water and sky are pure Clarity, reflecting deep.
Waves smooth, fish roil this duckwood mirror, 
And egrets dot misty shorelines. 

We breeze past sandy streams, 
frostfall streams cold,
Moonlight streams aglow.

Ridge above ridge, like a painting.
Bend beyond bend like a screen. 

Here I think back to Yen Zi Ling's empty old age, 
Lord and recluse, one dream. 
Renown's empty then as now.

Just mountains stretching away,
Cloud mountains erratic, 
Dawn mountains green.

-- Su T'ung Po (1037-1101), translated by David Hinton, in 'Mountain Home: The wilderness poetery of Ancient China', page 226, published 2014.

Any Morning by William Stafford

Just lying on the couch, and being happy

Only humming a little,  the quiet sound in the head. 

Trouble is busy elsewhere in the world. 

It has so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep 

They can't monitor you all the time 

and sometimes they forget
when dawn flies over the hedge you can get up and act busy 

Little corners like this, pieces of heaven, left lying around  

Can be picked up and saved.
People won't even see you have them.

They're so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others. 

You can shake your head, you can frown. 

Degreasing

Allow for Space

Tsoknyi Rinpoche

The difficulty most of us face is that we’re afraid of our humanity. We don’t know how to give our humanity space. We don’t know how to give it love. We don’t know how to offer our appreciation. We seize upon whatever difficult emotions or painful thoughts arise—in large part because we’ve been taught from a very young age that life is a serious business. We’re taught that we have to accomplish so many things and excel at so many things because we have to compete for a limited amount of resources. We develop such high expectations for ourselves and others, and we develop high expectations of life. Such a competitive, goal-oriented approach to life makes us very speedy inside. We become so tight physically, mentally, and emotionally as we rush through each day, each moment, that many of us forget—often quite literally—to breathe.

When we allow space into our meditation practice, however, something quite wonderful begins to happen. That solidity, that seriousness begins to break down. We begin to relax a bit more and experience some of the fluidity we enjoyed as very young children. We begin to dance with our experience: “Haaa ... I’m so upset … I’m so good … I’m happy … I’m a human being ... I might be upset, but I’m alive … If I were dead, I might not have emotion … but, wow, I’m alive.”

We also gradually cut through the habit of identifying with each emotional wave that passes through our awareness. We can be angry, jealous, or scared without having to act on those emotions or let them take over our lives. We can experience joy or love without becoming attached to the object that we think is the cause of our joy.

All too often, the emotions we experience, along with the thoughts and behaviors that accompany them, become part of our internal and social story lines. Anger, anxiety, jealousy, fear, and other emotions become part of who we believe we are, creating what I would call a “greasy” residue, like the oily stuff left on a plate after eating greasy food. If that residue is left on the plate, eventually everything served on that plate starts to taste alike; bits of food start to accumulate too, stuck to layers and layers of greasy residue. All in all, a very unhealthy situation!

When we allow space into our practice, though, we begin to see the impermanent nature of the thoughts and feelings that arise within our experience—as well as of the conditions, over many of which we have no control. That greasy residue doesn’t build up, because there’s no “plate” for it to cling to. If we can allow some space within our awareness and rest there, we can respect our troubling thoughts and emotions, allow them to come, and let them go. Our lives may be complicated on the outside, but we remain simple, easy, and open on the inside.

From Solid Ground by Sylvia Boorstein, Norman Fischer, and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, © 2011. Reprinted with permission of Parallax Press.

Our True Nature is Awareness - Warren Lang

Warren offered this poem tonight.  He said "Our true nature is awareness"....  He wrote this wonderful poem:

Breathe and breathe
Again.
Observe the mind.
Never leave this seat.

And his 'explication de texte', of his own text, is helpful:  Let the thoughts and feelings and other phenomena 's'evanouissent'.  See the ephemerality of phenomena.  This is liberation.

See how the process of 'identifying with suffering' only increases suffering or said differently, it keeps the suffering in the perceived domain of 'permanence', more ego-delusion. 

Identifying with suffering engenders actions that often increase suffering. No thought or condition is permanent. 

Our true seat is the seat of awareness; our true home is the awareness that we always have available.

....

from Verse 1 of Hakuin's Chant in Praise of Zazen: :

From the beginning all beings are buddha
Like water and ice, without water, no ice.
Outside us, no Buddhas.
How near the truth, yet how far we seek.
Like one in water crying 'I thirst',
Like a child of rich birth, wandering poor on this earth,
We endlessly circle the six worlds.
The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion. 
From dark path to dark path, we've wandered in darkness.
How can we be free from this wheel of samsara?

from Verse 2 of Hakuin's Chant in Praise of Zazen: 

The gateway to freedom is zazen samadhi,
Beyond exultation, beyond all our praises,
the Pure Mahayana.
Observing the precepts, repentance and giving,
the countless good deeds and the way of right living
all come from zazen. 
Thus one true samadhi extinguishes evil,
It purifies karma, dissolving obstructions. 
Then where are the dark paths to lead us astray?
The pure lotus land is not far away.
Hearing this truth, heart humble and grateful,
To praise and embrace it, to practice its wisdom,
Brings unending blessings, brings mountains of merit. 

from Verse 3 of Hakuin's Chant in Praise of Zazen:

But if we turn inward and prove our true nature
That True self is No self,
Our own self is no self,
We go beyond ego and past clever words.
The gate to the oneness of cause and effect is thrown open, 
Not two and not three, straight ahead runs the Way.
Our form now being no form,
In coming and going, we never leave home. 
Our thought now being no thought,
Our dancing and songs are the voice of the dharma

A discussion too about being a grumbler, a natural tendency to attempt to problem solve, to not relinquish control;  the ego desperately wants to maintain control of situations.  Desperately wants the world to be a 'certain way'.  But each moment offers a new beginning, a new reality...not one whose conditions will ever be what we can imagine.  "Rest your frontal lobe.'' 

The grumbler will benefit from 'the mindfulness practice' ...that awareness that is always present.  A samadhi can be sourced through Zazen samadhi but also dishwashing samadhi, driving samadhi, etc.

Warren ended with a prayerful meditation from Glimpse After Glimpse, April 17:  

Rest in natural great peace. 
This exhausted mind 
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves 
In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace. 

NYOSHUL KHEN RINPOCHE


Warren offered how the breath connects inside with outside...two dimensions of the same abiding moment.  One without the other is not possible. 

I Like it...but is it Meditation?

An appreciation of everyday mindfulness

By Barry Evans

MY LIFE IS FULL of meditation: I gassho before I eat. I turn the shower to “cold” before I get out. I visually check the state of the tide in our bay every morning en route to our local coffee shop. I do the New York Times crossword over coffee. My pal Mike and I play pool at our neighborhood bar Monday nights. I take my kayak out on Humboldt Bay several times a week. I usually check the stars (or, more likely, the overcast sky) from the darkness of our hot tub before going to bed. These are my rituals.

Meditation? What’s all that got to do with meditation? Well, it depends how you define it. Strictly speaking, and in the Soto Zen tradition in which I practice, meditation is sitting quietly on a zafu, eyes half-open, mindfully paying attention to my breathing. It starts with a bell ringing and ends with a bell ringing. Kinhin—walking meditation—is an extension of shikantaza, “just sitting.”
That’s what I think of as “formal” meditation, 30 minutes or so a day. Then there are the myriad openings for informal meditation, like those I’ve mentioned above. Pool? Crosswords? Tides? Oh sure, and much more: the daily—hourly, even—opportunities to be mindful, to stop and pay attention, to take a breath of gratitude, to appreciate the Ultimate Fact of Life: I’m here!

For the first two thousand years of its existence, Buddhism was mostly confined to monasteries with strict rules, timetables, and hierarchies. In contrast, Zen in America today finds the majority of its followers in the lay world, where most of us have families, jobs, and homes. Our zendos are places to visit, perhaps daily, but more likely once or twice a week: refuges, perhaps, from the “real world” of money and responsibility.

Along with the “layification” of Zen has come a sharp distinction, for most of us, between meditation and the rest of life. While the monks of old lived and breathed, day in day out, year in year out, in an atmosphere of stillness and contemplation— their entire lives were one unbroken meditation!—we modern practitioners stop what we’re doing when we sit and restart our everyday lives when the bell signals that time’s up. The result of this is an apparent dichotomy: either I’m meditating (on my zafu, often in the zendo, sometimes at home), or I’m not meditating (the rest of the time).
What’s lost in this either/or distinction is the idea that meditation can be anything I choose to make it. Sure, I can define meditation rather narrowly as the time spent on my cushion. But if I do so, I’m elevating sitting over everyday awareness and thus diluting the possibilities for all those other quotidian opportunities for mindfulness.

So what is meditation, if it’s not zazen? It’s easy to think of it in terms of the zazen process: solitary (even when you’re elbow-to-elbow with fellow sangha members), quiet, physically upright, mentally focused (in most forms), precisely timed, free of outside stimulation. That’s usually how meditation is defined: how it looks and what we do for those 30 or 40 minutes.

Another way to look at it is from the point of view of what it offers. I recognize that this is anathema to many meditators—for years, on being asked why I meditated, I’d say something like, “I don’t know, I just do it.” (Attainment? Oh please!) The fact remains that, consciously or unconsciously, I do things for a reason. I wasn’t born a blank slate. I came with a standard-equipment brain that constantly makes decisions based on the available information. At some level, whether I’m aware of it or not, I meditate because of some perceived benefit.

I suspect it’s the same for everyone— I’ve asked fellow meditators the same question, and they all give me some reason, from “helping me get through the day” to “taking me to the root of things” to “seeing the big picture of life.” My own “why” list is something like this:

A sense of gratitude (Hey, I’m alive!)
Playfulness (My mind sure knows how to have fun)
Self-awareness (I’m aware that I’m aware, whoa!)
Humility (OK, Barry, don’t take yourself so seriously)
Intimation of mortality (This breath is one breath less…so don’t squander!)
Creativity (I’ve got to remember that great idea for later)
Adventure (Wonder what’s coming next?)

All these gifts usually appear to me at some time or other during zazen. But the rest of life offers so many opportunities for welcoming exactly the same gifts, so long as I’m willing to notice and accept them. It just (just!) takes the slightest mental nudge to transform the usually unnoticed happenings of my life into rich servings of observed experience. It helps to think of them as mini-meditations.
Take pool. I’m a mediocre—make that bad—pool player, but I’m also lucky. Sometimes, when I’m in the flow, I’m like Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie, effortlessly potting one ball after another. At those times, I’m never more alive, never more aware of the bittersweetness of this life, gratitude balanced by poignancy: one day this will end. And the humility of watching the cue ball roll unerringly toward the corner pocket. It’s meditation writ large, it’s fulfilling and engaging and just plain fun.
Same with solitary kayaking, coldshowering, gazing up at night—with all of my rituals, in fact: appreciating the enormity of it all compared to this meager body and mind, taking refuge in my breath, finding myself still here, giving thanks for being a player in Life, all available simply for the noticing.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with zazen—in fact, I credit zazen with helping me to pay attention to non-zazen events. It’s just that when I put so much stock in formal meditation, I forget that it’s only one way of helping me see the magic that surrounds me and that is me. Redefining meditation simply as “the opportunity to notice” opens up a world of possibilities.

Seeing zazen as simply one more activity—no more or less meaningful than solving a cryptic clue or watching a pelican dive-bomb for his lunch or sinking the eight ball—helps level the playing field between “sitting” and “the rest of life.”

And guess which of these I spend more time in?

Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) is a member of the Arcata Zen Group in California. He also sits with Akira Kasai in Guanajuato, Mexico. When he isn’t being cynical, he thinks meditation may save the world.