Category: Changing habit patterns

I was so Mad…

October 28, 2019

Addiction, Anger#, Awareness, Buddhism, Changing habit patterns, Choice, compassion, Control, Mindfulness of feelings, not abandoning, Uncategorized

Montana hayfield. Photo by Sofie Kirk

“When someone does not know how to handle his own suffering, he allows it to spill all over the people around him. When you suffer, you make the people around you suffer. That’s very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won’t spread it everywhere.”

~Thich Nhat Hanh, from Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

“A person overwhelmed with anger destroys his wealth.

Maddened with anger, he destroys his status.

Relatives, friends, & colleagues avoid him.

Anger brings loss. Anger inflames the mind.

He doesn’t realize that his danger is born from within.” ~Excerpt from

“Kodhana Sutta: An Angry Person” (AN 7.60), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

“Anger is a zone of energy in us. It is part of us. It is a suffering baby we have to take care of. The best way to do this is to generate another zone of energy that can embrace and take care of our anger. The second zone of energy is the energy of mindfulness.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh, from Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

Dear Friends,

Two weeks ago, I got mad. Not regular mad, but extra-mad, boiling. Getting mad is not extraordinary, nor is it worth mentioning except for the fact that I have been practicing with my anger for the past 14 years. I had enough experience with anger to believe I knew how to handle this strong emotion, but given the right conditions, anger can be like a riptide and drag us under.

Anger is a secondary emotion. This means that although we attribute the cause of our anger to external conditions—anger is a response to emotions that may be so fleeting or shadowed by the powerful quality of anger, we aren’t aware of them. The “Anger Iceberg” from the Gottman Institute shows some of the feelings below the surface of anger. As practitioners, we understand we are responsible for our creations of body, speech, and mind. This includes how we handle our anger.

Anger serves an important function for the biological survival of our species. Anger arises as a response to the signal of threat and lets us know something is wrong and lets us know when a situation is not ok for us. Anger, with its accompanying adrenalin and norepinephrine, moves us from passivity to action and can propel us to leave an abusive situation, to make changes, to stand up for injustice. We do not want to suppress, ignore, or get rid of anger. It is a crucial part of our ability to take care of ourselves.

Unfortunately, when we are in anger, our nervous system is flooded with stress hormones and the part of our brain that understands about consequence, kindness, and wisdom doesn’t get the oxygen and glucose it needs to function properly. We are operating from the emotional center, the limbic region of the brain. You may notice that in anger, we are very limited and focused—on what is going wrong. We lose the ability to see a bigger picture and to see we have choices. We become reactive and depending upon our conditioning we may yell, fight, both physically or verbally, or escape without understanding the consequences of our actions. In anger as the Dalai Lama says, “we lose the best part of our brain.”

Another aspect of anger I can speak to is the addictive quality of anger. The opioid receptors in the neuropeptide system link the behavior—the action of anger with the reward of pleasure and relief. We get a spike of dopamine when we act or speak in anger, the same high that accompanies narcotics, sugar, or sex. In anger, we are flooded with adrenalin which gives us purpose and provokes action. We can enjoy this feeling of importance and derive pleasure from the righteousness of being wronged. We can get swept out to sea by our anger and the resulting pleasure from the neurochemical cascade and wonder how our mindfulness evaporated so quickly.

I’ve learned over the past years that anger gives plenty of warnings, so I have the opportunity to stop and attend to the feelings that are present before it gets to boiling. As Tara Brach tells us, “everything belongs,” even our emotional responses. We don’t have to shame ourselves or get rid of our angry reactions but recognize that we are called to witness our anger with the same compassion and curiosity we bring to all other aspects of our experience. We can acknowledge that we are fully responsible for the creation of our emotions and what we choose to do with them. This is karma, the literal consequences that result from our actions.

So how do we engage with anger skillfully? When I was so angry, I found myself struggling with the energy of the anger itself—which brought me into the forever humbling experience of being a human being who is subject to stress and overwhelm. I have learned that despite years of practice, anger is one of the strongest biological and habitual snares I’ve encountered. Although I didn’t discharge my anger at anyone—it certainly made my life a hell realm for a while. I found myself shaking my head at how small I had let my world become. When I looked at the situation from a cooler perspective, I saw that my feelings of being trapped, overwhelmed, and helpless could have been resolved with two phone calls and the magic word, “no.”

Dharma teacher Joanne Friday asks us to consider if we are a victim or a student in this lifetime. When I acted from a place where I forgot I had a choice, I was a victim and my anger reflected the injustice and powerlessness of that perception. When I looked at my response as a student—I saw that old habits made me consider other’s needs and happiness above my own. When I agreed to do more than I could, I sacrificed my ease and physical wellbeing. My anger was the cry of my own body and mind that wanted to be considered and to matter.

What I forget and learn over and over, is that I need to matter to myself. When I matter to myself, I understand the limits of my abilities. I don’t overload my schedule. I get support for the heavy lifting—both physically and metaphorically in my life. This takes real mindfulness of the body and mind and recognition of our moment by moment experience. Mattering to myself isn’t narcissistic flattery or propping up my ego with importance. It means that I extend the same care and concern for myself as I do for the other people in my life.

This week I invite you to take some time out to see how you are mattering to yourself. Are you responding from habit and doing what you always do—feelings of irritation, frustration, and wanting things to be different are a hint that we are not considering our own wellbeing. What are some actions we can take to let ourselves know we matter? Time for play and relaxation, getting help, adequate sleep, time to eat without rushing, respecting ourselves enough to arrange travel time so we arrive refreshed and calm—all these strategies can help undo the conditioning that tells us to hurry and to abandon ourselves. When we value the quality of our own consciousness and we demonstrate it with our words, deeds, and thoughts, we are learning to entrust ourselves into our own care. Looking with wisdom at how we support our practice and our own capacity for peace and resilience creates the framework that strengthens our commitment to living in awareness with compassion for all beings—including ourselves.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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I Want to Live With An Empty Boat

June 25, 2019

Big mind, Blaming, Buddhism, Changing habit patterns, fearlessness, Inner Peace, Irritation, Uncategorized

Rainbow on Cape Newagen, ME: Photo by Karen Swanson

“How much ‘ego’ do you need? Just enough so that you don’t step in front of a bus.”

~Shunryu Suzuki

“Whatever happens in your life, joyful or painful, do not be swept away by reactivity. Be patient with yourself and don’t lose your sense of perspective.”

~ Pema Chodron

“Fearlessness is not only possible, it is the ultimate joy. When you touch nonfear, you are free.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Dear Friends,

I was cleaning out my oversized bag, getting ready for my trip across country. As I discarded old receipts and empty stevia packets, I found a note to myself that said, “write about loving without the judgment, the non-self—the empty boat.” I was delighted to remember the story of the empty boat and decided to take my own suggestion and write about these three things. To begin, I must write about the story first. I loved this story the first time I heard it in one of Jack Kornfield’s dharma talks. It is also included in a book by Tibetan nun, Pema Chodron. Searching a bit more on the internet, I found that that the seed of this story originally came from the Taoist sage, Chuang Tzu, who lived in the 4oo BCE.

The story goes that a fisherman is out in the early morning on the river. As the sun comes up, he sees another boat further down the river. As the boat approaches, the fisherman can see it is steering directly towards his boat. He shouts a warning as the boat gets nearer. The boat continues to come closer. Again, this time with anger, he yells to steer the boat away from his. The approaching boat doesn’t turn, and the fisherman watches embroiled in rage, as the boat crashes into the side of his vessel. Screaming curses, he glares into the interior of the immobile boat. There is no one in it. All his rage and judgment vanish at the sight of the empty boat.

When I heard this story, I wanted to carry it with me in my pocket to remember that the acts I imbue with vicious intent, all the wrongs done to me, are really mistaken perception. I wanted to see the empty boat in the moments when I was on hold with my health insurance being transferred to a specialist for the third time and when the kids didn’t clean up after making late night macaroni and cheese. I wanted to know the impersonal nature of life and remember that these actions are not done “to me” when I was disappointed that I didn’t get the email, or the acknowledgment I was longing for. The empty boat lets us experience the spaciousness of non-self and just as the fisherman’s blame and judgment evaporated seeing the lack of malice, so may we become empty of our righteous rush to condemn.

Chuang Tzu spoke about this as a protection, “If a man could succeed in making himself empty, and in that way wander through the world, then who could do him harm?” This way of seeing brings us the willingness to stop the dance of victim and perpetrator. There is a paradox that comes about when we empty ourselves of our desire to punish and blame, we become harmless to others—and as a result, we lose our fear of others.

When we can look at our lives with the reminder of non-harming and blamelessness, we can touch into the joyful aspect of not being a small self. And recognize that we are more than the trembling ego who reacts with temper tantrums when we don’t get our way, or when we are not considered. The idea of the empty boat releases the other person from the weight of our judgment and frees us both. Practicing emptying our boat, we can begin to see that our desire not to harm is rooted in integrity and caring. This is the love that we hoard and ration out to those who are worthy—the select few who agree to our rules of conduct, don’t irritate us, or cause problems.

There is a phrase in Buddhism, The Bliss of Blamelessness. This is the joy that comes from following our precepts and mindfulness trainings. Living in accord with our highest and best desires, we can rejoice that we are living lives dedicated to caring for living beings, generosity, kind and wise speech, sexual responsibility, and compassionate consumption.

When we live with an empty boat, it doesn’t stay empty for long. It naturally fills with concern for the quality of our consciousness and care for others. Our vessel becomes greater as we jettison our righteousness, our pride, and blame. We make room for what comes next—the love that values the purity of our own hearts and our own peace above the need to be right. Once we experience the spacious happiness of non-fear and are free from the confines of condemning and punishing, our boat has no room for war.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

Calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh

References:

B. Watson, trans. (1964, 1999). Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings. New York, NY: Columbia University Press

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The Care and Feeding of Intention

April 2, 2019

Basic Goodness, Big mind, Busyness, Changing habit patterns, compassion, Creating intention, Detached Action, Good Heart, Mindfulness, Uncategorized

Biddeford, ME, Photo by Celia

“The quality or purity of any spiritual practice is determined by the individual’s intention and motivation.” ~ H.H. The Dalai Lama

“If you were at the end of your life looking back, what would matter about today?” ~Tara Brach

“Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

Dear Friends,

More than twenty years ago, I was driving home from a writing class late at night. After years of creating my own business and being someone in the eyes of the world, I was overworked and unhappy and looking to change directions. I was searching for my path that would keep me from falling into the sea of nothingness, where I would flounder and let my life ebb away in meaningless flailing towards a new identity. The class was my floatation device. I remember that very unpleasant fear that if I gave up what I knew, even with all its stress and pain, reaching towards the unknown would be a worse—some sort of soulless, bland existence. Without putting a name to it, I was looking for something bigger than my business, bigger than my own self, I was looking for an intention.

I don’t remember the radio show I was listening to that night, but the topic was about creating a framework for your life—it was nothing new in the world, but new to me. Listening, the interviewees gave examples of big intentions. For example, if your life’s work was to bring beauty to the world, you could garden, paint, write a book, raise a child, become an environmental activist, all things in line with your intention, or life’s purpose. Up to that point, my life’s goal as a designer was to make enough money to live and to be respected—which was something I could not control. The respect and recognition I longed for would come from outside myself and gauging my worth according to my approval rating effectively gave away all my own power for happiness. I could see in my writing class that I was merely transferring this small goal to another discipline. My life’s work was not money or fame; it needed to transcend myself. As the poet, David Whyte writes, “Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anyone or anything that doesn’t bring you alive is too small for you.” What I recognized was that I had mistaken the smallness of a goal for the intention of a lifetime.

There is a knowing in the body that resonates with a true intention. You can feel it—guaranteed. Getting 10,000 followers for your blog or find that one perfect partner and living a fairytale romance is not a true intention, but a mark of achievement. This is common in our culture that looks to financial success and power as the worthy aims of our lives. When we assign ourselves a task—even a noble one, such as raising children or reversing climate change, we can tend to focus on the outcome and transfer our habits of busyness and achieving onto a more wholesome scaffolding—but we can still be tied to our judgment and evaluations of how well we are accomplishing, still caught in desire for rewards and praise and lose touch with what connects us to our larger and more selfless nature.

A true intention must also be large enough to hold everyone we encounter, including ourselves. I can’t be passionate about clean water and air and ignore the suffering in my relationships that pollute my own life—that is not integrating my intention. My intention to be a presence of care for others must also encompass myself and my family. An intention to be peace cannot thrive in a house where there is fighting and hurt. Intentions do not overlook any relationship, any moment; they are a magical size that can enfold all experiences and conditions of life.

The Buddha is recorded as saying that all mindstates and mental qualities require food. In the Food Discourse, Ahara Sutta, SN 46.5, the Buddha described the nutriments that feed both the “skillful and unskillful, blameworthy and blameless, gross and refined.” There is a type of attention that feeds the desires of greed, anger, and the belief that I am separate from the world, and there is that the food that feeds the intentions that connect me to the truth of living in the temporary housing of a body that is part of a much larger interrelated world. The food the Buddha spoke of is the “appropriate attention” to the goodness that is arising and sensitivity to the experience of the wholesome when it is manifesting. Through attention to how we are already living in alignment without our intentions—and using this experience as our food to create energy and persistence, we nurture our own goodness and commitment through appreciating our own efforts. In short—we strengthen our own commitment through experiencing our own good heart.

For a while now, I have had the intention to be a presence of care in each moment, for myself and others. This is a big intention and one that can sound theoretical and live in the mind. When we commit to our intention, there is an inquiry into sustaining it—giving it the necessary nutriments to keep it alive. We also notice what starves our intention. In my experience, there is nothing so deadly as time pressure to make me forget my true purpose.

When we are rushing and filled with deadlines, the world can become very small. We forget we are connected to others. In my life, I know that more I am rushing, when others are an obstacle instead of an opportunity, I lose my intention. Intention is made of Attention. One simple thing I do each day is to recall my intention. When the Buddha used the word remembering, sati [mindfulness], his message was that through remembering the path to liberation and the four steps leading out of suffering, we all could become ennobled. Our worth was not determined by birth, but through the goodness of our actions, our thoughts, and words…and the way we made ourselves noble was by remembering how much choice and power we do have over our habitual thoughts and actions. So, remembering our larger intention is a daily practice.

Peace activist and Buddhist teacher Donald Rothberg suggests writing out intention on a piece of paper and looking at it before a meeting or having a difficult conversation. Some days, I have written my intention on my arm in pen and am contemplating a tattoo, but things keep changing, don’t they? This week you may want to consider your larger intention in the world. Ask yourself, what is the thing that brings me alive? Leaning back into the gifts of the ancestors, the kindness we have received in our lives, the wisdom teachings, what do we want to continue and bring forth into the future to bless ours and other’s lives? How do we make our beautiful dreams into the scaffolding of our lives? If your intention is to bring healing to the world, how are you manifesting that towards yourself? Towards this moment? Are we willing to nourish our intention with appreciation for the moments that our intention is manifesting? Aligning our work, and our life with our truth and intention that can infuse the whole of our lives with purpose and the nourishment of appreciation gives us strength to continue.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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Dharma Dog

March 11, 2019

Acceptance, Changing habit patterns, compassion, Dependent origination, Self-view, Uncategorized

Lilly and Daisy. Photo by Celia

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.” ~Milan Kundera

“If you can sit quietly after difficult news;

if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm;

if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy;

if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate;

if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill;

if you can always find contentment just where you are:

you are probably a dog.”

~Jack Kornfield

“There never yet has been a dog

Who learned to double cross,

Nor catered to you when you won

Then dropped you when you lost.”

~Mary Hale

Dear friends,

Some days wouldn’t you rather be a dog? Life would be so simple. Dogs don’t worry much about what comes next, or how to be a better dog. There is no complex examination of morality or conflicted intention in action because clearly, if you are smaller than I am, you are to be chased and if you are larger than I am, you are to be chased. Not much scheduling or planning—car’s broken, oh well, let’s eat something and have a nap. Pretty much all unpleasantness in a dog’s life arises because of external conditions since dogs do not have a sense of self like you and I. It is this profound difference that creates so much trouble for us humans and can make us our most painful companions.

Last week a friend told me the teaching story of farmers looking out at their fields in April. If they think of everything that needs to happen between spring and harvest, their heads would pop off. I could really relate. Just trying to keep my life on schedule brings me dukkha of planning. Mixed into this adventure is the fear of making a mistake (FOMAM). The mistakes I am speaking of will not result in an oil spill, a train wreck, or a bridge collapsing, but they are painful and inconvenient for me and those who are waiting for me to show up.

I am looking into this unpleasantness through the lens of the system of causation the Buddha set forth, the twelve links of Dependent Origination. This is a complex and accurate map of how we get stuck in repeating behavior from the past in the present moment and creating our future. This simplest description of this web of cause and effect is from Thich Nhat Hanh, “this is because that is.” Looking into what “that is” can take us through past experiences, to see how we recreate our habits, our longings, and addictions and perpetuate the view of who we believe we are.

Last week, I was fifteen minutes late to a school meeting and forgot a phone meeting, both on the same day. These two missteps have stuck with me much more than all the things I did right on that same day, including arriving at two other meetings on time with traveling over an hour each way. This propensity to dwell on mistakes is part of our natural negativity bias. A useful trait for the continuation of the species, this innate evolutionary function emphasizes the unpleasant or painful in order to instill avoidance of events and situations that can bring us suffering. I see this bias in the view that glosses over all the ways I was organized and on-time that day.

Negativity bias pulls us into auto-pilot mode and adds fuel to the self-critical voice, and to our doubt and reactivity. Instead of focusing on our ability to meet the challenges in our lives, we hone in on the mistakes, the imperfections which may lead us to believe and cling to these roles as flawed or wrong. As we respond to these self-imposed labels, we either push against them (I don’t want to be the late one) or we embrace them (I am happy to be the responsible one). They can last for a few moments, or for a lifetime, bringing with them a tangle of views and behaviors to solidify or purge these traits.

In his astonishingly comprehensive book, The Foundations of Buddhism, Rupert Gethin (1998) describes the mind which mistakes biological responses to life for a personality as “merely an underlying mass of ever-changing causes and conditions, arising and falling, but which none the less, as it flows on, maintains a certain pattern which gives it the appearance of relative identity” (p. 246). When we believe we are what we think we are, we repeatedly take birth in our self-view. Each time I am late, I can further reinforce my belief, I am flaky—or each time I am on time, I could reinforce the idea that I am punctual, but even a pleasant identity will also cause pain on the day I get stuck in traffic. And being late will go against the identity I want to present, to be seen as competent, mistake-proof, reliable, as someone who lives up to their promises. So, we can see that all of these labels will eventually cause us the pain of trying to live up to them, or the pain of trying to run away from them.

This week, you may like to try this exercise, to list all of our self-views, all the good and the bad: compassionate, cruel, aggressive, patient, intelligent, slow, generous, selfish, all the ways we limit and evaluate our behavior. We tend to reward and punish ourselves based on these views. Consider what would it be like to have the same amount of acceptance and caring for ourselves when we have disappointing labels as the good ones? Can we stretch our compassion to include all of our existence without exclusion and offer ourselves to ourselves even when we make a mistake? I wonder if this is the secret of dogs? To not be sad about what we did last week and to not know how to withhold our love.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

Calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh

Reference

Gethin, R. (1998). The foundations of Buddhism. Oxford, New York: Oxford Press.

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To Reconcile Means to Trust

December 10, 2018

Buddhism, Changing habit patterns, Expectations, Families, Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Relationship, Right speech, Self-care, Self-Kindness, Uncategorized

Winter Stream. Photo by Rick Errichetti

“The wounded child is there and we don’t even know she is there.

The wounded child in us is a reality, but we can’t see her.

That inability to see it is a kind of ignorance. This child has been severely wounded.

She or he really needs us to return.

Instead, we turn away.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh from Reconciliation

“It’s a cause of growth in the Dhamma and Vinaya of the noble ones when, seeing a

transgression as such, one makes amends in accordance with the Dhamma

and exercises restraint in the future.”

~ Digha Nikaya verse 2

“The people around us, our family and friends, may also have a severely

wounded child inside. If we’ve managed to help ourselves, we can also help them.

When we’ve healed ourselves, our relationships with others become much easier.

There’s more peace and more love in us.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, from Reconciliation

Dear Friends,

The holiday season brings lots of opportunities for families to connect and be together. For some of us, these celebrations are a real celebration, joyful occasions where we renew our connection with our families experience support, trust, and feel at home again with those we are closely linked to. And then, there is the dark side of the holiday, when old habits appear, people say things and react uncovering old wounds or creating new ones. We may leave the holiday table feeling bruised and battered and running for shelter instead of experiencing a safe refuge where we encounter care and consideration.

There is no standardization in how families react to hurt feelings and disappointment. Some minimize or ignore, some have a blowup and engage in simultaneous loud and energetic opinions. Some decide who is at fault and who to punish, while some distance, not trusting that there are welcome and respect. Individuals may stay away and try to keep safe from afar. It can be painful to have division and discord in our families especially at this time of year when there is a cultural expectation about what a happy welcoming family is.

Our expectations can make these situations much worse. These are the “shoulds” we insert in our judgments; my daughter should call because I am the parent. We should get along because we are family. My parents should apologize because they are wrong. He shouldn’t say/ do/think that. She should…fill in the blank. We believe that families are supposed to get along without conflict and when they don’t, we experience a loss. This loss of an ideal can hurt as much as the actual words and actions of family members. There is an often unconscious belief that if we try harder or were a better person, or they were a better person, we would stop feeling hurt and angry and there would be a magical spontaneous healing and understanding.

I recall being on retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh when a son asked about staying connected to his father who spoke with anger and refused to listen to him. Each conversation ended in a fight and hurt. Thây recommended that the son stop communicating with his father and care for his own suffering. He needed to listen to the part of himself that was hurt and discouraged, to hear the longing for trust, respect, and care for his own loss and sadness. Only then would he could be able to engage with his father without reacting from the place of rawness and quick reactivity.

In Buddhism, there is the opportunity to do lots of violence to the self through spiritual-bypass. This is a rush to get over our hurt, because –if we are good Buddhists, we know this world, including all spoken words and even our solid appearance of a self, are in the ultimate reality a chimera and have the consistency of a soap bubble. That is an often convenient mindset to escape the nitty-gritty and humbling work of looking at our own words, deeds, and intentions. We all exist in the historical dimension and when we use the teachings as an escape route from admitting our culpability or to not take responsibility for how we hurt another, we are abiding in ignorance.

Forgiveness and reconciliation and two different things. Tibetan nun Thubten Chodron says that one cannot truly forgive until they fully understand the depth of hurt they have suffered. This doesn’t mean to dive into self-righteous recounting and blaming but is a call to do the work of sitting with the difficult feelings with empathy, tenderness, and pure understanding that we are all sensitive beings who desire love, trust, and consideration. We cannot forgive until we have cared for the parts of the self who are hurt. A rush to forgive and reconcile before one has the time and space to meet their own needs results in a veneer of friendliness that tears apart quickly at the slightest offense. True forgiveness requires patience and the willingness to care for the self before extending ourselves to another who has hurt us.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes a beautiful article about forgiveness and reconciliation for the sangha and in our own lives that outlines some of the stages in this process. He writes, “[r]econciliation — patisaraniya-kamma — means a return to amicability, and that requires more than forgiveness. It requires the reestablishing of trust. If I deny responsibility for my actions, or maintain that I did no wrong, there’s no way we can be reconciled. Similarly, if I insist that your feelings don’t matter, or that you have no right to hold me to your standards of right and wrong, you won’t trust me not to hurt you again. To regain your trust, I have to show my respect for you and for our mutual standards of what is and is not acceptable behavior; to admit that I hurt you and that I was wrong to do so; and to promise to exercise restraint in the future.” Reestablishing trust is at the root of reconciliation. There can be no friendship, no connection, or willingness to be near someone we do not trust. And we know that trust takes time to build.

Social scientist Dr. Breneʹ Brown describes building trust as adding marbles to a jar. Each time we encounter another and experience safety when we share what is dear to us, we add a marble to the jar. When the jar is full of these small moments, we have a foundation of trust. When we do not feel safe with another person, when there are unkind words or actions, there is no trust and the marbles spill out of the jar. Building trust means we are sensitive to the needs of another and their feelings and it takes time. Rebuilding relationships does not coincide with a calendar date, as much as we may feel pressure to do so.

This holiday season, no matter what side of the table you find yourself are on—the one who feels hurt and unheard, or the one who acted and spoke with good intentions, but was unskillful and is experiencing the consequence of unmindful speech, please start at the beginning. As Thay would say, come home to yourself and make your own home a safe place. Take the time to listen to that hurt in you—and the part of yourself that needs your own care, compassion, and nurture. Remember that healing is non-linear and doesn’t go in a straight line. True forgiveness and reconciliation happen when there is enough self-care to heal the willingness to trust again.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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Putting an End to Hatred

October 28, 2018

Activism, Buddhism, Changing habit patterns, compassion, Ending hatred, Ignorance, non-violence, not abandoning, not punishing, Uncategorized

Ginko and denim. Photo by Celia

“I entrust myself to earth,

Earth entrusts herself to me.

I entrust myself to Buddha,

Buddha entrusts herself to me.”

~Thich Nhat Hanh, from Being Peace.

“Without being

peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we

cannot help other people to smile. If we are not peaceful, then

we cannot contribute to the peace movement.”

~Thich Nhat Hanh, from Being Peace.

“Hatreds never cease through hatred in this world; through love alone they cease. This is an eternal law.”

~Dhammapada, Verse 5, Narada Thera trans.

“We are committed not to kill and not to let others kill. We will not support any act of killing in the world, in our thinking, or in our way of life.”

~The Twelfth Mindfulness Training. The nuns and monks of Plum Village.

Dear Friends,

Yesterday I took refuge in the three jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha sharing a day of mindfulness with the Greater Hartford Sangha. I left with deep gratitude for the gift of sharing my day with a community dedicated to alleviating suffering in the world. I was so glad that I had the nourishment of the three refuges yesterday as I learned about the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill. I felt huge sadness and grief for the families and victims of the shooting. As I sat with these feelings, I was aware of the rage in me fed by the desire for all beings to be safe and valued. I saw my thoughts go into blame and judgment and turns towards punishment. I’ve grown up in a society that believes punishment equals justice and that punishment is a useful strategy for getting people to change their behavior. If we are a parent we know what punishment does; it teaches our children to be afraid or to be sneaky. Punishment, isolation, and shame are enculturated ways we believe we can effect social change. But how effective is punishment? The U. S. Bureau of Justice in a 2018 update reports that 5 out of 6 state prisoners were rearrested within 9 years of release. It seems that punishment is an expensive and misguided attempt to create change that ignores the basis of violence and hatred.

Buddhist scholar and monk Bhikkhu Bhodi writes that it is the root of ignorance or delusion (avijja/ Pali, avidya/ Sanskrit) that leads to suffering. Ignorance is not a pathological condition. It is not evil or bad; it is simply a misperception. This is the ignorance that creates the mental confusion or blindness leading to separation and hatred and forgets we inter-are. It is the ignorance that creates in-group and out-group distinctions. It’s the “I making and my making” that leads us to grab hold of the disastrous strategies of greed, hatred, and violence with the mistaken belief they will keep us safe. Writing this I am grateful that I know the usefulness of anger AND extremely grateful I have entrusted myself to the care of the Dhamma which teaches me what to do with my anger so it does not need to become hatred. Anger is a powerful message that something needs our attention. Anger, just like pain, is signal to us that there is something harmful and hurtful going on and we need to take wise action to alleviate suffering in ourselves and others.

The Buddha had a profound understanding of human nature and the innate desire to protect oneself and one’s clan. He gave a teaching on five ways to put an end to hatred that tells us when someone is acting and speaking with violence and out of the delusion in a separated protected self, it is as if they have fallen severely ill, are alone in a strange place without food or medicine and shunned by all others. “And as for a person who is impure in his bodily behavior & verbal behavior, and who does not periodically experience mental clarity & calm, how should one subdue hatred for him? Just as when there is a sick man — in pain, seriously ill — traveling along a road, far from the next village & far from the last, unable to get the food he needs, unable to get the medicine he needs, unable to get a suitable assistant, unable to get anyone to take him to human habitation.…” (Aghatavinaya Sutta: Subduing Hatred). The Buddha tells us that viewing those who act with hatred and delusion through our veil of ignorance and condemnation will only enforce the belief in separation and fuel the cycle of hatred and violence. He tells us it is our task as practitioners is to pick up this ill and isolated person, provide food and medicine to help restore them to health and wholeness of body and mind and most importantly to put down our ignorance and do what feels so counter-culture—to understand that violence is a sign that someone is sick and suffering and care for the person who does harm.

This is a life-altering practice and requires some deep and honest looking at how we create a dangerous “other” and feed the cycle of violence and hatred in our own lives. Ask yourself who is it ok to hate? The KKK? Nazis? White nationalists? Terrorists? Joining together in our communities, who do we hate? When we practice hating, just like any skill, we get better at it. This week please look to see the usefulness in your anger, the beautiful desires for equality and justice that lie beneath anger and judgment and then, go deeper. See how we can act to remove what is the real danger—ignorance. On Tuesday, please take your compassion to the polls and do your best to elect those who can transcend the delusion of separation, those who remember that we all belong to each other.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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Changing Habits of Change

October 9, 2018

Blaming, Changing habit patterns, compassion, Mindfulness, Self-care, Uncategorized

Buddha and the artichokes in Judith’s garden. Photo by Celia

“If we take something to be the truth, we may cling to it so much that when the truth comes and knocks on our door, we won’t want to let it in.”

~Thich Nhat Hanh

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth”

~Pema Chödrön

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never

learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find

compassion. ”

~Pema Chödrön

Dear Friends,

I hope you are well and riding the waves of change with some amount of ease and equanimity. This past weekend, several sangha members and I attended a retreat titled Bringing Mindful Speech to Life offered by Plum Village tradition dharma teacher and Nonviolent Communication (NVC) trainer Peggy Smith. The retreat combined Plum Village practices of mindful sitting, walking, and eating with NVC training. For many of us, this training really rocked our world. We learned that we are communicating in a system grounded in right and wrong thinking, based on blaming, punishing, and manipulation to get our needs met. Waking up to recognize our compliance in this systemic enactment of violence was a shock. We saw examples of how our habitual responses to suffering, even ones we thought of as mindful, or compassionate, actually blocked the necessary empathetic resonance that allows true compassion to take place.

After the retreat, many participants left feeling both exquisitely grateful and exquisitely confused about how to practice right speech. Some may have been discouraged and wondered how to begin after having these entrenched societal patterns hard-wired into our brains after twenty or fifty years of communicating. If only wanting to change meant change would happen. The truth of changing habits is that it takes time, diligence, and lots of determination.

When we first begin to make a change in our lives, whether its conscious speech, awareness of our bodily responses or watching the judging mind, we introduce the mental suggestion to take note…and we do. We may find ourselves horrified at how many times during the day we fall into blaming others for our emotional response, or how often we think of Chinese food, sex, a new car, or give out our diagnoses and judgments of others as if they’re the truth. Pema Chödrön tells us that at the beginning of changing patterns we will see our habits all the time repeating with glaring consistency and vigor. We can start to believe that we are deeply flawed and incapable of change. But Pema tells us that seeing our habits is actually good news. It’s not that we are more judgmental, greedy, or mean-spirited than we ever were, it’s the fact that we are so sensitized to our actions. We have woken up to our formerly unconscious habit patterns.

One way to re-frame this thinking is to celebrate the times we catch ourselves in our old ways of thinking, speaking, and responding because this is our first step towards freedom—noticing. Buddhist monk, Anam Thubten, considers this step so essential he writes in No Self, No Problem: Awakening to Our True Nature, that each time we catch our minds wandering during meditation instead of lamenting and feeling despondent at how bad a meditator we are, we should celebrate and give ourselves a piece of chocolate. The noticing and returning the mind to the goal, whatever the goal is—staying present in meditation, or giving our self warm accompaniment when we feel the familiar shield of defense and the desire to retaliate—that is the very movement that creates the new habit of change.

This is a shift to compassion and changing two habits at the same time. When you find yourself messing up and doing the thing you don’t want to do, judging and responding from a place of fear and lack, yelling, or eating that piece of cheesecake, give yourself a reward of self-compassion for paying attention and gently return to what you do want to do. You can offer yourself Peggy Smith’s simple “of course.” Thich Nhat Hanh uses the phrase, “Darling, I am here for you,” or you can try out “I care about this.” Experiment and find which words comfort and soothe the nervous system that tries so hard to keep us safe and happy. Of course, we fall into habits and repeat behavior. Of course, we do what we know best. It is hard work to change. Giving ourselves the gift of open-hearted acceptance can make changing habits a gentler and comforting process that leads to our greater freedom and connection with all beings.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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