Resolve for 2012: Be Your True Self

Happy New Year! All primed for the New You?

New Year resolutions are one way to make important changes in your life, but they’re also reminders that change is harder than you think. There’s more to it than making a decision about how you should be. The big question is, “How am I right now?” You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

Ever since my parents and teachers started wagging their fingers at me I’ve attempted to improve myself. By turns, I tried to be the best Catholic, communist, hippy and Buddhist I could. It took me an awfully long time to realize that all I needed was to be true to myself.

If only I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to kick myself because I missed what was staring me in the face. And yet, it always seems to be the last thing I see, only when I’ve given up hope.

Enough is Enough

It all began with the certainty that I wasn’t good enough. Everything my mean old elders told me was reinforced by this weird society we live in, that profits by telling me that I don’t have enough and ends up convincing me that I’m simply not enough.

Whether it’s through religion, social justice, self-help or new-age consciousness, the drive to improve ourselves is as old as the hills.

Occasionally, someone comes along to challenge the ways in which we do this. Perhaps we’re praying to the wrong god, or in the wrong way. Even more rarely, someone comes along to question the very fact that we even try. That’s what the Buddha did.

We all want to be happy, all want to let go of pain and self-doubt. As children, we simply turn away from the bad stuff and focus on the fun. ‘Growing up’ is a euphemism for discovering that life’s more complicated.

But we don’t necessarily get to the root of the issue. Most ‘spiritual paths’ focus exclusively on the good stuff. To take an immensely popular example: Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. The book’s website promises, “the life of your dreams.”

Imagine! Your dreams can come true, if only you make them.

There’s nothing new in wishful thinking. Put aside the naive suggestion that we actually know what we need and consider the notion that we can actually make ourselves happy — that happiness can be manufactured.

We all know money can’t buy happiness, but how many of us put our hopes in relationships, reputation, career or fame, Himalayan treks or sublime philosophy or devotion to an enlightened guru? We console ourselves with pleasure or security, and call it happiness.

We settle.

Don’t Settle: Lose Your Marbles!

The Buddha saw through all that and took a radically new approach. Everyone thought he’d lost his marbles. He gave up on pleasure, stopped avoiding unhappiness and turned to face it with mindful reflection.

He wanted to get to the root of it. Happiness is hard to define, but unhappiness is as clear as day. In time, he found unhappiness to be caused by … guess what?

Our dreams.

You can choose to believe in your dreams if you want, but are you doing it because it makes sense or just because it sounds good?

That’s why you have to lose your marbles, a little. We can’t fit in for the sake of fitting in — that’s just false security. We can’t just think what everyone else thinks — that’s moral laziness. We can’t conform just to avoid conflict — that’s cowardly.

Don’t fit in; think for yourself; conform at your peril

So keep your eyes peeled: when you find yourself being politely fake and not being your true self, try something different: look inside and let go.

And have an independent New Year!

How’s that Working for You?

What have you promised yourself for 2012? How are those promises working out? Please share.

The Web of Life

Mindful Reflection Tip #5

Sometimes you have freedom of choice, but other times you’re bound by the consequences of those choices.

The Web of Life

Life isn’t just a biochemical reaction. It’s the constant flux of mind and matter. What you are is a product of your environment. What would you think and feel, wonder or worry about if it weren’t for the words and ideas, love and frustrations of others?

Another way of saying this is that life is contingent: everything connects — directly or indirectly, in space or in time. Your sense of self is not just an idea, it’s the story of your life, deeply rooted in emotions, habitual responses, unconscious patterns and all that has molded you.

You are both less and more than you imagine. You’re not a totally free agent responsible for everything you experience; neither are you an eternal victim of circumstances. You’re part of a bigger picture in which sometimes you have freedom of choice, but other times you’re bound by the consequences of those choices, in which getting what you don’t want may be the greatest gift of all.

Your life is ruled by cause and effect, not by you. You learn and grow intuitively. You’re creative and compassionate to the extent that you don’t allow self-consciousness to get in the way. Understanding this as a fact is not enough. Only by reflecting on it repeatedly will you come to see yourself in a new light.

Remind yourself at every opportunity that you’re not in control. You don’t need to take the reins of life, can’t be who you think you should be. It’ll never happen anyway. Mindfulness gives you breathing room because it’s not about how things should be; it’s about how they are. Allow mistakes; give yourself a break. Instead of setting yourself up for future frustration by vowing to never make another, just be more attentive. Instead of trying to take the reins or the blame, be honest with yourself. It’s the key to growth.

At the root of dishonesty is fear. It comes from thinking you need to be other than you are. Contingency means you’re a product of circumstances — nothing other than can be expected. Ego is threatened by this, but the ego’s not your friend. It’s something made up to protect itself. Weird? You bet. Contradictory, irrational and confounding? Welcome to human life.

Expose your contingency wherever you are — in conversation, at work, while commiserating with a friend, washing dishes, working out, practicing yoga, grieving, travelling, feeling bored, experiencing stress, listening to music, fighting. Everything’s contingent. You’re contingent.

When you’re connected to the web of life you have immense strength and profound peace, but to truly share in the way things are, you must let go.

Reflecting Reality

Mindful Reflection Tip #3

The meditative lifestyle isn’t just about the inner life; it’s also about reconnecting to the outer world: not just mindfulness but also reflection.

A few days ago Caroline and I were enjoying the warm sun of a late summer afternoon when she closed her eyes for a few moments to settle her mind. As they opened again she gasped quietly and whispered to me to turn my head. There in our backyard stood a magnificent heron — ramrod-straight and oozing untamed dignity.

Speaking of untamed, our garden is quite unlike our neighbors’ manicured patches. By late summer it teems with overgrown life; perhaps the heron deemed it some wild oasis in the monotonous suburbanscape.

Whatever its motives, it graced our afternoon. Its head turned to one side with an indifferent eye on us, the bird shocked the familiar from our eyes, returning us to the reality of where and how we lived: in a world that is not ours. For all our mastery of nature, our technological progress and environmental destruction, we’re just visitors with a brief lease on life, of no particular significance. Even our environmentalist instincts set us apart from nature for, let’s be honest, deep down we’re designed to care more about humanity than the planet.

Since childhood I’ve been urged to consider my mortality daily, the better to keep life and perspectives in order. With aging it grows easier to do, and harder to ignore. This brief meeting had a similar effect, bringing the ticking of life’s unstoppable clock to the fore and pushing my daily worries back to the farthest reaches of triviality.

Perhaps this is why we seek out intimate contact with nature. To feel once more naked, free and unbearably vulnerable — eventually to be recycled, though not just yet.

 

Life With No Foundation

I was thirty when my teacher Geshe Rabten first asked me to address his Buddhist group in Geneva, I knew the material and had long felt a calling to teach it. Afterwards, a woman, very much my elder, beamed at me and exclaimed, “Such wisdom in one so young!” Her companion nodded enthusiastically.

These were just the words I’d hoped to hear, but they didn’t bring me any comfort. I squirmed. My teachers all had decades of experience under their belt. I hadn’t even one. Buddhism is a transformative practice, not just a belief system or philosophy. I’d had no blinding flashes of insight, no visceral feelings of universal compassion and bliss. My meditation was scarred by chronic distraction and self-doubt. I was mired in the petty concerns of ego. I felt like a fraud. Furthermore, protected as I’d been by the rules of monastic life, what did I know of the stressful and complicated lives of these people?

I quit not only teaching but monkhood. It was a momentous decision, more complicated than words can say, but I rationalized it thus, as an act of integrity. Twenty years were to pass before I once more took up the mantle. In the interim there’d been no drama. As I’d continued my practice it had simply dawned on me in bits and pieces that the pursuit of supernatural experience was a blind, that the path of insight was not spectacular. There were no colored lights, no comic quakes and no heavenly showers. The way to freedom consists simply in relinquishing the illusions that make life seem reasonable, safe and pleasant.

The thought of life without foundation is scary. Teaching is the process of nudging people towards that abyss. They go willingly or not at all, but the teacher must know deep down that it’s okay, that letting go isn’t the fulfillment of your worst fears but a discarding of your self-imposed limitations. The shock of sudden descent is real, the fear of hitting hard rock and smashing every bone is palpable — but the impact never comes. As you gradually you get used to that, your practice blossoms.

I love to teach. I enjoy formulating a deft phrase or, even better, a well-laid trap. Those who attend my workshops come to hear the truth (small-t), to be disabused of all the spin that’s pumped out by religion, consumerism and technology. The human world is a monument to the arts of illusion. It’s no mean feat to read between the lines and see the fiction, to even want to break through the veil.

I learn as much from my workshops as my students do, perhaps more. I’m indebted to them. I honor and respect them. Even as they teeter at the edge, half scared to death, they dare to peer into the chasm. My job is to reassure them that the leap, when it comes, is an affirmation of  faith in themselves, and not in any higher truth. How else can we live to our full potential?

The Politics of Cynicism

Canada’s just kicked off a federal election campaign. Once upon a time this would have been purely regional news, but I’m seeing something that’s mirrored in the US and Europe too — deepening cynicism among voters, politicians profitably disconnecting from reality and democratic values turning into shells of cliché and empty rhetoric.

None of this is new, and that in itself makes me think. In recent days I’ve watched a video of a twelve year old girl telling off the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, an eloquent, new yet classic anti-war rant, a beautifully produced (another) manifesto against blind conformity and an old, old recollection of Jimi Hendrix’s If 6 Was 9, which promotes individuality against both culture and counter-culture.

It all resonates for me. It always did. The twelve year old girl’s speech was so timely I assumed it was yesterday; in fact it was delivered two decades ago. Old rants against the phoenix of old wrongs, both perennially renewed. The outrage of my sixties generation was unprecedented. We were uncompromising. We weren’t pretty. We were communists and anarchists. Some took up arms. We were sure to turn the tide of corporatism, money and war. Instead, we were slowly recruited into the fold. Today, power-brokers spin the concepts of freedom and democracy while racking up obscene profits at the cost of our planet, our health, our sanity and our social cohesion; some of them are my old comrades.

The English philosopher John Gray said, “…intolerance for reality is innate in the human mind.” In Canada, our prime minister has spun the concept of political coalitions — a venerable, practical feature of parliamentary democracy — into a spectre of lingering evil. His opponents have fallen hook, line and sinker for this misrepresentation and spent time, money and credibility defending themselves against it and accusing him of doing the same thing, as if it were a problem — or even an issue. It’s a non-debate — a diversion that treats voters with unprecedented contempt. Perhaps we deserve it.

The intellectual and emotional level of political debate seems to have reached an all time low. Instead of exchanging views and perspectives, political foes today cast aspersions on one another’s intelligence and integrity. This ignorant disrespect is reflected and magnified in hundreds of thousands of comments on political blogs — disheartening forums of insult and abuse that split the political spectrum into your side and mine. Fix your allegiance and slag the other. It requires no thought, no study, no effort, and apparently delivers enormous, obnoxious self-satisfaction. Here are our neighbours, parents of the next generation, power-brokers of the future. Many are university-educated in specializations so narrow that they’re actually profoundly ignorant of the context in which they spout their ‘opinions.’ Is the educated class a thing of the past?

It all makes me wonder whether our forefathers were right to give a vote indiscriminately to every man and woman. Shouldn’t that right be a privilege, conditional on actually contemplating the issues, or at least acknowledging that other points of view might have merit? How can anyone be so sure of themselves?

Which brings me to my field — the contemplation of human motives. I recognize blunt certainty: it’s a cover-up of existential unease, of the instinctive knowledge that nothing is sure. How few people — even fewer public figures — acknowledge that life is a mystery for which we have many theories but no answers. The healthiest among us take their knowledge with a grain of salt and keep their minds open. Those who cling to certainty with violent conviction are driven by forces that may originate within them, but from which they’re profoundly out of touch. John Gray continues, “The pretence of reason is part of the human comedy.”

We need a thoughtful society. It’s asking a lot — so much that you’re probably already shaking your head, incredulous at my naïveté; but how can we ask for less? What about the omnipotent, omniscient, fictional ‘they’ to whom we always pass the buck? Will they do something about it? Shall we continue the long wait for human institutions to act humanely? ‘They’ will continue to pursue their own interests by clumping into power structures too big for any of us to bring down, short of violent revolution. Real solutions will not trickle down from the top; they can only swell from the bottom up — from us. Be mindful, think reflectively, learn empathy. Teach your children, with words at least but more importantly by example.

Our society has become a frenzy of acquisition that may well implode. We have more stuff than our forefathers, more than we need; far too much to make us happy. Managing it is so onerous that we find ourselves under stresses that are poisoning society and killing us — and ours is the fortunate, developed, ‘advanced’ society. More stuff stimulates more need, more greed, less introspection. Maybe one day the battle lines will be drawn and we’ll bring it all down by force. But then, just like our prime minister’s foes, we’ll have fallen for their spin and will just rebuild in the image and likeness of those same old aggressive passions. Study history: it’s happened before with numbing regularity.

It’s hard to keep hope, and yet — fortunately — we’re programmed to keep hoping. It’s irrational, probably impossible, but I can’t help it: I want a sensible world. What little we can do is dictated by circumstance, not by whim and certainly not by belief. Will we cultivate sensitivity to circumstance, to the messages from the biosphere and from those within it? It’s the incontrovertible message of the stewards of the Earth — the aboriginal cultures — but will we ever again find such clear simplicity?

Feel helpless and outmatched if you must, but don’t leave it to ‘them.’ Go inwards; seek insight. By simply pursuing personal balance we model it to others, and remind each other to be respectful, clear-headed, thoughtful and forceful in expressing what we believe while acknowledging that that doesn’t make everyone else wrong. Whatever else we might do, it has to begin with this. Take little steps and long strides may follow. Take no steps and you foster the growth of cynicism.

Decisions, decisions

Quiet Mind student Falk Kyser asks, “using the Buddha’s teachings, how do you make an important life or business decision?” Falk is not one for little questions.

Spiritual pathways like the Buddha’s are making some impact in the business world, but only baby steps. There’s still a long way to go in overcoming the perceived gulf between spiritual and material pursuits. I say perceived, because there’s no practical difference at all. Let me explain:

My own introspective life, as well as feedback from meditation students, has shown me that much of what we call perception is in fact preconception — we tend to see what we expect to see, sometimes even what we want to see. Buddhism draws attention to this by guiding us in mindfulness practice towards bare perception (manasikara) — sustained attention to something in the present moment — usually the breath. As beginners, we discover that bare perception is almost instantly overtaken by the feelings, attitudes and mental constructs that constitute the inner chatter. Among other things, mindfulness slows down the interdependency of those mental events so we can: a) see how the untrained mind works, and b) develop focus and make more informed decisions.

Most business leaders see meditation and spiritual pursuits as woolly-minded and impractical — something that, if you really have to, should be done outside of the workplace. It’s hard to blame them. On the other side of the imaginary divide, ‘spiritual’ teachers and practitioners consider themselves at war with greedy materialists, and favour wishful thinking over hard-nosed materialism. What both camps are missing is that authentic paths to mental freedom don’t separate the spiritual from the material but reunite them in organic, practical and everyday ways. That’s what core Buddhism’s all about. Of course, Buddhists can be woolly-minded too; wishful thinking’s a natural tendency of the human mind. Just because you ‘believe’ in the Buddha is no guarantee that you’re actually following his example. The point, as the Buddha himself made on many occasions, is to explore your own mind and, knowing it, come to your own decisions.

There’s another perceived conflict between business and spiritual thinking: goal-oriented versus non-goal-oriented behaviour. Organized managers and business leaders favour rational thinking and planning for good reason, but they often lose sight of the fact that people are driven by emotion. Scientific studies have shown that most reasoning takes place after the fact—to justify a foregone decision. The good news is that emotional decisions aren’t necessarily wrong ones; the bad news is that we often think we’re being rational when we’re being emotional. If you’re looking to know your own mind and how it works, such rationalized excuses are just more mental constructs that pile layer upon layer of mental chatter, adding to confusion and causing bad decisions.

The most common source of confusion in business is thinking that the bottom line is money. It’s not — it’s survival; money is only one component of survival. Ethics, satisfaction, self-esteem, integrity, dignity, honour and compassion are qualities that serve both individuals and organizations, promoting long-term growth, happiness — and survival.

The practice of mindful reflection develops these qualities by combining mindfulness —sustained attention to what is (as opposed to what one wants), with insightful reflection — an understanding from your own experience of how you’ve made decisions and how they’ve worked for you. By focussing quietly on your mind in the present moment you clear the fog of preconception and, instead of falling for your own rationalization, see past it to your emotional motives.

For example, I was recently referred to a new client by a supplier who, over the years, has passed several opportunities my way. After the job, the client alerted me to a problem which I fixed immediately at no charge, the unspoken assumption being that I’d ‘overlooked’ it first time around. A week later, my supplier called to explain that the client was in the same situation, and was now upset.

My instinct was to protect my reputation at all costs. In fact, my hand was on the phone to tell the client I was on my way, but at that moment I detected the pang of resentment. I put the phone down and stopped to reflect. I’d been careful to do the job right second time around, and knew I could guarantee it. Looking deeper into my own motives, I realised that I resented going back because the only explanation was that my client had ignored my advice on how to implement the job I’d done, and had in fact spoiled it himself. He must have known this but, unwilling to assume responsibility or pay me fairly for a subsequent visit, he blamed me.

I wasn’t entirely unsympathetic — perhaps he thought his emotional decision was actually a rational one. I’d explained to him the dangers of modifying the job I’d done, but he’d insisted that he had to do so, and was therefore able to (wishful thinking). Clearly, he lacked the knowledge to troubleshoot his modifications and now expected me to do so. On the one hand, I realised I should have looked more closely into the terms of the job before I began; on the other, his decision was his own responsibility.

Recognizing that the situation was irresolvable, I decided to sever my link with him and suffer the consequences rather than proceed deeper into the mire of an untenable relationship. In seeing my own resentment in time and recognizing it as a red flag, I’d avoided wasted time, personal recrimination and more damage to my reputation. I’d also stopped enabling him to believe in his own non-existent skills and learned an important business lesson: to carefully consider the terms of any contract in advance. As any competent negotiator learns, that’s a skill you just keep revisiting; there are always new mistakes to learn from.