go gentle.: February 2020

Toughen up, love

good friends February 25, 2020

Nobody wants to talk about suffering, and when somebody does bring it up, people don't know what they're talking about.

***

The past few weeks have been a hard time for me.

Went in and out of a "relationship", discovered that my ankle is more damaged than doctors initially realised and that I might have to get surgery down the line, underwent yet more visa madness, and what have you.

I don't think I've felt that low in a long time. Aside from doubt, helplessness, loneliness, etc., it was just general depression.

The kind where all you can do is lie down on your carpet and feel the pain while listening to The Smiths. Or where you just sit in the middle of the living room floor and start sobbing.

I know it sounds dramatic and a bit "real" and like maybe people are thinking why are you airing your dirty laundry out on the Internet.

But that's an interesting thought because it seems like nobody ever wants to talk about suffering. Nobody wants to talk about it, and nobody wants to hear about it. Let's be real, who wants unpleasantness? All we want to know is that things are going well - good news, good news, good news. Perpetually. Don't you tell me that life is in fact quite sad, I just want to go shopping.

~ Good vibes only ~

This Sunday past, we were talking to Ajahn Hāsapañño about the practice of confessing when you break precepts or deviate from the path in some way. He said the intention behind doing that is important - not to get into a kind of martyr complex, but just to be true and honest with your spiritual friends. He said that that's better than pretending that everything in life is perfect, like lots of people do on social media.

And it's like, yeah, who are any of us kidding. Life is a shitshow for the most part, and then some. Maybe we should be more honest about it so we can start addressing the shittiness rather than hide behind pleasure, which is mostly delusion.

***

When things get painful enough, I tend to need to retreat inwards. I don't feel inclined to reach out to friends or teachers, until I have processed the problem enough on my own. I feel like I have to let a big part of the suffering pass through before I can talk about it in a productive way. Sometimes you just gotta mope about for a bit, sit with it for a bit.

The way I addressed the visa stuff and the break-up, and the way my spiritual friends supported me around that stuff, was very gentle. Going with the mentality that I shouldn't be so hard on myself, and I should let myself be what I needed to be, feel what I needed to feel. Be as sad as I had to be. (Probably to the point of indulgence really....)

And then when the ankle problem surfaced and I told Dara about it, she very skilfully called me out on it. She and Shaun (her partner) were like, okay girl, you're just going to have to get over it. Don't misunderstand, that doesn't come from a dismissive, mean place, like "just suppress the suffering and get on with it" - no, not at all. It comes from a place of letting go.

They were telling me, look, yes, this is shit, but you have to let go of the past and power out of suffering with right effort. Focus on what you can do now to fix the problem, direct all your energy there. Let go of the rest, it doesn't do you any good.

They weren't telling me that I shouldn't be angry or sad about it, but that I needed to set my intention towards what I can do for recovery right now.

That was real skilful of them because at that point, that would have been like my 4th consecutive week of low-key moping. Ain't nobody got time. Struggle's real. Just got to power through like a Dhamma warrior.

Reflecting on sadness for a quick second-

It's one of those emotions that is so easy to indulge in. Like when your mind is low, it's so easy to just stay there, even though you know you're in a pit. In a way, we actually enjoy sadness. It's like an excuse. "I'm sad, so let me eat all the things I wanna eat, and watch all the Netflix I wanna watch". It's not easy to uplift the mind, it takes effort.

Dara and I have been in conversation about skilful means to handle the mind - knowing when to be gentle and when to be tough. Sometimes you need to take the soft and gentle approach - that's what's considered right effort, when you take a soft approach to conditions that demand softness, or as Dara calls it, "Dhamma cuddles". But sometimes you just need to take a hardline approach and snap out of it and get tough with the mind just so you can power through.

I think, in different ways, both approaches involve letting go. It's about responding to what you need at that time, given surrounding conditions.

I was chatting to Dara about the flaws of the healthcare system, and she goes, "it's cool, we let go and rework the road ahead". I mean, that's the way to go, clearly. I guess the instinctive reaction is to get angry and dig through the past and start pointing out what went wrong where and stay bitter and vengeful about all of that. But again it boils down to intention and what you wanna get out of it.

I went through a similar situation some months ago, where I relied on an external agent, who let me down. I was gonna storm into their office and give it to them and really make them see they'd screwed me over. But Xeyiing told me, look, you have to set your intention right. In vague terms - if your intention is to achieve the goal that you wanted to achieve through them, then you'll just take the actions that you need to take to get there.

Her advice was so simple, but made things so clear. The storming in and giving them hell was unnecessary, it was out of ill-will. What do you get from telling them off? Sure, you may teach them a lesson, but how often do they take that to heart, even if you're really giving them constructive critism? It's really more about you and how uncomfortable you feel with what they've done to you than going with a higher purpose of "correcting their mistake". The anger seems completely justified because you think you're going with that noble purpose, but really, anger is anger is anger.

If I really wanted to get things done, what I really had to do at that point was let go of the past and just power through with right effort.

Same thing in this situation. The intention is to recover, not take revenge on the doctors haha.

It took me a few days to snap out of it - once I started putting in the right effort to remedy the situation, I felt pretty good. The mind felt uplifted.

In getting to that place mentally, I had to amp myself up with talks by Ajahn Thanissaro. He is the man when it comes to toughening up the mind.

I found this gem: Toughen & Tenderize the Mind. An excerpt.

"There's a paradox in the way the Buddha talks about a trained mind. On the one hand, the trained mind is sensitive - as he says: malleable, tender. And on the other hand, it's unshakeable, strong, tough. So how do those two qualities go together?

They're both desirable. On the one hand, you want the mind to be sensitive to what's going on. One of our major problems is that we cause pain and suffering to ourselves and others, and yet we tend to deny it. That becomes ignorance. A big wall in the mind which blocks off a lot of things, so that we can't really see what's going on - what we're doing or the results of what we're doing. So you want to train the mind to be sensitive so that it can come to see problems inside itself that it didn't see before and make corrections. If you don't see them, you can't correct them. So you want to be sensitive.

On the other hand, if you're sensitive but weak, you get blown away by the problems of the mind and lose whatever confidence you had that it could be something you can handle, something you can solve.

So both qualities are desirable, and it's learning how to develop them together in the right way. That's what brings balance into the training of the mind.

We develop sensitivity by thinking in terms of saṃvega - it's a Pali term that literally means 'terror'. But in practice it means a sense of dismay when you look at the way the world is. Because as the mind gets more and more still, you see that the world is filled with a lot of meaningless turmoil and it seems to want to keep on doing it - there's not much that you can do to stop it. And then you look inside and you realise there's a lot of that turmoil in you as well. And a lot of your internal turmoil is going to implicate you in the external turmoil. As long as you want things that the world has to offer, you get pulled in. The Buddha's image is a fish in a puddle of water, and the puddle is drying up, and they're fighting one another over that last gulp of water. Of course, they're all going to die when the water runs out. But there's a group of them that decide, okay, we want that last gulp and push the others out of the way.

Years back I saw this - I was in a stream up in British Columbia. The salmon were coming in and there were a lot of dead salmon in the stream and there were the salmon that were hopping over them to get further up the stream. And there were bears waiting to get the ones that were still alive. Seeing the fish fight over that last gulp of water really impressed the Buddha's image on my mind.

So one of the things you'll notice as the mind begins to settle down and you get more sensitive - you see all the pain and suffering out there and you see the pain and suffering in your own mind. And you'll also see your own defilements. Where your greed, aversion, delusion come in. The important thing is not to get discouraged, not to get depressed. This is where the other emotion that the Buddha recommends comes in - which is pasāda, which is confidence. Confidence that there's a way out, that there's a solution to the problem. And having this confidence that there is a way out and you can figure it out - that allows you to put up with a lot of things that otherwise you would just get blown away by. Because an important part of this toughness of the mind is patience and endurance. You want to develop an attitude of the mind that can watch just about anything and not get blown away. This doesn't mean that you accept everything and embrace everything. You accept things that are there but then you accept also that there are times when you have to make changes. But even if you can't succeed in making changes outside, you want to work on making changes inside. But before you can make changes and things you have to be willing to see what's there.

This is what this quality of toughness is. And the more you have confidence and conviction that there is a way out, and there's a solution, the more you'll be able to see. The more you'll be willing to open up to see. Because if a part of the mind feels there's no way out then you just don't want to think about it and you start closing things off. So it's in this way that the toughness of the mind actually allows the tenderness to grow in a healthy direction..."

***

Two weekends ago, the weekend after Valentine's Day, Ajahn Hāsapañño gave a powerful Dhamma talk that went straight to my heart. Maybe it was powerful because it was what I needed at that time.

He spoke about how Valentine's Day actually started because St Valentine was marrying unmarried men to save them from going to war / joining the army (I think the law in Rome back then was that married men shouldn't go to war). It was in the name of compassion, not "romantic love" per se. Ajahn said nowadays the way modern society and culture and movies approach love makes it so unrealistic, holding it to a standard or value that it can never truly give us. So it's almost like we keep searching for value in something that just inherently doesn't have that value.

Then Ajahn said, everything in this world will let you down.

He said that in his classic Ajahn Hāsapañño matter-of-fact way.

For people in partnerships, there are only three outcomes:

1. You break up.

2. One of you dies first.

3. You both die at the same time.

But the Dhamma will never break up with you, fail you, die on you, etc.

The Dhamma protects those who practise it. It is something you can rely on.

Just reflecting on that again in line with the recent reflections on pasāda -- when things are going shit in the world, yeah that's how it is. As Ajahn Thanissaro says - gain, loss, praise, blame, pleasure, pain, status, disgrace - that's what the world has to offer. All you can do is go with Dhamma, with Right Effort, like a gentle warrior. You have faith in the actions that you do that are in line with the teaching, that you will be okay because the teachings are the path out of suffering. No need for moping or lamenting. Just gentle and energetic effort. When you go with Dhamma, you transcend the world, because Deathless reality is not conditioned the way the world is.

So yeah man. A lot has been happening. But again and again: no mud, no lotus. It's almost like you can't have wisdom without the prerequisite suffering first haha.

Last weekend we helped polish all the bronze things at Vimo. I don't know if you're ever polished bronze, but it involves applying polishing solution to a cloth and rubbing the bronze with it. Black stuff comes off the metal when you do, and it seems absolutely neverending, it's like omg where is all this black stuff coming from. But as you keep going, the bronze actually gets shinier and shinier and shinier, whether or not you realise it. But before you can get it looking completely pure and spotless, you gotta go through that tedious process of cleaning it, getting the dirt off it, being patient with it all.

It's actually quite an enjoyable process. And when you turn back and look at it, you find it's become shiny.

There's actually a Dhammapada verse on this, 239

One by one, little by little, moment by moment, a wise man should remove his own impurities, as a smith removes his dross from silver.

I reckon they were polishing metal statues back then too hahahaha.

***

Here are some recent pictures from my life, just because.

Dhamma sisters!!