PART THREE

Take Nothing Personally

And I say see who is there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally,
least of all ourselves,
for the moment we do,
our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt

Emotions

Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge.
A warrior cannot complain or regret anything.
His life is an endless challenge, and challenge
scannot possibly be good or bad.
Challenges are simply challenges.
Don Juan, Carlos Castenada

Many of us have spent years learning to notice our emotional responses. And we’ve raised our children to be aware of when they feel sad or angry or frustrated. Western culture focuses our attention endlessly on noticing and working with our internal state.

This is helpful, up to a point. It’s important not to deny any of our feelings, both the good and bad ones. But there’s a crucial next step: we have to realize that we authored these emotional responses. We made them up, so we can change them.

Emotions don’t exist independent of us—it’s not as if anger or grief float around looking for victims to inhabit. Everything we feel and experience comes from inside us. How we respond to any situation or person depends on what’s happened to us in the past and, mostimportantly, what interpretations we’ve given to those experiences.

We walk around wrapped in our stories, and it only takes a small poke from the outside world to unleash a flood of them in all their velocity. Over time, we become packages of predictable responses. We forget there’s any other way to respond.

The good news is that at any moment we can refuse to be triggered in the old, familiar ways. This takes practice, and a lot of discipline, but the next time you find yourself gripped by any strong emotion, see if you can just observe the feeling. Don’t deny it or judge it. Don’t start telling yourself why you’re angry or sad. Just observe that you are. If you can avoid, even for a moment, getting dragged under by your usual storyline, that’s real progress. You’ve succeeded in bringing in just a tiny bit of air, a momentary breath—and in that small opening lies the possibility of freedom.

We illuminate the road to freedom each time we make a conscious choice to stay out of our stories. The road gets easier to see in the light of each pause.

Praise and Blame

This has been going on through the ages.
They criticize the silent ones.
They criticize the talkative ones.
They criticize the moderate ones.
There is no one in the world who escapes criticism.

There never was and never will be,
nor is there now,
the wholly criticized
or the wholly approved.
Buddha

There is absolutely no way to avoid being criticized. Nobody gets through life described as totally wonderful.

The question is, what do we do with criticism? Do we take it in, believe it and develop self-loathing? Do we assume that a criticism of something we’ve done is a condemnation of who we are?

Or can we filter criticism and keep it focused as perhaps valuable but bounded information? Can we look for the kernels of truth there that might help us improve? Can we not instantly push criticism away, yet not accept it totally?

And can we treat praise the same way, not instantly basking in our glory? Praise and blame are two sides of the same coin. If we are eager to accept praise, then we are equally vulnerable to feel the sting of blame.

In both cases, we need to listen with caution and discernment. There are truths in what people say about us, good and bad, but let’s not ever believe that their words define us.

Failure

Fall down 53 times.
Get up 54.
Zen slogan

Failure is unavoidable. There’s no way to avoid times of crushing defeat, great loss, terrible regret. We might like to think that “failure is not an option,” but it’s guaranteed to appear and reappear throughout our lives. This is just how life works.

It helps to know this ahead of time. Or to learn it very quickly. What’s essential is how we work with failure, what we do once its ugly face appears.

Some people feel that failure is a lesson sent by God to teach them what they need to learn. Others feel that failure is a punishment meted out to them by God or destiny. To some it’s karma. Whatever your personal view, failure certainly is an opportunity to learn—not just about yourself, but about how the world works. Failure is filled with messages. How we interpret those messages is critical to what happens next.

When we fail, we have the opportunity to feel really bad about ourselves. Often, our own negativity is encouraged by others telling us how worthless we are, how everything that’s gone wrong is our fault.

But we could learn more helpful and realistic things. We could learn that every failure results from a complexity of factors. It’s never just one person’s fault. We could learn about ourselves, what triggers us, which of our behaviors create problems, which seem helpful. We could learn about the dynamics and patterns present in the situation that had an impact on its negative outcome.

It takes a lot of contributions from many different sources to create failure. We’re wasting the opportunity to learn and grow if we try to pin the blame on just one person or one reason.

Blame

The practice countermeasure to blame
is to directly face the pain
we are trying to avoid.
Ezra Bayda
Zen teacher

When things go wrong, we’re conditioned in Western culture to turn on each other. If we can just find someone to blame, or determine a simple explanation to our difficulty, we can move on.

If only life were that simple.

The world doesn’t work this logically or straightforwardly. It’s never just one person’s fault, no matter how terrible or nasty they are.

The search for scapegoats is a huge detour from the work that has to be done, the problem that has to be solved. And it deprives us of the energy and relationships we need.

Seeking scapegoats or hastily assigning blame tears us apart. How can we trust one another if we think that someone’s about to accuse us of something we didn’t do?

Rather than hunt for a hapless victim, what if we all could admit that we’re deeply troubled by what’s happened, that we’re all feeling distressed by this turn of events.

If we directly face the pain of what’s here in our midst, we won’t become blinded by blame. Past the pain is the possibility of clear-seeing, unclouded by despair or paranoia.

From here, we can see the way forward. Together

Fear

Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living
in better conditions.
Hafiz
Sufi teacher, poet, 14th century

Fear is just part of human life. It’s so common that every great spiritual tradition includes the injunction: “Be not afraid.”

If fear is this fundamental to being human, we can expect that we’ll feel afraid at times, perhaps even frequently. Yet when fear appears, we don’t have to worry that we’ve failed, or take it as a sign that we’re not as good as other people. In fact, we’re just like other people. Fear is simple evidence that we’re human.

What’s important to decide is what we do with our fear. We can withdraw, flee, distract or numb ourselves. Or we can acknowledge that we’re scared. And stay right here.

We can stay where we are and bravely investigate our fear. We can move toward it, curious about it. We can even interview it. What does it feel like? What color is it? Does it have a texture, size, personality?

What’s important is to question the fear itself. We’re not asking ourselves why we feel afraid, which is our usual inquiry. We just want to know more about this seemingly frightful creature that showed up in us.

Our investigation moves us closer and closer, and then the fear begins to change. Paradoxically, the more we engage directly with it, the less fearful it becomes.

It is our curiosity that transforms fear. Most often, it dissolves into energy that we can work with.

And all because we were willing to develop a relationship with what, at first, appeared so frightening.

Aggression

If we could read the secret history
of those we would like to punish,
we would find in each life a sorrow and suffering
enough to disarm all our hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Writer, poet

One way to look at aggression is as gestures. Thinking of the motions of aggression, rather than the causes, can be helpful. At any moment, if we notice these movements, we can prevent ourselves from going where aggression wants to take us.

Aggression begins as a gesture of separation; we draw a line and create an antagonist, a threat, an enemy. Aggression must have an object to fight, to strike out against or to defend ourselves from.

Thus one way to interrupt aggression is to move closer to the object we fear. We might ask a question or become curious about our enemy’s motivation. Getting a bit closer through our curiosity, we might discover that we and the stranger have shared a similar life experience—a realization of our common humanity.

Whenever we go on the attack, verbally or physically, aggression becomes another gesture, that of a projectile, something like a heat-seeking missile intent on finding its target.

Once we launch, we can curtail our aggression by stopping the forward motion. In a confrontation, in a hallway or meeting room, we can back-up just a few inches. Or it can be as simple as sitting back in the chair rather than leaning aggressively across the table or desk.

Or we can notice the spear–like precision of our language as we go in for the attack. Instead of words intent on cutting and destroying, we could choose plump phrases, gentler words that have no sharp edges.

One gesture to counteract aggression comes from the 8th century Buddhist teacher Shantideva. He advised us to ‘sit like a log’ when we get provoked and want to react. Even if we sit there feeling more like a crocodile trying to camouflage itself as a log, it helps to pause, get quiet, and just wait for our reactions to subside.

Jealousy

Love is the only emotion that
expands intelligence.
Humberto Maturana
Scientist

Jealousy and generosity are reverse images of one another. In response to any circumstance, one or the other will arise, guaranteed. Since they inhabit the same space, only one can appear at any time; they cancel each other out. Jealousy arises as generosity disappears, generosity flourishes as jealousy is stilled.

When something good happens to someone else—another organization wins a grant, a friend gets a promotion, someone else gets the opportunity we wanted—we can activate either emotion. We can question whether there’s enough to go around. We can wonder whose need is greater, or just assume that we needed it more. We can be happy for their good fortune, or bemoan the loss of ours.

As closely connected as jealousy and generosity are, they create very different consequences. If jealousy predominates, we turn inward, shrivel our hearts, and lose strength. If generosity grows, we grow also. Our world expands. We realize there’s enough to go round. We realize we don’t need everything we thought we did.

The world in general feels more reliable, more trustworthy, more enjoyable. The world expands from the inside out—it’s our hearts that have enlarged. We not only feel more loving, we’re also more open and aware. We see more, we take in more, we let in more.

Jealousy is such a waste of a good human heart.

Boredom

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win,
you’re still a rat.
Lily Tomlin, Comedienne/Author

Current culture places no value on boredom. In fact, it gives it absolutely no respect. Moments of nothingness, of not-doing, not-knowing—these are to be avoided at all costs. Lucky for us, we have the pocket technology to guarantee that we never lapse into boredom, not even for one second.

Yet boredom is a doorway, an invitation to step into uncluttered, nothing-there space. From the outside, it doesn’t look at all appealing. We instantaneously reject the invitation and look for something more evidently stimulating.

But boredom offers a lot. For one thing, it can give our frantic exhausted selves some rest. We don’t have to do anything. We can just sit there and rest in the open space of nothing-to-do. If we can rest there, we might learn to stop fearing this unfamiliar emptiness. We might start to enjoy some of its qualities, such as coolness, peacefulness, tranquility.

Into this new empty space, many temptations will appear, things we need to do, ideas we need to write down immediately, people we need to contact, and lists, lists, lists.

But we don’t have to respond to any of these. We can continue to just sit there, becoming a little more familiar with this cool, quiet sensation of doing nothing.

Later, we can get busy again.

Laziness

People are too busy to care.
Healthcare worker

Laziness is a choice, like most things in life. It’s choosing the easier way out, the path of least consciousness. But while laziness is easy to notice when we don’t want to do physical work, it’s actually everywhere in our lives—in the pivotal choices we make about our emotions, our reactions and where we focus our attention.

For example, being angry or depressed is a common form of laziness. When we begin to feel these emotions at the fringes of our awareness, it’s easier to surrender to them than work to prevent them from getting a firm foothold inside us. Even though we may fear the consequences of anger or depression, we’re very familiar with them. It requires no work whatsoever to let them take over. That’s laziness.

We also slip into laziness about our habits and routines. Even if we’re unhappy with the life we’ve created by succumbing to these routines, it takes work to change them. It’s easier to just let them continue on and keep beating ourselves up. That’s laziness.

Busyness is another form of laziness. As long as we’re working hard, we don’t have to exert any effort to notice whether our work is working, whether it’s leading anywhere good. We don’t have to pay attention to what’s happening, who’s affected, who’s reacting, what the unintended consequences are that clutter the path behind us. We just keep going, busy, thoughtless, ineffective.

Laziness lulls us into a life we don’t like, even though we let it happen because we thought it would be easier. Unconsciously, we chose boredom and routine over life itself.

Life takes work. Awareness takes work. So does perseverance.

Discipline

So let us plant dates, even though
we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret of discipline.
Rubem Alvez
Brazilian theologian

Discipline is a strange and foreign concept to many people today. We’ve been conditioned to follow our passion, to do what we love, to connect our work with our life’s purpose so that we’ll be highly motivated.

But life doesn’t work this way, and work doesn’t get done this way. After the first rush of romance in discovering meaningful work, there’s the actual work to be done. The work will, at times, be boring, repetitive, uninteresting, senseless.

This is why discipline is so important. If you have a daily regimen— exercise, meditation, prayer, sports, music, writing—you’ve learned to do the same thing day after day. You don’t abandon it when it gets boring. You don’t avoid the repetition. You learn to just do it, because you know that the repetition and boredom eventually serve your goal.

When engaged in this kind of practice, at some point we realize that tomorrow will be just like today, and there’s nothing more to do than finish today so we can begin again tomorrow. We practice, practice, practice, focused on completing the session we’re in right now.

If our life lacks this kind of discipline, we end up always looking for a substitute. We seek new work, new causes, new relationships, something or somebody that will fire up our passion and make us feel motivated and alive again.

Propelled by passion rather than by discipline, we end up spent, exhausted, unhappy.

And we lose the capacity to persevere.

Stupidity

Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior
as much as the challenge of dealing
with impossible people in positions of power.
Only under those conditions can warriors
acquire the sobriety and serenity to
withstand the pressure of the unknowable.
Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda

How do we deal with what appears sometimes as stupidity, and other times as deliberately feigned ignorance? How do we deal with people who refuse to understand, who seem to just want to make our lives more difficult, who keep asking the same questions over and over but who never understand our answers no matter how many times we explain things?

Even if we’ve learned to stop being so reactive and can keep our strong emotions under control, stupidity demands a whole other level of patience and practice. Especially if we feel that the person is playing dumb deliberately in order to block our work.

There certainly are people who consciously choose to misunderstand our work. But we often encounter something else—a genuine inability to understand us that is not caused by mental incapacity or nasty intention, but by humans’ inherent perceptual inability to see anything that is truly new and different. Any work, proposal or idea that comes from a different worldview, that is based on a new way of thinking, creates lots of “stupid” people. It’s not that they can’t reason, think or apply logic.

It’s that they have no framework for understanding anything based on different beliefs and assumptions, different logic. When people look at new ideas through their familiar lens, all they see is a haze of disconnected statements and ideas. And it’s not about helping them connect the dots—we’re presenting ideas that, to them, don’t even look like dots.

Patience is the only remedy for this situation. And compassion. Let’s not judge them as stupid or difficult or obstinate. Let’s redefine our task and challenge ourselves to become gentle guides to the world as we see it, not fierce advocates for our view of reality.

Then we’ll discover there’s less stupidity blocking our path.

Loneliness

[The basic order of life] includes all the aspects of life—
including those that are ugly and bitter and sad.
But even those qualities are part of the rich fabric of
existence that can be woven into our being. In fact, we
are already woven into that fabric whether we like it
or not...We cannot change the way the world is,
but by opening ourselves to the world as it is,
we may find that gentleness, decency, and bravery
are available—not only to us, but to all human beings.
Chögyam Trungpa
Buddhist teacher

If we’re set on creating change, on doing things differently, we must be prepared for loneliness. As someone noted, “It’s lonely to get to the future first.” We can’t expect to be joined by a lot of people. We will always be the minority, and we will always feel invisible and lonely.

Or at least we’ll feel this way at first. As our work deepens and we find the few others to accompany us, as we grow wiser about how the world works and lower our expectations of what might be possible to accomplish, our emotional state becomes less compelling. We pay less attention to how we’re feeling. We just keep doing the work.

We don’t develop this wisdom and patience without experiencing many difficult times when we feel abandoned, ignored, maligned, and unloved. But we can pass through these, or more accurately, we can let these feelings pass through us, without responding, without telling ourselves a story. If we can avoid justifying our emotions, if we can avoid explaining why we feel so badly, our emotions won’t solidify into a story that keeps us down. These feelings will pass, if we let them.

Loneliness eventually transforms into a willingness to be alone, even a desire for the space and peace available when nobody else is there. But to get to this lovely place, we first have to let loneliness be there, wait for it to pass through, and then notice that it’s gone, that we quite like the space we’re in.

Everything changes, even the harshest times and the most terrifying feelings. We can trust this process—it’s the only one there is.

Guilt

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
T. S. Eliot
Poet

Mistakes, errors of judgment, hurt and harm we cause others—the path of life is cluttered with these sadnesses we hoped to never cause and certainly never want to happen again.

How do we react when we’re disappointed in ourselves?

Disappointment can grow almost without notice into shame, guilt, self-hatred. What began as a mistake, a lapse of judgment or a tragedy caused by inattention consumes us and destroys our future capacity. One moment or period of bad behavior can predict the rest of our life. This is the true tragedy—we never recover, never learn how to keep going.

There’s a fundamental distinction between guilt and regret. Guilt turns us inward, creating a cauldron of self-hatred that destroys us. People never act wisely from guilt—the intensity of emotions prevents discernment and right action.

Regret, on the other hand, does not disable us. It gives us the capacity to see clearly, to clarify our future, to change. We can vow to not repeat our mistakes, we can pay attention to what we’ve learned, we can focus our heart and mind on not causing harm again. We can develop greater insight into who we are, and move forward to become who we’d like to be.

If guilt and shame are driving us inward, hopefully we can notice this direction and choose, even for a moment, to look outward. If we look out into the world, we will notice that millions of other people are, at this very moment, experiencing the same terrible feelings.

We can use this time of feeling badly about ourself to get beyond our self, and connect with all those other humans with whom we share this dark kinship. If our hearts open to them, what enters us is not more darkness, but the light of compassion.

Grief

If we are able to give ourselves to the loss,
to move toward it—rather than recoil in an
effort to escape, deny, distract, or obscure—
our wounded hearts become full,
and out of that fullness we will do things differently,
and we will do different things.
Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can
wake us up to love, and to loving action.
Norman Fischer
Zen teacher

Death

Do not squander your life.
Zen Evening Reminder

For something that’s so obvious—that we all die—it’s remarkable how little use we make of our impending demise. Instead of taking advantage of our condition, we try and control it—believing that someone somewhere will save us from this inevitability.

Accepting death, far ahead of its appearance, is richly liberating. Suddenly we find courage, energy, determination and levels of freedom never available when we were crouched down in self-protection. Accepting death opens us, frees us, clarifies life, simplifies decisions.

But too many of us have yet to discover this. We clutch to life, work to avoid aging, pray not to get sick, and may even avoid those who are ill and dying.

Those who’ve been visibly brave in the world, those who are known for their tireless efforts for freedom, for the poor, for the planet—all liberated themselves from fearing death. Death might be on their future path, but in this present moment, death has ceased to control them. As one said: “We’re all going to die anyway, so we might as well do something with our life.”

Can we enjoy the opportunities that death offers? Can we focus on its gifts of clear-seeing, fearlessness and the absolute relishing of this present moment and the people we’re with?

Hopefully we can accept these gifts while we still have life enough in us to enjoy them.