PART FOUR
Banish the Word Struggle
The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves.
Banish the word struggle from your attitude
and vocabulary.
Why Stay
From a certain point onward,
there is no turning back.
That is the point that must be reached.
Franz Kafka
Writer
It’s normal to reach the point where we start questioning our motivation: “Why do I work so hard?” “Why am I dedicating so much time to this?” “Why do I stay in this work?”
And if we don’t ask these questions, our friends and loved ones surely will. Usually, if they’re confronting us with these, they already have the answers in mind: Stop working so hard; get a life; notice that other people aren’t nearly as dedicated as you.
Asking “Why stay?” can be an invitation to reassess not our work load, but our original commitment that brought us into this work. Especially when we’re overloaded, burned-out and exhausted, it’s extremely helpful to pause occasionally and reflect on the sense of purpose and potential contribution that lured us into working for this cause. Doing this with colleagues who also are working much too hard is a well-tested means for deepening our relationships and strengthening our resolve to keep going.
But there’s also a significant element of irrationality in why we keep going, even in the midst of defeat and exhaustion. The question “why?” doesn’t lead us to any personal clarity or reassessment, because there really isn’t an answer.
We’re doing the work because we’re doing the work.
If we try and develop an explanation beyond this simple statement of fact, we get into murky waters. Yet even though it’s the truth, it’s a statement destined to promote either anger or confusion in our loved ones.
It’s an insufficient answer, and sometimes it’s the only one available.
Giving Up
After the final no there comes a yes
and on that yes the future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
Poet
Sometimes we just need to stop what we’re doing and acknowledge that things are not going to work out as we’d like.
Sometimes we need to realize that we’ve given all we can and we’re all used up.
Sometimes we need to acknowledge that we’re exhausted and have absolutely no energy left.
How we approach these moments is fundamental to whether we can continue on. Do we feel guilty, upset at ourselves, depressed? Or can we see this moment as rich with information about what’s possible and what’s not?
Giving up is a moment either of acceptance or resignation, two very different states.
Resignation has a beaten up, victim quality to it. We worked hard and we lost. We’ve been defeated. Now it’s time to retreat, to move on, to put this experience behind us as quickly as possible.
Acceptance is radically different—we’re in touch with reality, we’ve learned that we’re not the savior of the situation, and we might feel humbled, but not beaten. We have a richer picture of what’s going on and, after a little rest, we’ll reenter the fray.
Acceptance is to be relished. It allows us to sink our feet more deeply in the mud, and from there to find real sustenance.
Don’t Ask Why
This abiding place, this state of being, of not knowing,
is a very difficult place to be. It’s the
place where we don’t know what’s right, what’s
wrong, what’s real, what’s not real. It’s the place of
just being, of life itself, [the place of] no
separation between subject and object, no space
between I and thou, you and me, up and down,
right and wrong.
I call such practice bearing witness.
Bernie Glassman
Zen teacher
When we get into a difficult situation, when we’re trying to solve a problem or understand another person’s behavior, we shift into analysis. Depending on what we’ve read or how we’ve been trained or who our spiritual teacher is, we immediately try and figure out what’s going on.
Some of us are exceptionally skilled at this, and also quite happy to offer our assessment to anyone who’ll listen (and often to those who won’t). Ironically, the more we’ve trained to be understanding and sensitive, the quicker we are to analyze what’s going on. Yet all our tools and techniques are simply judgments.
The very act of analysis is a separation—standing back or outside of the situation in order to grasp it. As we stand outside peering into the problem or the person, we don’t even notice how little information we’re taking in.
We go looking for certain information and are oblivious to anything else, even when it’s staring us in the face. Here is where the practice of not-knowing comes in handy. Can we just dwell with the problem, the person, the emotion?
Can we let in new information, even that which we’ve pushed away? Can we just be with what is rather than asking why it is? Of course this is very hard, but it’s the essence of being in relationship with whatever’s going on. Just there, just as present as we can possibly be, available to whatever information wants to be noticed.
Bearing witness.
As It Is
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.
William Stafford
Poet
Sometimes the best thing to do is just leave things alone. To stop manipulating, interfering or pushing things along with your own worn-out energy. This is the first step—withdrawing your energy from forcing or cajoling.
The next move is to change where you are, to stop looking at the situation from the outside and to step into it as much as you can. From inside, a whole different territory is revealed.
What do you notice when you stand inside the problem and take a look around? What information is available to you when you stop and listen to all the messages being offered? What happens as you stand there as open and curious as you can manage at this time, willing to not-know, even for a second?
Being in not-knowing, open and aware, is how we discover right action—the appropriate means for what needs to happen. Right action usually doesn’t match our plans, conceived as they were from outside. But now that we’re inside the situation, curious and uncertain, we’re able to notice what’s here. We begin to see dynamics, people, patterns and information we can work with. We become realistic about what’s available. Now we can focus on working with what’s here, rather than what we thought we needed.
If we take this approach, in every situation, we discover that the resources we need are already here. We have more than enough to work with. It’s our task to notice this abundance, and then figure out how to work with it appropriately. What’s possible now, given all these new resources we’ve discovered?
The situation, no matter how difficult, doesn’t need to be different. We just need to see it differently.
Choice
A Buddhist teacher caught himself complaining about the loud party nearby that was disturbing his meditation. And then he had this insight “Oh, the sound is just the sound. It is me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won’t annoy me. It’s just doing what it has to do. That’s what sound does. It makes sound. That is it’s job. So if I don’t go out to bother the sound, it’s not going to bother me. Aha!”
Story told about Ajahn Chah
Buddhist teacher
Choice makes the world go round. The only problem is we don’t know this. Everything in our world—what we feel, who we like, what we dislike, what we do—is a choice. When we realize this, and start to act on it, we regain our freedom and control. We become more conscious participants in any situation.
We need first to notice that we’ve made choices about everything in our lives. How we react and respond, every single feeling, is a choice. Every situation has infinite possibilities for interpretation and reaction. But we collapse all those possibilities the second we assign a feeling or judgment to the situation.
How do we get out of this constriction and discover infinite choice?
It begins with recognizing that we’re not locked in by our perceptions, that other responses are possible. Instead of deciding we don’t like a person, even if the reason seems valid and obvious, we could pause and take another look. Or we could ask them a question that invites them to reveal something more about themselves.
Or on a day when we’re beating up on ourselves, or feeling depressed, we could notice that we’re telling ourselves a story. At that moment, we could deliberately choose another story, one that’s positive, bragging, grateful. It won’t be a true story, but none of them are. They’re all fictions of our drama queen minds.
Changing the story seems unauthentic, lacking integrity. But in this case, authenticity is very over-rated. And extremely limiting.
Why, in this world of infinite freedom and choice, would we lock ourselves into one petty story, no matter how much time, attention and creativity we’ve spent on composing it?
Stuck
Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk.
And this is the edge of the roof.
Rumi
Sufi mystic, poet, 13th century
It’s unfortunate that life isn’t about constant progress and unending success. Life is circular in form—cycles of light and darkness, success and failure, order and chaos. Seldom do we appreciate the necessity for these opposites. We’d rather just have it be successful and wonderful all the time. But we all have to pass through life’s cycles, gracefully or not.
When we personally are confronted by the downside of these cycles, such as when we get stuck, how do we respond? Do we get frustrated? Do we become angry and aggressive? Do we immediately find something else to distract and motivate us? Do we search for a scapegoat or target? Do we withdraw and disappear?
Or do we sit there, content to acknowledge that we’re stuck, that we have no idea what to do now?
In the workings of life, everything moves between periods of chaos and order. Too long in either state is destructive. Too much chaos and nothing new gets created; too much order and nothing gets accomplished. Stuckness is a sign that there’s too much order—too much rigidity in our thinking. It’s time to loosen our grip.
When we get stuck, when nothing seems to be moving and there’s nothing we can do, this means that a very fruitful time is at hand. But these fruits come at a cost—we have to be willing to let go of what we’ve been holding onto—our opinions and beliefs, our current ways of perceiving things, our old methods and techniques.
We’re inside a large knot and the tighter we hold onto any of its strands, the more stuck we get. Loosening our grip, letting some fresh air into our opinions, bringing in new voices and more diversity—any of these approaches will ease the knotty tension we’ve created.
It’s another opportunity to recognize where we are and relax into the experience. Things will become so much easier if we do.
Control
Want to make God laugh?
Show God your plans.
Bumper sticker
What do we control in life, truthfully?
Even a quick glance at our day-to-day life reveals our constant attempts at control—interactions with our children or partner, planning a meeting, developing a project, rehearsing how to approach someone about a situation. And we seek control for a very good reason. We know better. We know what needs to be done.
Just about every person alive is a dismal failure at control. No matter how clever or dedicated we are, everybody resists our best efforts to control them, and life does too. Our failure isn’t due to poor technique or lack of information or lack of respect.
Life simply is uncontrollable.
There is only one thing we can control in life—our own self. We can control our thoughts, our emotions, our responses. We can observe our behaviors and reactions and realize we made a choice. Therefore, we could choose a different response. If we have ourselves under control.
This is not about repressing or denying our experience. Quite the opposite. It’s about looking in the right place for where control is valid, where control can make a difference.
Because, if we learn to control ourselves, the entire world around us changes.
Invisibility
GLOBAL WARMING
When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
Continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.
Jane Hirshfield
Poet
It can be good to be underappreciated, to go unnoticed, to feel invisible. In our achievement-focused, award-based, trophy-giving world, it’s difficult to appreciate the value of invisibility. Of course we want our work to be acknowledged and respected. Recognition and rewards keep us going, especially when the work is difficult and we’ve stuck with it through setbacks and adversity. And especially if we’ve achieved the results that were asked for. We want the world to notice us.
However, if we’re engaged in doing things differently, in finding new ways to solve old problems, in discovering new methods and techniques, we have to expect to be invisible, even if our new approaches are very successful.
This dynamic is called “paradigm blindness.” We all see the world through a particular lens, and we can’t see anything beyond that. Anything new and different isn’t visible. It’s not that we personally are invisible—it’s our way of being in the world that is.
If people are willing to notice our work, their lens will filter out what’s new and different and only bring into focus those achievements or methods that look familiar. Everything else, all the innovative, bold, new things we’ve done, will be invisible.
People don’t make a choice to ignore us—it’s just that we all see the world through the lens we’ve crafted over many years of experiences and interpretations. Aspects of our lens are created by our culture, our parents, and by ourselves. To create a new lens takes work. We have to be committed to noticing our blind spots, and actively seek information that we didn’t see at first. We have to notice what we’re not noticing and commit to this practice as a discipline. But most people won’t undertake this work. They’ll continue to ignore us, and we’ll continue to feel invisible.
Below the radar, if we don’t need recognition, we can get a lot of good work done.
Frustration
We’re never gonna survive
unless we get a little bit crazy.
Seal
Singer/songwriter
From time to time, it’s good practice to surprise ourselves with new behaviors. Especially when our familiar techniques aren’t working and we’re frustrated. At such moments, most of us do more of the same. We act as if our approach is fine, it’s just that we’re not applying it correctly. So we become more focused, diligent, hard-working, frustrated.
When things aren’t going well, when the results we need aren’t materializing, it’s time to be different. It’s time to choose a new response. We don’t have to choose a better response, it just has to be different.
Choosing a different behavior is risky. We’re going to look strange to those who think they know us. But in many cases, they already think we’re strange, so perhaps the risk is not as great as we fear.
We don’t do things differently to upset people. Changing our behavior is how we discover we have choice. There’s no reason we have to stay locked into how we’ve always done things. As soon as we break free of the prison of our habits and patterns, as soon as we take the risk of trying something different, freedom greets us.
Noticing our freedom is the essence of this practice. That’s why it almost doesn’t matter which new behavior we try out. Whatever we do that’s different releases us from the familiar; any change introduces us to the space of possibilities rather than the confinement of habitual patterns.
Over time, of course, we want to discover responses that are appropriate, that better serve to accomplish our purpose. But these too will become overly familiar and eventually frustrate us.
Frustration is a guide to freedom, if we recognize its signals.
Experiments
We can put our whole heart into whatever we do;
but if we freeze our attitude into for or against,
we’re setting ourselves up for stress. Instead, we
could just go forward with curiosity, wondering
where this experiment will lead. This kind
of open-ended inquisitiveness captures the
spirit of enthusiasm, or heroic perseverance.
Pema Chödrön
Buddhist teacher
Life is just one big experiment and so are all our efforts and great intentions to impact our world for good. If the solutions to problems—personal and global— were known, they wouldn’t be problems now.
Even though this logic seems rather obvious, it’s strange how so many people keep applying old methods and old thinking to these issues, even as they keep failing. It seems we’d rather keep exhausting ourselves with failure than change our minds and admit that new ideas are needed.
Truthfully, we don’t have the faintest idea what to do.
Yet this is not an admission of defeat, it’s an invitation to experiment.
Instead of exhausting ourselves with doing the same thing only faster and with more vehemence, we could shift into curiosity.
Curiosity is a very compelling space—open, rich, friendly. We’re willing to be surprised rather than having to get it right. We’re interested in others’ perspectives, intrigued by differences, stimulated by new thoughts.
Curiosity is a very pleasant place to dwell. Relaxing even. And most certainly fruitful.
All it requires is letting go of certainty and admitting we don’t know what we’re doing.
Let the experiments begin.
Clarity
Human life should be like a vow, dedicated to
uncovering the meaning of life. The meaning of
life is in fact not complicated; yet it is veiled
from us by the way we see our difficulties.
It takes the most patient practice to begin to see
through that, to discover that the sharp rocks are truly jewels.
Joko Beck
Zen teacher
It can take many years of being battered and bruised by events and people to discover clarity the other side of struggle. This clarity is not about how to win, but about how to be, how to withstand life’s challenges, how to stay in the river.
We never learn to triumph over life, but we can learn that every defeat, every problem, every terror is a teacher that prepares us for the next hardship. And we learn to expect that there are always more difficulties ahead.
When this clarity emerges from our experience, what also emerges is trust in ourselves. We realize that we can cope and learn and grow from hardship and trials. We learn to accept difficulty and setback as part of life’s normal processes. We cease feeling threatened by most things.
Instead of struggling or avoiding difficulties, we become people who know they can hold their ground even as the currents intensify and threaten to drag us under. We learn to sink our feet into the mud ever more deeply, because we know that more challenges are coming.
Once we’ve experienced life in all its dimensions—good, bad, hard, easy—life doesn’t seem so challenging. Every situation is what it is, sometimes lovely, sometimes difficult. Every situation is workable.
We’re fully in the river and we’re learning how to keep our heads above water.
Life Is Life
The essence of the false promise is that we can
make ourselves and our life whatever we want.
But this will only bring disappointment,
because no matter what we do, there’s no way we can
guarantee a life free of problems.
Ezra Bahda
Zen teacher
What is it about us humans that we think we need to control everything? Actually, this isn’t true of all cultures—most indigenous people and traditional cultures participate with life, work with its unceasing cycles, and expect there to be good times and bad times.
But in Western culture, we believe we’re smart enough to control everything, including Mother Nature. We certainly think we can control what happens in our own lives. If this weren’t true, why would we be so obsessed with planning and goal-setting?
What would it feel like to surrender to the rhythms and dynamics of life? What would it feel like to realize that we don’t really have a choice here—we can either participate with life, or resist it and drive ourselves to exhaustion and failure.
Instead of working so hard to actively construct our lives, we could relax with the opportunities that life provides, both the good and the bad ones. People who have this type of relationship with life truly are more relaxed. The seeming loss of control doesn’t create anxiety or feelings of distress. It does the reverse, it creates feelings of ease and clarity—and the capacity to stay.
Surrendering to life offers some wonderful realizations. We learn we’re capable of being in this dance, of working with whatever happens. We learn to trust ourselves and then others and, gradually, we learn that life itself can be trusted.
The grace of surrender offers us the awareness that life is on our side, that life is our partner. Whatever may be happening in our private worlds, inside the noise and disturbance, a lovely realization dawns.
Life wants us here.
Just Like Me
Pleasure is not a reward.
Pain is not a punishment.
They’re just ordinary occurrences.
Chögyam Trungpa
Buddhist teacher
Anytime we’re experiencing a dark emotion—grief, anger, fear, loneliness—we can be assured that all over the planet, millions if not billions of people are experiencing the same thing. This is true because we’re all human. Even though our external experiences differ profoundly, our emotional responses are the same.
In the midst of overwhelming emotions, even a momentary recognition that we’re having a shared experience can transform our experience from personal to communal. Even when we feel crushed by isolation, abandonment, loneliness, if we can flash for a brief instant on all the others who are in the same state, it changes our experience. Perhaps our awareness is short-lived, but even a few seconds is enough to recognize that we’re not completely imprisoned by these emotions, that, in fact, we can use them to connect to others who are also suffering.
Once we experience this connection, our pain isn’t quite so oppressive. We’ve taken a moment to look beyond our personal experience and that simple gesture of looking outside ourselves creates more space within us. There’s a little more room for our hearts to open, to experience compassion, connection, even gratitude.
When we recognize that our personal struggle is fundamental to being human, that everyone struggles and suffers, we begin to feel less personally victimized. We become more accepting of difficulty, less battered by bad moments.
It takes but a moment to notice what’s going on in the world beyond ourselves. At every instant, no matter what we’re feeling, we always find ourselves in the very good company of hundreds of millions of people.
Clear Seeing
My continuing passion would be...to part a curtain,
that invisible shadow that falls between people,
the veil of indifference to each other’s presence,
each other’s wonder,
each other’s human plight.
Eudora Welty
Writer
To want to see clearly is a true act of fearlessness. To open our heart and mind, to be open to what life is offering us in this moment, requires tremendous courage and steadfastness.
In the openness, we will encounter the information we pushed away, the messages we wouldn’t hear, the ideas we rejected, the people we made invisible.
Our openness also invites in penetrating emotions—grief, sorrow, love, compassion.
We do not create the space of clear seeing with our usual methods. No questioning, no analysis, no distinctions—just bearing witness to what’s present. The less we sort, judge, categorize or distinguish, the more we see and feel.
Without our usual filters and boundaries, we stop feeling repulsed or threatened or thrilled. We discover that we’re much larger than our usual boundedness. In fact, we’re big enough to take it all in.
And wonderfully true, the more open we become, the less fear is present. Fear does a very good job of keeping us from being present, filling us with thoughts about what might happen in the future, or what seemed to have happened in the past.
But in this present moment, fear is nowhere to be found. Clear seeing has no fear. We are in this very moment released from fear’s mesmerizing grip.
To be free from fear, we merely need to be in the present moment. Then we can see clearly.
Success
If we have been aware of the process of our lives,
including moments that we hate,
and are just aware of our hating—
“I don’t want to do it, but I’ll do it anyway”
—that very awareness is life itself.
When we stay with that awareness,
we don’t have that reactive feeling about it;
we’re just doing it.
Then for a second we begin to see,
“Oh, this is terrible—
and at the same time, it’s really quite enjoyable.”
We just keep going, preparing the ground. That’s enough.
Joko Beck
Zen teacher
What are your measures of success? Both your conscious ones that you proclaim, and your unconscious ones that manipulate you invisibly? When you get depressed or upset with yourself because you’ve failed, what measures are revealed by your distress?
At the end of your life, what measures of success do you expect you’ll still be clinging to or proudly proclaiming?
Can you accept as a measure of success that you just kept showing up, day after day, even when you weren’t feeling helpful or effective?
What about the times you didn’t get caught in others’ dramas, or weren’t swept away by dark emotions?
Or the times you refrained from striking back and refused to counter aggression with aggression?
Or the moments when your heart opened to another person’s predicament because you’d had the same experience and realized we’re all just only human?
Simply staying on the path, no matter what, keeping on with your direction, finding your way back when you get lost or diverted—this seems enough success for a lifetime.
If we’ve returned again and again to our work, if we’ve taken on challenges rather than avoiding them, if we’ve known when to give up, when to change, when to open up, when to love...
Well I, for one, will feel very successful.