But the stone that the builder refuse
Shall be the head cornerstone,
And no matter what game they play,
Eh, we got something they could never take away;
We got something they could never take away

You already are what you want to become.

—Master Lin Chi

All of us go through times of transition, challenges, and difficulties. We may have faced or will face times of loss, confusion, or heartbreak, when we realize we cannot control the way our life is unfolding, whether in our personal lives or in the world around us. With mindfulness, we can learn to move through these intense, challenging times in ways that don’t add to the suffering and difficulty that are already there. We can even learn to open our hearts to the richness and wisdom these times of immense disruption can bring us.

When we touch this experience of coming home, it is like we have finally arrived home after a long journey.

A key step that can help us begin to settle ourselves when we are profoundly unsettled is to come home, to ourselves, in this moment, whatever is happening. This is one way of speaking about mindfulness, or being present: coming home to ourselves. When we bring our mind back to our body we come home. We could consider this state as our true home. This home inside of us is a home no one can take away from us, and it cannot be damaged or destroyed. No matter what happens around us, if we can find this home inside of us, we are always safe.

When we touch this experience of coming home, it is like we have finally arrived home after a long journey. We experience a sense of peace and even freedom, no matter how confining the outer circumstances. Coming home to ourselves feels like belonging; it is a state that holds us and enables us to hold others.

This is so important because we can live our whole lives estranged from this home within ourselves.

My mentor Thich Nhat Hanh, whom his students call Thay, or “teacher” in Vietnamese, sums up his whole lifetime of teachings with one sentence: “I have arrived, I am home.” For him, the principal aim of mindfulness practice is to experience that we have already arrived, here and now. There is nowhere we need to run to or be, other than right here in the present moment. And we experience ourselves at home, no longer looking for some refuge outside of us, in some other place or time, when we touch the truth that all that we long for and search after is here inside of us.

We can experience encountering this spacious and free place of our true home in unexpected moments as we spend more time tuning in to what is happening inside us and around us. One morning, when I was a novice nun, in slow walking after our early morning sitting meditation, I was very present and able to be aware of nearly every step. I began by being aware that as I was stepping with my left foot, I was at the same time stepping with my right, because my left foot could not be without my right. And vice versa. Then I saw that my arms were also contained in my feet, so I was also stepping with my arms. Then my hands, my stomach, brain, sense organs, heart, lungs. I was 100 percent with my body. So I was tasting the earth with my feet, listening to it, looking at it, feeling it, knowing it, smelling it with my feet. My heart was loving it, my lungs breathing it in and out.

Then I turned my attention more toward the Earth and knew I was also walking on cool streams of water flowing under me, and hot, fiery liquid deep below, in the center of the Earth. I imagined walking on the feet of those directly opposite us on the other side of the planet. The soles of my feet touched the soles of a little baby taking tentative steps, and a pregnant woman, and an old grandpa. My feet touched the feet of a lonely, isolated person, and someone carried away by hatred and anger. I was also walking on the feet of someone who was right then doing walking meditation and enjoying the present moment. I was one with those walking the Earth whose hearts were filled with love and peace.

We can’t find what we need to meet tomorrow or a month from now because we can’t control or exactly know the future, but we will find what we need for right now.

If we’re not aware of what is happening in the moment because we are caught up in our thoughts or reveries, or in the grip of worry or other strong emotions, it’s like we have left our house. If we stay away for a long time, dust accumulates and unwanted visitors may take up residence in our home. Things like stress and tension accumulate in our bodies and minds, and over time, if we don’t tend to them, they can lead to physical or psychological illness.

But the beauty of awareness is that we can always return home to ourselves. Our home is always there, waiting for us to come back. There are numerous ways we can go home to ourselves: by being aware of our breath, by being aware of body sensations or bodily movements, and by connecting with the reality around us, like the sounds in our environment. And when we come back home in these ways, we are able to take stock and survey the territory of our being, seeing clearly what parts of our inner landscape need more support, where we need to pay more attention.

It is especially tempting in times of transition and challenge to abandon our homes, to leave our territory, in search of answers, perhaps by worrying about what will happen in the future. This is precisely the moment when we need to return to the present moment, feel our bodies, and take good care of ourselves now. Because the future is made of this moment. If we take good care of this moment, even if it is very difficult, we are taking good care of the future.

It may also be hard to come home if we sense that unresolved pain has accumulated and we don’t want to face it. We may get into the habit of avoiding our home completely. We don’t want to be with those raw, unprocessed parts of our experience that are painful and may be quite scary.

If this is our situation, it is important to have compassion for ourselves for not wanting to return home to face these places inside of us. And yet the only way we can heal them, move through them, and make our home a more cozy place is to turn toward them. As the teaching goes: “The only way out is in.” Or through.

How do we do this? One of the ways is to stay with what is here and now, on the platform of the train station so to speak, watching the trains of our thoughts and plans come and go, rather than jumping on a thought-train that is heading into the future, or another thought-train that takes us into the past.

Those plans, worries, and anxieties will surely arise in our mind, but we can learn to notice them and take good care of them rather than feed them and get pulled away by them. Bringing our attention to our breath or to the sensations in our body helps us to stay on the platform of the now. The past and future are not the place where we can come home to ourselves and resource ourselves with the elements we need to move through our difficulties. We can only come home to ourselves in the present moment, in the here and now.

We can spend lots of our time and energy trying to predict or control what the future will bring. This doesn’t usually serve us. In truth, we don’t need to know what the future will bring. We just need to be right in this moment, and if we touch it deeply, mind and body united, we will find we have all that we need to meet the present. We can’t find what we need to meet tomorrow or a month from now because we can’t control or exactly know the future, but we will find what we need for right now.

Meditation: I Am Home

Let’s practice connecting with our present moment experience. Sit, lie, or stand in a comfortable position that supports you to be alert and also relaxed. You may like to set a timer with your phone or an alarm clock for ten minutes if you wish to be aware of time. Most of these meditations are short, and you can practice them throughout your day.

Begin by feeling the contact between your body and whatever surface is supporting you. Let yourself rest in this place, returning to this moment, here and now. Invite whatever parts of yourself that may still be dispersed to come back and settle.

Set the intention to come home to yourself, to be present for yourself. You deserve this care, you are precious and unique, in all the world there is no one else who brings the precise combination of gifts that you bring. Allow yourself to arrive here as fully as you can. And welcome the many parts of yourself home.

You may already begin to feel yourself settling into the home inside of you: the place of your strength, wisdom, and clarity. A place that is trustworthy and capable of providing you with refuge in the storm. But if not, continue to stay with awareness of your body sensations, sounds, or breathing. A sense of coming home will develop over time. It may not happen the first time you meditate, but as you become more attuned to yourself, you will find you have been at home all along.

If it’s helpful you can repeat inwardly, I have arrived. I am home.

If it supports you, you can connect the words with your breathing, arrived with the in-breath, home with the out-breath.

Arrived in the present moment, home in myself, just as I am.
Arrived, arrived,
at home, I am at home,
dwelling in the here and dwelling in the now.
Solid as a mountain, free as a white cloud,
the door to no birth and no death is open,
free and unshakeable.
—Plum Village song

This teaching is excerpted from her new book, We Were Made for These Times, which will be published by Parallax Press in October.

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Clarity about the difference between meditation and rumination is important for an optimal sleep routine. Meditation is intentional; the intention can be to let go of thoughts instead of following them, or a resolve to focus on the breath.

In contrast, rumination happens spontaneously. Studies show that we spend 30 to 50 percent of our mental activity in thoughts that are neither related to what we’re doing nor to our surroundings. This can be a problem at bedtime as the body has trouble telling thoughts from reality. Thus, if your thoughts are replaying an argument you had earlier in the day, then your heart rate, blood pressure, and level of stress hormones will match those feelings instead of feelings that will foster a peaceful drift into sleep. Meditation can help you go to sleep, whereas rumination can keep you awake.

Although I didn’t start meditating in order to sleep better, a good night’s sleep has been one of the unexpected gifts of meditation. I use the two essential practices of focusing on the breath and letting go of thoughts every night. My personal challenge has been going back to sleep after waking up at night—a problem that affects up to 35 percent of us. Now when I wake up, I sit on the edge of the bed and do a period of meditation. After a short time, my mind is peaceful, and I’m ready to fall back to sleep.

If you find meditation challenging, try the following steps. Do each step for three breaths.

1. Focus on Your Breath

Breathe slowly and deeply from the diaphragm, concentrating on the sensations of breathing.

Always breathe through your nose. The nose makes important contributions to your health. Glands in the sinuses produce nitric oxide, which helps dilate the blood vessels and improve circulation. The nose humidifies and filters the air.

Is one nostril blocked? Lie on the other side. This unblocks it within a few minutes. Are both nostrils blocked? Cup your hand at the faucet and fill your nose with cold water for a few seconds. A blocked nose isn’t necessarily due to mucus, so blowing your nose may not always fix it. Sometimes the cause is the erectile tissue inside the nose. Nasal blockage and mouth-breathing contribute to snoring, which in turn may interfere with sleep.

2. Do a Body Scan

A body scan is systematic. You start at one end, say the feet, and work your way up—focusing on different parts of the body, noticing any tension, and letting it go. Some yoga teachers offer a shortened version of a body scan at the end of a class. That was my first introduction to it, and I’d sometimes notice fellow yoga practitioners falling asleep in class while doing it.

Whether on the yoga mat or in bed, a body scan is effective as a relaxation technique.

When I lead a group through a body scan, I start by asking people to feel if one foot is colder than the other, and I ask them to notice the pressure they feel on the buttocks from sitting. (We are usually sitting in a meditation class.) Then we work our way up. When we come to the neck, I note that the head is ten pounds heavier for each inch it’s leaning forward. I notice a few people straightening up as I say that. Coming to the facial muscles, I usually quote Thich Nhat Hanh: “Sometimes I smile because I’m happy, and sometimes I’m happy because I smile.” I also remind people of the old adage: “The face is the mirror of the mind.”

A body scan is a good practice for body awareness and relaxation. Focusing on the body works as an antidote to being in our thoughts, for the body is always here now, whereas thoughts can be anywhere, anytime. We need that grounding at bedtime.

3. Conduct a Scan of Your Emotions

Notice with compassion what’s on your mind. The psychological term “negativity bias” refers to our tendency to think more about negative things and to accord them more importance. This creates anxiety rather than happiness, and discontent rather than contentment. Both can interfere with sleep.

The first step in overcoming the negativity bias is being aware of it. Then with a smile, urge your mind to notice that the glass it sees as half-empty is also half-full. We tend to take what we have for granted, and this gets in the way of contentment. Reach for contentment. Look at all the things you take for granted and appreciate life’s blessings.

4. Focus on What You Want

Thinking doesn’t stop when we go to bed. There’s no “off” button. Forceful directions, such as saying to yourself, “I will stop thinking,” don’t work.

Give yourself positive directions instead. An obvious example of this is what happens when you say, “I will not think of a pink elephant.” You think of a pink elephant! But think of a blue elephant instead, and the pink elephant disappears. Thus, “I will not think of that argument I had with my spouse,” is likely to be counterproductive. It’s better to say to yourself, “I will focus on my breath.”

5. Let Go

The goal of doing your best is more realistic than the goal of being perfect. Keep in mind that we control our intentions and our actions, but not the results of our actions. With hindsight, we may see what we should have done; however, that knowledge wasn’t available during the moment we acted.

“I’ve done my best today; may all people be happy and well” is a soothing evening prayer. It celebrates a compassionate heart while tacitly acknowledging its limits.

If your mind serves you self-bashing thoughts at night, turn them toward self-appreciation. Focus on your motives and your efforts—the things that you do control.

Our culture says, “If at first, you don’t succeed, try harder.” Such messages are valuable in certain areas. For example, if we try harder, we can run faster, at least to a certain extent. But in areas where we don’t have conscious control, trying harder doesn’t work at all; it’s often counterproductive. Instead of helping, the extra effort gets in the way. Sleep is one of those areas.

Striving or worrying about sleep only makes it more difficult to attain. Just focus on your breathing. Let go of everything else.

Once you’ve cycled through these five steps, extend the meditation period by continuing with conscious breathing, or try repeating the steps from the beginning.

If you don’t fall asleep after a reasonable time of meditating, get out of bed. Put yourself to work doing something that needs to be done. Do this with a positive mindset, considering the extra time as a gift. Use up your energy. You’ll check off an item or two from your to-do list, and you may feel more inclined to sleep afterward.

Finally, be aware that pairing meditation with certain lifestyle choices is particularly effective for nurturing healthy sleep patterns. Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.” So, a sleep problem also has the nature of interbeing—it doesn’t exist alone. Our lifestyle, including our caffeine consumption and the amount of exercise we do, has a bearing on how well we sleep.

Caffeine doesn’t affect everyone the same way. For some people, it can stay in the blood for more than nine hours. It turns out that 40 percent of us are fast caffeine metabolizers; 15 percent of us are particularly slow at it; and the rest fall somewhere in between. If you know someone who drinks cup after cup and then sleeps peacefully, don’t try to imitate them. It may not work for you. A good way to find out how coffee affects your sleep is to go without it or only drink the decaffeinated stuff for a week.

Studies show that regular exercise correlates with better sleep. These days, over half of all work is done while sitting at a desk, so this makes intentionally finding ways to exercise all the more necessary. Bike to work if you can, find a gym close by, or run. Do what you need to do to get a daily dose of exercise. You’ll appreciate it at bedtime.

Sweet dreams, my friends!

The post What to Do When You Can’t Sleep appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

What can we do when our world, our community, and our hearts are broken? How do we handle the reactivation of intergenerational trauma, when our physical safety, emotional well-being, and mental health are shattered by simultaneously occurring global health crises, pandemics of violence, and seriously escalating environmental disasters?

I believe this story exemplifies the power of collective healing practices.

I believe we begin by recognizing and accepting the depth of our experiences. Our initial shock, withdrawal, and numbness may be our bodies’ way of protecting us. We may choose to pause, or to reach out to an experienced counselor or circle of friends. After the initial shock, the practice of RAIN, which asks us to 1) recognize 2) allow 3) investigate and 4) non-identify/nurture, is a good way to investigate states that provoke emotional destabilization.

In the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Kisa Gotami approaches the Buddha and asks him to bring her dead child back to life. The Buddha doesn’t simply tell her life is impermanent. Instead, he sends her on a journey, asking her to gather a mustard seed from every house that has never known death.

I imagine—although the suttas don’t state this—that when she visited some households, people wept for the loss of those who had died, and she joined them. Even though grief and lamentation are viewed as dukkha, suffering, the Buddha gave Kisa time to grieve and lament with others. Once that occurred, she could relinquish her overwhelming grief.

I believe this story exemplifies the power of collective healing practices, especially in times of profound individual loss and great social trauma. For some of us, the candlelight vigils, community protests, and creative artistic collaborations that emerged alongside the Black Lives Matter movement provided deep refuge in times of great suffering. My own contemplation of the numerous altars, murals, and music videos created over the last few years has provided a welcome antidote to the brutal images of Black death and unworthiness.

While not every protest is a spiritual event, community efforts that honor the dead and affirm the preciousness of every sentient life-form are powerful sites for healing and transformation. I believe that embodied ritual practices, including chanting, prayers, testimony, and crying, were part of the great Buddhist teacher and peace activist Maha Gosananda’s walks across Cambodia, leading people home who had lost everything except their lives during decades of war. I know from my own experience that embodied communal practices supported our bodies-minds-hearts during the 1960s Civil Rights struggles in the United States, encouraging us to peacefully resist violence and commit to the ending of social injustice.

One of my students shared recently that as their participation in protest rallies decreased, their despair about the state of the world increased. While activism without compassion, self-reflection, and ethical guidance can create situations of great harm, let’s acknowledge the power of activist sanghas to transform, heal, and mend our brokenness.

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With a puzzle, a person sits at the table with a thousand pieces scattered in all directions. They may say, “I don’t see any connections. How can I find anything?” After a few minutes they may say, “I can’t do this. This is not for me.” So, they give up. It may be true that the activity doesn’t work for them, but by giving up without putting in a good effort, they’ve lost the opportunity for their attention to grow.

“When we learn to see thoughts come and go, we develop the attitude of the observer.”

For many, meditation is similar. They say, “How can I meditate with these thousand thoughts swirling in my head?” They don’t see the connection between following their breath and cultivating well-being. Nothing seems to make sense, so they think, “This is not for me,” and they give up quickly. Their attention does not have the chance to stabilize, nor does tranquility have the chance to arise.

Doing puzzles is a humbling experience, since we see how dispersed our minds can be. Our field of vision is bombarded with puzzle pieces, but when we try to focus on one piece, another attracts our attention. We then let go of that distraction and return to finding our initial piece. As we return, another thought pops up and takes our attention away. We believe we saw the piece before; we just don’t remember where. We can even swear that a piece is lost, simply because we cannot find it. That’s how unfocused our minds can be.

The good news is that as long as we keep returning to the task of finding the puzzle piece, eventually we will “see” it. This is what makes attention grow: a gentle but consistent persistence. It is like dripping water filling a bucket drop by drop. In my community in Brazil, we have a similar saying: It is grain by grain that the hen fills her gullet.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu says that mindfulness “is the ability to keep something in mind and remember to keep it in mind.” He also reminds us that the Buddha taught right mindfulness and not simply mindfulness. With right mindfulness, together with other aspects of the path, we keep in mind and remember to keep in mind what is beneficial and abandon what is not.

The simple task of finding a puzzle piece cultivates mindfulness and concentration, which spills over into our meditation practice. Moments of concentration in meditation then lead to additional moments of mindfulness in daily life. It is a snowball effect. This fundamental aspect of the Buddha’s teachings helps us understand cause and effect and can be applied to any part of our lives. We do this, that arises. We stop doing this, that ceases.

If there is a messy pile in front of us, it will take longer to see connections. So, separate the puzzle pieces by color or shape. In meditation, we see connections as we return over and over to the object of our attention. That process of returning is what gives the mind a chance to calm down, rest in the present moment, and watch our thoughts. In time, we realize how we create stress for ourselves by the frenetic way we think.

Sometimes we focus on small details in the puzzle. Other times, we look at the whole picture. In observing the breath in one spot, we narrow our attention. Other times we make our awareness broad. In the Anapanasati Sutta, for example, the Buddha encourages us to make our awareness include our whole body. 

At one moment, the puzzle seems easy. Another moment, we want to quit. Similarly, we may be hitting a plateau in our meditation practice or encountering a seemingly insurmountable challenge. In moments like these, patience, creativity, persistence, and a gentle touch can help.

In the essay “A Decent Education,” American Buddhist monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu says, “when things like pain and distraction come up in the meditation…don’t get discouraged by how big the task is. Just keep chipping away, chipping away….when you come to meditation you need to develop the basic skills needed to deal with a long-term project: Keep chipping away, chipping away, step by step.”

We can train ourselves to improve our attention. A puzzle is one of endless activities that can increase our attention by bringing our minds to the present moment. At first it is all a blur, but with time it starts to make sense. Finishing a puzzle can bring a sense of accomplishment. We have cultivated attention and can now notice what we didn’t before.

As we meditate, we see our thoughts more clearly and question their reality. Insight meditation teacher Tara Brach says, “Thoughts are real but not true.” What this means is that their effect on the body is real, but we are often making them up.

When we learn to see thoughts come and go, we develop the attitude of the observer. This is an important step because observing our thoughts is a major goal of meditation. Otherwise, unskillful thoughts spill out in our words and actions when we are irritated.

Sometimes, simply acknowledging a thought’s presence is enough for it to go away. At other times, we need an active approach, especially with persistent and negative thoughts. Deal with those like a call from a strange number or a scam text—see it but don’t answer it, or glance at it and delete it.

We learn to notice that thoughts of understanding, forgiveness, generosity, compassion, and goodwill for ourselves and others have a positive impact on our emotions. How we think affects how we feel. This is the principle of cause and effect. Test it to see if it is true for you.

With more moments of mindfulness, continue observing your thoughts. Engage with thoughts when needed, or just step back and watch. By stepping back from our thoughts, we create moments of rest despite the conditions of our lives and this unjust world. Most importantly, we create positive causes for this moment and the next. The practice is to pay attention to one breath at a time, one moment of mindfulness at a time, and one thought at a time. Even when there are a thousand thoughts.

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Going to a retreat or program is a wonderful way to deepen our meditation practice. But how do we stay connected with these waking-up practices when we go home to the myriad projects, emails, responsibilities, and distractions waiting for us?

This is a question that applies not just to meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices, but to any creative art we want to commit to, such as painting, writing, or playing an instrument. Paradoxically, the practices we know are most vital to our wellbeing are the very things that are usually pushed aside by daily tasks that feel more urgent.

You may start each day intending to spend half an hour on your zafu, practice walking meditation in the park, or write three haikus capturing the essence of your insights. But you’re out of yogurt and broccoli, there are 237 unread emails in your inbox, your taxes were due last week, and your child has knocked out a tooth skateboarding or needs you to buy Japanese print fabric for a history project. So you put off meditating or working on your memoir for one more day. And then one more. And then one more.

Lately I’ve been offering students a six-step plan that I’ve found effective for establishing and maintaining a home practice of almost anything—even in the middle of a crazily busy life. I’ve used these principles to maintain a yoga and meditation practice for almost 30 years—and also to pursue various long-term artistic projects, such as writing a novel.

Here are six steps you can follow to establish a daily practice of almost anything:

1. Set Your Intention

Get very clear about what you want to commit to—and even more important, why.

Why is it important to you that you sustain a meditation practice—or do tai chi, or paint wildflowers? What part of you does it nourish? Write down your reasons. The more specific you are, the more likely you will be to do it. It’s not just “I want to meditate more.” It’s “I commit to meditating for ten minutes before I wake up the kids for school because it keeps me calm, grounded, and more present for my family.” To make your intention even stronger, share it with someone close to you. However, be careful about talking about it too widely—that can dissipate the energy.

2. Establish a Cue

This is what reminds you to start your practice. The most simple and reliable cue is a specific time. For instance, you decide you will meditate every evening from 9 to 9:30 p.m.

It can also be a floating cue: you will do half an hour of yoga right after you finish work, whenever that happens to be. Or you will take ten mindful breaths whenever you are about to launch your email program. To ensure that your good intentions don’t get overrun by other plans, carve out the time in advance. Write it into your calendar and don’t schedule anything else during that period. Be sure to build in time for any preparations or cleanup that are necessary.

Remember, start modestly. Meditating for ten minutes every day for a year is more beneficial than meditating an hour a day for three days, then burning out. Again, it can help to let the people close to you know what you are doing, especially if you live together. That way they can support you in your commitment.

3. Round Up Your Supplies

Make sure you have everything you need for your practice in a place where you can find it easily. That way you don’t have to waste your precious time hunting them down. Maintain a meditation nook with an inviting cushion, a small altar, and a supply of incense and matches. If you want to write down your dreams every morning, place a notebook and pen on your bedside table.

4. Do Your Practice

So you don’t spend your dedicated practice time spacing out or trying to figure out where to get started, it helps to have a plan in place, especially at first. Know what meditation method you intend to practice—for example, breath meditation or loving-kindness practice—and stick with one method for at least a week before switching. (If you’re planning on using a guided meditation, download or bookmark the instructions in advance, so you don’t eat up your meditation time surfing the web.)

If you’re doing yoga, outline a standard routine you can fall back on, knowing that if you get inspired, you can always change it once you get going. If you’re doing writing practice, put some prompts in your journal to get you started.

5. Reward Yourself

Yes, theoretically the practice is its own reward. But especially when you’re establishing a new pattern, it helps to have an external reward as well. After your dawn meditation, make yourself a cup of green tea and sip it slowly while watching the sun come up. After your evening yoga, watch a silly movie with your kids. After you draw in your art journal, put a gold star sticker on your calendar. Our brains love this kind of positive reinforcement.

6. Track your progress

Keeping a record of what you have and haven’t done increases your sense of accountability. Make this part fun! You can go the old-fashioned route by checking off boxes on a calendar. Or you can use one of the many new habit-tracking apps that are available.

Remember, this is about celebrating your accomplishments, not beating yourself up when you miss a day. Through daily small changes of routine, your whole life can shift over time to a new trajectory. Just remember to enjoy the journey.

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My birth was not a celebrated and magical event. My parents’ relationship had always been rocky and, sadly, it completely unraveled during my mother’s pregnancy with me.

We lived in Bellflower, California, a low-income neighborhood between Long Beach and Compton, in a large concrete apartment building surrounded by chaos. Gangs were commonplace and I became used to the sounds of gunshots, sirens, and police helicopters.

Even as a small child I felt a lot of love and compassion for my parents, and I recognized early on that they were themselves survivors. My father left soon after I was born and my mother worked as much as she could for us. With state aid and food stamps, we just got by.

If we really listen, we can hear that life is trying to get our attention as well and wake us up. This call to wake up happens when our lives are no longer satisfying, when we have lost interest in all the things that once made us so happy.

I wasn’t allowed to play outside very often, so my earliest memories are of my sister and me jumping up and down on an old green sofa in our tiny living room. I can remember thinking at an early age, “Wow, this is going to be a very difficult life.” I understood even as a child that I was going to have to bloom in very muddy waters.

About 2,600 years ago, an Indian prince named Siddhartha was born amid many favorable signs. His father, the king, was determined to protect him against the reality of suffering, and the prince grew up within the walls of the palace with every luxury one can imagine.

Around the age of twenty-nine, Siddhartha began to feel dissatisfied with his princely life and deep feelings of unhappiness began to grow. He longed to explore the world and convinced his reluctant father to let him leave the palace on an outing. This gave the gods and spirits the opportunity to arrange a series of signs that would help Siddhartha wake up and see the truth of life. These signs have become known as the four heavenly messengers, and they changed the course of his life.

The first messenger that he encountered was a very old man, covered in wrinkles, bent over, and barely able to walk down the road. His father had only allowed young and beautiful servants in the palace, so this was an unfamiliar sight. Siddhartha now realized that his youth would someday end and he too would grow old.

The second heavenly messenger the prince encountered was a very sick man. He was covered in bloody sores, lying in pain on the floor of a mud hut. Because his father had forbidden sick people from entering the palace, the prince had no experience of illness and disease. Now he realized that he and all others would eventually become sick, and his heart was filled with compassion.

The third heavenly messenger was a large funeral procession. A corpse, wrapped in cloth, was being carried to the charnel grounds to be cremated. Siddhartha stayed at the charnel grounds for hours watching the body slowly burn and disappear, and he realized that death awaits us all.

As Siddhartha continued traveling along the road, he saw the final messenger: a radiant monk dressed in very simple robes, carrying a small bag and a bowl. The sight of this peaceful monk awakened the deepest yearning Siddhartha had ever known. Following the call to awaken of these four heavenly messengers, he rode his horse to edge of a beautiful forest and, on the banks of a river, ordained himself.

If we really listen, we can hear that life is trying to get our attention as well and wake us up. This call to wake up happens when our lives are no longer satisfying, when we have lost interest in all the things that once made us so happy.

The call speaks to us in questions: Who am I? What is my purpose? What am I doing with my life? This internal dialogue can be frightening, even overwhelming. As we look for answers, we are forced to question the very foundation of everything that we hold on to—our relationships, religious views, politics, career choices, and even our social status.

When we say yes to the call to wake up, the people, situations, and opportunities we need to move forward present themselves naturally and at the perfect moment.

As this process of self-discovery moves toward greater understanding, a radical shift starts to happen. Sometimes our inner questioning takes us to exotic environments or new communities. We may be drawn to things that are unfamiliar, taboo, or even dangerous. In our attempts to discover our deepest truth, we may begin dancing, singing, exploring our sexuality, or following a new spiritual path.

This process is often misunderstood in our culture. It is labeled a midlife crisis, Saturn’s Return, or even a nervous breakdown. The powerful call to awaken can be shocking and confusing to people who are accustomed to seeing us behave in our old predictable ways. It may seem that we have gone temporarily crazy—and we may feel crazy at times. This is when we must be willing to take a leap of faith—to trust our inner voice and overcome doubt. To trust what is emerging and bow to the wisdom of the ancestors.

During these times of awakening, things appear in our lives to sustain us. When we say yes to the call to wake up, the people, situations, and opportunities we need to move forward present themselves naturally and at the perfect moment. We might find refuge in a spiritual teacher or set of teachings. We may be guided to go on a vision quest or visit holy sites that hold power and meaning for us. We may have visions, dreams, or even experiences of non-ordinary states of consciousness. All of these can signal that something important is happening.

In 1997, I had a complete emotional breakdown. I didn’t realize at the time that it was part of the call to awaken.

It started with a book left accidentally on my dining room table by a family member. It was a beautiful book about the path of meditation written by a Hindu teacher. It reminded me of my life purpose and awoke my passion to live a spiritually based life.

A few months later I moved in with my new boyfriend, even though we’d only known each other for a short time. We lived in a tiny, rundown house in the worst neighborhood in East Oakland. It was definitely “the hood,” and everyone seemed to be in a bad mood. Even our dog was grumpy all the time.

Miraculously, I heard about a ten-day Buddhist meditation retreat starting in a few days. It was way out in the desert in Southern California. This was it! It was the break I’d been waiting for and it couldn’t have come at a better moment, because I was truly desperate.

We had a pretty bad relationship and argued constantly over everything. To make matters worse, we both had telemarketing jobs aggressively talking people into buying expensive timeshares they didn’t need and often couldn’t afford. I had got myself thousands of dollars in debt and was being hounded by creditors night and day.

I became very depressed and angry about the weird direction my life had taken. I was living with a man who made me absolutely miserable and every day I went to a job that I hated. My emotions were becoming more and more erratic. I couldn’t seem to stop crying and I was overwhelmed by anxiety and a sense of desperation. I began to smoke a lot of marijuana to numb the pain, but drugs and alcohol were only a temporary solution.

Then one day it happened—everything started falling apart. I was fired from my job for calling in sick. I decided to end my tortured relationship and my car was about to be repossessed. I lay on the couch eating cookies, praying to God for help, and crying for a week straight.

Miraculously, I heard about a ten-day Buddhist meditation retreat starting in a few days. It was way out in the desert in Southern California. This was it! It was the break I’d been waiting for and it couldn’t have come at a better moment, because I was truly desperate. I had been practicing on my own for over a year, and I knew I needed to learn how to meditate properly. I was so excited by the idea of ten days of silence, healthy food, and meditation instruction that I was willing to do anything to get there. I somehow got the money together and registered.

I had all of my belongings in my car, my last twenty-five dollars in cash, and nowhere to go when the retreat was over. I didn’t care, because I somehow knew that if I could just get to the retreat, everything would make sense.

On the day the retreat was to start, I made the nine-hour drive to Southern California, crying hysterically, chain-smoking cigarettes, and drinking diet Mountain Dew. I had all of my belongings in my car, my last twenty-five dollars in cash, and nowhere to go when the retreat was over. I didn’t care, because I somehow knew that if I could just get to the retreat, everything would make sense.

Looking back now, I see that what I went through during those ten days in the desert was a genuine awakening experience. I spent hours in sitting meditation, and my screaming, tormented mind finally became silent and peaceful. Doing walking meditation in the desert, I let go of oceans of tears with each step. For the first time, I encountered the teachings of the Buddha and immediately knew I had found my path. I met my teacher, Jack Kornfield, whose loving encouragement and steadfast belief in me have helped me transform my life. The last day of the retreat, I hiked way out into the desert and on top of a small hill, I prayed. I took a vow to follow these teachings until the very end. I had answered my call to awaken.

This was the beginning of my meditation path. It wasn’t the prettiest of starts, but it often isn’t. In truth, it’s never where we start that defines us; it’s where we end up.

I went on to do many more Buddhist retreats, ultimately spending a total of almost three years in silent retreats, and became a Buddhist teacher myself. In my years of teaching, people have told me many beautiful stories about their lives, which have opened my heart and given me faith in the strength of the human spirit to soar and rise even in the darkest hour.

If you were to write your our own biography, it would be filled with laughter and tears, times of tragedy and of triumph. Each one of us has a touching story of how we came to be and why we are the person we are today. Some of us are the descendants of slaves and others have fled war-torn countries. Many people in the West grew up in wealthy families that looked perfect on the outside, yet were filled with violence and confusion.

Although we each have unique circumstances and diverse backgrounds, the threads of our personal journeys are woven together into the same beautiful tapestry. The Buddha said, “In a human life we all experience 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. No one is free from this.” No matter what you have been through or experienced in your life thus far, understand that it’s only a starting point, and your greatest chapters are yet to come.

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I began to question whether the approach treasured so much by my tradition was actually touching students in the way intended. I pondered why students around the world were understanding the teachings but not able to embody them and deeply transform.

I suspected that the channels of communication between their minds, their feelings, and their bodies were blocked or strained. From the Tibetan viewpoint all these channels should be connected and flowing freely. Yet I saw that my students couldn’t integrate the understanding their intellects were capable of, because they couldn’t digest them at the level of the body and feelings.

This led me to change how I teach meditation. Now I focus first and foremost on healing and opening the channel between the mind and feeling world, to prepare the student’s whole being. The technique I describe here, and others, reflect this new approach, which I’ve honed for the past few decades. Although they emerge from decades of training with great meditation masters and my own meditation and teaching experience, these are not meant solely for Buddhists or “serious meditators.” Quite the contrary, they are designed to benefit anyone and everyone.

Beautiful Monsters

All of us have some issues, challenging emotional patterns that make our lives and relationships more difficult. It might be unworthiness, or a particular kind of fear, or self-righteousness, or envy, or some kind of irrational anger. There are many possibilities.

We often feel ashamed and irritated by our issues. We resist and react to them, sometimes we hate them. Usually, we just wish they would go away. I like to call them beautiful monsters.

Beautiful monsters are patterns of reaction that are slightly or greatly distorted. For example, if we felt undervalued or underappreciated as a kid, we might overreact as an adult to ordinary criticism or blame. This overreaction is a beautiful monster.

Both parts of this phrase “beautiful monsters” are important. If we think of them as just monsters, we solidify our aversion and hatred toward them, which are really just parts of our own mind. If we think of them as just beautiful, however, we are denying the destructive potential they have and the suffering they can cause. It’s important to understand that they are both monsters and they have beauty.

The beautiful monsters have two types of beauty: the first is by their very nature. No matter how monstrous an emotion might seem, its deep underlying nature is very different. Like the raw material of full-colored 3D images projected on a screen is pure light, the underlying raw material of our beautiful monsters is openness, clarity, and energy. So beautiful monsters have that beauty. The second is that beautiful monsters seem ugly at first, but when we heal one, it becomes beautiful.

Beautiful monsters are formed in various ways: sometimes we develop habits because of challenging relationships; sometimes tendencies get provoked by circumstances; sometimes repeated stress just makes us develop reactive habits. Something that was once helpful, like protecting ourselves in an unsafe environment, can become a beautiful monster when it gets hardened and habitual. We hate a certain kind of person or situation even though we are no longer in danger.

I often get asked, are all feelings and emotions beautiful monsters? I would say no. Normal anger is part of the healthy, authentic relative truth—there is healthy anger, healthy fear, healthy attachment. These are not beautiful monsters. Beautiful monsters form when there is some unhealthy distortion in our mind and feelings, and then we start to believe their version of relative truth. If we become caught up by these beautiful monsters they become our lenses, the way we see the world and see ourselves. When we heal those, we have normal, healthy emotions and experiences.

Beautiful monsters are like ice. Their nature is like water. We don’t have to destroy the ice but melt it, free it into its natural state of flow. Beautiful monsters are like that. They are “frozen” patterns of reacting and resisting. So the question becomes how to melt the ice? The warmth of our kindness toward our beautiful monsters, in the form of nonjudging—this allows the ice to start melting.

Handshake: Working with Our Beautiful Monsters

How do we face our beautiful monsters with friendliness rather than fear? Based on some traditional meditation techniques and my understanding of psychological wounding and healing, I developed what I call handshake practice. It is not a method as we normally think. It is more an attitude and a way of being.

The handshake is between our awareness and our feelings. It is a metaphor for the stance we take, for how we can meet our beautiful monsters. Our minds have been pushing away or holding down our feelings and emotions for a long time. Now we are just extending our hand. Not running away, not fighting, just meeting.

Essentially, handshake practice is to be fully aware of whatever is in you, especially feelings. If they have a story to tell, we just listen. I feel this practice of handshake is very important for these modern times, and has the potential to deeply heal us.

This kind of healing can best occur where our awareness touches our feelings. To heal, we need to feel our emotions in a raw and direct way. Then the wounds and patterns of resistance can start to open up from within. Otherwise we can try all sorts of healing techniques, but they may not really open us up. To actually transform, we need to make friends with our emotions.

Understanding the theory behind the handshake helps us because we can see why we need to work on our distorted beliefs and attitudes in order to have real transformation. Otherwise we can have temporary relief, but we will still be operating under the same assumptions and beliefs (for example, I am not worthy; it is shameful to be angry; if I feel the fear, it will dominate me and I’ll fall apart). But just reading about and contemplating these ideas won’t change much. We need to face our beautiful monsters.

Facing them means feeling them. Actual transformation happens mostly on the feeling level. When we learn to experience our beautiful monsters without resistance and reaction, we can actually befriend them. This is very loving, very kind to the beautiful monsters—nonjudging is the kindness.

Handshake means being fully with the feeling. It is a very simple method to describe, but difficult to actually do for several reasons. First of all, our attitude is often that these beautiful monsters are just monsters, and we want to fix them, to get rid of them. With that as a hidden agenda, handshake doesn’t work. Handshake is not fixing but rather meeting and being. It lets our awareness be with whatever is happening in our feeling world without judgment, without resistance.

Please note: If you’ve had a history of trauma, practices of radical nonresistance like this can be intense. Please use your common sense about how much you can reasonably take. Try this practice for very short periods of time, and use a base camp, a safe place to return to in between feeling the feelings directly. This handshake practice is for healing, not retraumatization. Consult with a mental health professional for support if that’s helpful.

How to Do Handshake Practice

First, we do the technique called “dropping” to prepare for handshake practice. Then we do the four steps of the practice: meeting, being, waiting, and communicating.

Preparation: Dropping

Dropping is not so much a meditation as a way to temporarily cut through the tension-building stream of constant thinking, worrying, and speediness. It allows us to land in the present moment, in a grounded and embodied way. It gets us ready for meditation.

In dropping you do three things at the same time:

1. Raise your arms and then let your hands drop onto your thighs.
2. Exhale a loud, big breath.
3. Drop your awareness from thinking into what your body feels.

Just rest there, being aware of your body, without any special agenda. Feel your body and all its sensations: pleasant or unpleasant, warmth or coolness, pressure, tingling, pain, bliss, whatever comes into your awareness. You can do this once or several times,

Step 1: Meeting

Now allow awareness to gently pervade the feeling world. Open awareness to moods, feelings, and emotions. Don’t hold any goal, any aim. Just meet whatever feelings and emotions are there. Don’t look for anything special, pleasant, or sublime, just be with what is arising. If you feel lousy, be with that. If you feel anxious, be with that feeling. If you feel angry or tense or tired, be with those feelings, and relax into them. If you feel great, peaceful, and relaxed, just be with that too. If you can’t feel anything, just be with the numbness, or be with the peace.

Feelings and emotions come and go on their own time; we don’t have to look for them. They are always changing, pleasant to unpleasant to pleasant again. Rather than wrestling with each changing feeling, we are just meeting them and allowing whatever comes without an agenda.

Keep connecting to the feeling world with this open, welcoming attitude. Whenever an agenda arises to get rid of something, or hold on to something, gently acknowledge it and be with that. Whatever the obstacle or criticism is, just be aware of it and be with that. You are the host of a banquet, standing at the door and meeting any of your feelings that show up. If something deeper and more intense shows up, it might be a beautiful monster. That’s fine too.

This meeting practice is to extend your hand and say hello. Initially, we just allow thoughts to come and go, and try to stay with our feelings and emotions, but later we extend the handshake practice encompasses everything, including narratives and inner voices.

Step 2: Being

Stop looking away. Stop hiding. Turn toward it. Touch it. Feel it. Listen to it. As you adopt this attitude, you are allowing raw feelings to emerge. There is nothing special to do except be with them.

Don’t suppress, don’t avoid, don’t indulge, and don’t apply an antidote. We have been doing those things for far too long. It hasn’t helped much. It hasn’t gotten us a healthy relationship with our feelings. So let’s try something different. Just being.

Being is not fixing. We tend to think “being” means being with something. But you can also just be, without an object. Just be with being itself. Slowly we can learn to just be with the experiencer, without a particular object. Naturally being in being itself. Just be, and as thoughts and emotions continue to arise and move, stillness of being remains too. Over time, the hand doesn’t need an object to hold, the hand itself becomes the resting, the stillness. If this experience organically develops out of handshake, this is a good sign.

Handshake is an intimate way of being. It’s different from an observer, which is more safe and distant. When the beautiful monsters come, this type of distant observing won’t help so much. It doesn’t touch the feeling world in the same way as handshake. Just be with whatever raw material arises without judging, and relax.

If a wild, deluded feeling shows up at your banquet—I want to smash everything!—just give your hand. The beautiful monster isn’t giving its hand. But you are being kind and just being there. Even if the beautiful monster gives you a slap or a punch, it’s okay. Take it. Be willing to suffer. This aggressiveness results from our suppressing them for a long time. Have a courageous attitude: Okay, I am willing to suffer. And if you find yourself judging, take a step back and handshake the judgment. If you notice an agenda, like wanting the emotion to go away, handshake that agenda. If you notice an aversion to the emotion, or an impatience, handshake that. Keep handshaking whatever comes up.

Take a radical approach: Be fully present with your feelings and emotions, without resistance. It’s almost surrendering, trusting the innate wisdom of the emotions. This is a big step. It takes some guts, some courage. Feeling something we’ve been avoiding is not easy. This can be very intense. Jumping into the unknown water can be scary. When the time is right, though, you have to take the step. If you feel like you’re holding back, if you feel like you’re resisting, give the beautiful monster your hand.

It almost seems like indulging, but it is not indulging. If the emotion says I can’t take it, you don’t have to believe it, just feel it. If the feeling says I want to destroy that, just feel that emotion, but don’t follow its orders. Allow awareness to feel the feeling fully, without resistance, without judgment. This is the practice of being.

Step 3: Waiting

Continue to practice being; give it some time. Don’t rush into anything. There is nothing to accomplish. You are making friends, and it takes time. Once you can be, just keep being and wait. Waiting is also kindness, compassion.
Practice patience. Here patience doesn’t mean an agenda like, I’ll be patient with you until you go away and leave me alone. Such an agenda can sidetrack the practice. Here patience means: You can stay as long as you want. I don’t care anymore whether you stay or go. We’re friends now.

This stage of waiting allows you to refine your handshake and make sure you are not rushing to make something happen, in which case our handshake is being sabotaged by antidoting. Or you might be rushing to lecture your beautiful monsters, before they trust you and are ready to listen. Just wait and relax.

There is a special relief when you actually drop in and just feel the feelings. You’re being true to yourself. Suppressing and avoiding can make you feel emotionally ungrounded, like you’re not centered in your feeling world. To drop in and feel, without judging, is a gift. It’s like crying when your heart wants to release sadness, or taking a nap when you’re exhausted, or eating a nourishing meal when you’re feeling depleted and hungry. It’s like asking for a hug when you feel bruised, and receiving a warm, solid embrace of total support. We can give ourselves that kind of relief and support, but we have to turn toward the pain, not away from it.

Step 4: Communicating

Once you are able to just be with your beautiful monsters, they may start to warm up, to open up. Actually they want to be friends. They want to be free. They may even ask a question. Then you can actually communicate. We gently tell them, It’s real, but not true. Your feeling is real. Your pain is real. But your narrative is not true. And they will listen.

As you feel your agendas to fix something, or to make something dissolve or disappear, have fallen away, you may notice a shift. Something magical and unexpected happens when we stop trying to fix the beautiful monsters, when we stop trying to make them go away. The raw emotions, the stuckness, the numbness are not as scary as they seem.

This is when true healing occurs. Now you’ve developed a healthy relationship between your mind and your feelings, and all sorts of communication can happen, both ways. You can share your wisdom and understanding. From their side, beautiful monsters carry their own wisdom and we can learn from them also. The experience of handshaking self-doubt, for example, can teach us about the subconscious fear of success and flourishing, and teach us great compassion for others who share this beautiful monster. Once we make friends with our beautiful monsters, then we are no longer afraid of ourselves.

From Why We Meditate by Daniel Goleman and Tsoknyi Rinpoche. ©2022 by Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Daniel Goleman. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

This article is not intended to provide or replace treatment options for those who may suffer from anxiety or other forms of mental illness.

If you are in need of help, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) to access free, 24/7 confidential service for people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, or those around them. The Lifeline provides support, information, and local resources. You can also text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 for free 24/7 support with a trained crisis counselor right away.

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It’s taboo to be depressed. When I was feeling really bad, I still went to work, though I was barely functional. If I had had the flu and felt a fraction of the pain I was in, I would have called in sick. But I couldn’t call in “depressed.” One day I threw a whole issue of the magazine I edit into the computer’s trash can, thinking I was saving it. Then I emptied the trash. I had to hire a consultant to look for it in the virtual garbage, and eventually I got most of it back. But it was myself I wanted to throw in the trash.

Physical pain is hard to describe; psychic pain is even harder. I was in intense, moment-by-moment pain, and all I wanted was to get away from it. The pain was in the thoughts, which I didn’t (and couldn’t) recognize as just my thoughts. (As Buddha said, “When, for you, in the thought is just the thought, then you shall be free…”) A voice in my head repeated what I took to be The Truth: I was completely alone, I would never again love or be loved by another person, I was nothing.

I spent hours every day on the phone. Once, during the 45-minute drive from my lover’s home back to Berkeley, I had to stop and call a friend from a pay phone by the side of the road, so that I could drive the rest of the way, even though it was only fifteen minutes. Luckily she was home. “I just got off the Richmond Bridge,” I sobbed. “I’m afraid I don’t exist. My body’s here, but there’s nobody in it.”

“You exist,” she said. “How could I love you if you didn’t exist? Come over right now and we’ll take a walk on the Berkeley pier.”

I’ve gained some understanding of what it must be like to have an invisible illness, like lupus or chronic fatigue syndrome. I wanted to wear a sign around my neck—I might look okay, but I’m sick!—so people wouldn’t expect me to be functional.

Waking in the morning was the worst of all. The moment consciousness returned, the pain came with it. Oh no! I have to breathe my way through another day.

I couldn’t eat, a common symptom of depression. It wasn’t just loss of appetite. Chewing itself was unbearable. A blob of bread was scary because it got in the way of breathing, and breathing was already hard enough to do. Liquids were more manageable. It occurs to me now that I’d regressed to the stage before I had teeth, when the only kind of eating I could do was sucking. So I drank hot milk with honey, and Earl Grey tea. I lost a lot of weight, something I’m always trying to do when I feel “normal,” but I was too downhearted to take any pleasure from it.

Like many other depressed people, I didn’t sleep well. I clutched my pillow and called out to the flapping curtains for help. I took sleeping pills—sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t. I couldn’t read in the night (or during the day, for that matter) because I couldn’t get past the fear to concentrate on anything.

Waking in the morning was the worst of all. The moment consciousness returned, the pain came with it. Oh no! I have to breathe my way through another day.

I didn’t like getting into the shower because I didn’t want to be alone with my skin. To feel my own skin and imagine that nobody would ever touch it again was unbearable. Better to swaddle myself in layers, no matter what the weather, so the skin didn’t have to notice it was alone. I remembered a pale young woman who had lived next door to me years earlier, who began to wear more and more layers of clothing—a skirt over her pants, a dress over her skirt, a long shirt over her dress, then a sweater, a long coat, a cape, a hat—in Berkeley summer weather. Finally her father came and took her away to a mental hospital.

One of the worst things about being so depressed is that one becomes totally self-absorbed. I could hear other people only when they were talking about me: recommending homeopathic remedies for me, interpreting my dreams to me, telling me they loved me. During my depression, one of my adult sons had a serious bicycle accident, and my fear for his well-being snapped me out of my self-absorption for the five days he was in the hospital. I sat all night in a chair beside his hospital bed, hypervigilant, watching him sleep. I put a cool cloth on his forehead, I prayed to whoever might be listening, and I made a promise I couldn’t keep: not to be depressed if only he would be all right.

He came home to my house from the hospital, with one leg in a full cast. It was summer. He sat on the back porch of the house he’d grown up in and I washed his back. One day I walked into the living room where he was reading on the couch, and he said, “My god, what’s the matter? You look like a ghost!”

Dry-mouthed with panic, I told him I had to go see my lover; we had to decide right then whether to break up. “Do you think I should stay with him?” I asked.

My son looked at me with an expression I’ll never forget—a mixture of despair and love. “I don’t know how to help you any more,” he said. “I don’t think you should be driving in the state you’re in. Why don’t you just stay here and be my mother?”

But I couldn’t. I drove out to see the man, compelled by an irrational sense of urgency, with my son’s stricken face burning in my mind.

I had then been a Zen Buddhist practitioner for more than twenty years. I assumed that my meditation practice would steady me. What could be more comforting than forty minutes in the peaceful, familiar zendo, with the sweet smell of tatami straw matting? But it didn’t help. This is something I want to say: at times it made things worse. The demons in my mind took advantage of the silence. They weren’t real demons, but they didn’t care; they tormented me anyway.

My Buddhist teachers urged me to keep on sitting zazen. “Don’t turn away from your suffering,” they said. “Just watch the painful thoughts arise and watch them pass away again.”

“Bring your attention back to your breathing,” my teachers had advised me. This was like telling a person on the rack, whose arms are being pulled out of her shoulder sockets, to count her exhalations.

When I sat down on a zafu, the painful thoughts arose all right, but if they passed away, it was only to make room for even more painful thoughts. I’ll die alone. And, adding insult to injury: After twenty years, I’m the worst Zen student that ever was.

When I told my teachers I was disappointed that zazen didn’t make me feel better, they scolded me. “You don’t sit zazen to get something. You sit zazen in order to sit zazen. If you want zazen to make you feel better, it won’t work.” But didn’t Buddha invent Buddhism in the first place to alleviate suffering? Did all those other people in the zendo really get up out of bed at five a.m. for no particular reason?

Still, I kept going back, hoping that if I meditated hard enough I’d have some sort of breakthrough. In the past, sitting in the zendo, I too had had the experience of watching my worries turn to dry powder and blow away. So now I signed up to sit Rohatsu sesshin, the week-long meditation retreat in early December that commemorates the Buddha’s enlightenment. He sat down under the Bodhi tree and vowed not to get up until he saw the truth. It took him a week. I had sat many sesshins before, but maybe this would be my week.

The first day was bad. I cried quietly, not wanting to disturb the others. The second day was worse. Tears and snot dripped off my chin on to my breast. I hated myself. Nobody else will ever love me!

“Bring your attention back to your breathing,” my teachers had advised me. This was like telling a person on the rack, whose arms are being pulled out of her shoulder sockets, to count her exhalations.

But I wasn’t on the rack. I was in the zendo. Around me sat my dharma brothers and sisters, hands in their pretty mudras. As for my mudra, I dug the nails of my left hand deep into the palm of my right hand, feeling relief at the physical pain and the momentary proof of my existence. On the third day, during a break, I snuck away to a pay phone down the street and called my sister in Philadelphia. Choking on my own words, I told her I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t exactly convinced by her reassurances, but just hearing her voice was some comfort.

The fourth day was worse yet. The distance between me and the people on either side of me was infinite, though their half-lotus knees were only six inches away from mine. I thought of the lover who wasn’t going to be taking care of me after all. I’m nobody, I thought. There’s nobody here at all. This feeling of no-self was supposedly the point of meditation, and yet I had somehow gotten on to the wrong path. While a nameless pressure mounted inside me, the people around me just kept sitting zazen. I couldn’t stay another second. I left without getting permission from the sesshin director.

Driving away from the zendo in the privacy of my car, I shouted: “This is the worst day of my life!” (There would be other days after that when I would say it again: “No, this day is worse.”) I drove into Tilden Park and walked into the woods, where no one could see me. I screamed and pulled my hair. I lay down on the ground and rolled down the hill, letting the underbrush scratch and poke me. I liked having leaves get stuck in my hair and clothing. It made me feel real. I picked up a fallen branch from a redwood tree and began flailing myself on the back. The bodily pain was easier to bear than the mental pain it pushed aside.

But I scared myself. How could I be spending my sesshin afternoon beating myself with sticks in the woods? How had it come to this? I picked the leaves out of my hair and went home. The next morning, the fifth day, I called the Zen Center and said I wasn’t feeling well—an understatement if ever there was one—and wouldn’t be sitting the rest of the sesshin. I didn’t sit zazen for some months after that.

I felt angry at Buddhism, as if to say: You told me there’s no fixed self, and I believed you, and look where it got me! I knew the yang of it but not the yin—the balancing truth that there was no separation.

I thought I had failed in my practice—twenty years of it!—and I was bitterly disappointed in myself. Only after the depression subsided did I see what growth that represented: choosing not to sit was choosing not to be ruled by dogma, to be compassionate with myself, to take my spiritual practice into my own hands.

Buddhism teaches that we have “no fixed self.” There is nothing permanent about us During the depression, I wasn’t my “self,” as we say. I didn’t seem to have a self at all, in a way that cruelly mimicked this central point in Buddhist teaching. You’d think that it would be painless to have no self, because without a self, who was there to be in pain? And yet there was unbearable pain. Like a wind-up doll, I went stiffly through the motions of being Sue Moon, but there was no person present, no aliveness—only a battery that was running down.

I felt angry at Buddhism, as if to say: You told me there’s no fixed self, and I believed you, and look where it got me! I knew the yang of it but not the yin—the balancing truth that there was no separation.

I couldn’t have gone on like this indefinitely. I was tearing up the fabric of my life. As I was weeping to my friend Melody on the phone one afternoon, speaking my familiar litany, she suddenly shouted at me: “Stop it! You’ve got to save your own life! You’ve got to do it! Nobody else but you can save yourself, and you can do it! You just have to be brave. That’s all there is to it.” This was an important phone call: she startled me into finding a stick of courage, and I held on to it by reminding myself of her words.

Still, the misery continued, and I finally decided to try medication. I consulted a psychiatrist, who prescribed Prozac. I took it for about a week and felt much worse, though I wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel worse. The psychiatrist had me stop the Prozac and try Zoloft. I felt it kick in after a couple of days. I didn’t feel drugged; I felt, rather, as though a deadly fog were lifting.

Zoloft is supposed to be good for people who have trouble with obsessional thinking, and I seem to be one of those. Zoloft did what zazen didn’t do—it quieted the voices in my head: I hate him. I hate myself. It didn’t shut them up entirely, but they weren’t as loud and I was sometimes able to turn away from them.

I had a lot of resistance to taking medication. I thought my unhappiness had two parts: negative circumstances in the outside world, which Zoloft obviously couldn’t fix, and negative attitudes inside my head, which I thought my Buddhist practice should take care of. Besides, an orthodox Zen voice whispered in my mind that the monks of old got along without Zoloft. But some of those monks probably obsessed their lives away in misery; others may have left the monastery because they couldn’t concentrate. Buddhist history doesn’t tell us about the ones who tried and failed, the ones with attention deficit disorder or clinical depression.

I took refuge in Buddha, dharma and sangha, saying the words out loud, whether I felt anything or not.

I was learning to trust myself. Taking Zoloft and stopping sitting were both acts of faith in myself. So, too, I learned to construct my own spiritual practice. Every morning, as soon as I got out of bed, I lit a candle on my little altar and offered a stick of incense. I made three full bows, then stood before the altar, my palms pressed together, and recited out loud my morning prayers, starting with a child’s prayer a Catholic friend had taught me:

Angel of God, my guardian dear,
To whom God’s love commits me here,
Ever this day be at my side
To watch and guard, to rule and guide.

It was comforting to ask somebody else, somebody who wasn’t me, to help me. Prayer was something I missed in Zen practice as I knew it, so I imported it from Christianity and other Buddhist traditions. I prayed to Tara, Tibetan goddess of compassion, to fly down from the sky, all green and shining, into my heart. I prayed to Prajnaparamita, the mother of all Buddhas, who “brings light so that all fear and distress may be forsaken, and disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion.” Then I took refuge in Buddha, dharma and sangha, saying the words out loud, whether I felt anything or not.

That I had shaped this practice for myself gave me confidence. And the early morning incense smoke, though it was thin and drifting, provided a hint of continuity for my days. They seemed, after all, to be days in the same life. One person’s life—mine.

Now I can say this: there are times in life when nothing helps, when you just have to feel terrible for a while. All you can do is go through the agony and come out the other end of it. It’s a gift, in a way, to hit the bottom (though it doesn’t feel that way at the time). If you lie on the grass, you can’t fall down.

There’s a saying in Zen that “inquiry and response come up together.” Perhaps that’s what prayer is. To make an inquiry is already to get a response, because asking implies that there’s something else there. And there’s not even a time lag. The moment you’re asking for help, you’re already getting it, though it may not be the help you thought you wanted. Once, when I called Zen teacher Reb Anderson in despair, he came to Berkeley to see me. We sat on a park bench in a playground, and he told me, “The universe is already taking care of you.” I said this mantra to myself over and over: “The universe is already taking care of me.”

I wasn’t afraid to be alone with my skin because I wasn’t alone; there was nothing, not the width of a cell, between me and the rest of the universe.

One late afternoon at the end of a hard summer, while I was visiting friends on Cape Cod, I walked barefoot and alone down the beach and into the salty water. There were no people about, so I took off my bathing suit in the water and flung it up on the sand. I swam and swam and felt the water touching every part of me. I was in it—no dry place left. I wasn’t afraid to be alone with my skin because I wasn’t alone; there was nothing, not the width of a cell, between me and the rest of the universe. I did a somersault under the water and looked up at the shiny membrane above me. My head hatched into the light, and I breathed the air and knew that I would be all right. No, not would be, but was already. I was back in my life.

I’m more than two years out of the desolation, and I still don’t know why I suffered so much, or why I stopped. I can neither blame myself for the suffering nor take credit for its cessation. I sit again—I mean on a zafu—but not as much as I used to. I also bow and chant and pray. I’ve stopped taking Zoloft, though I’d return to it without shame if I thought it would be useful.

I practice curiosity. What is it to be born a human being? What does it mean to be embodied in your separate skin? There are many other (and more reliable) paths out of the delusion of separation besides having a boyfriend—things like writing and swimming, for example. And most of all, there’s studying this human life. You could call it buddhadharma, or you could call it something else. It doesn’t matter.

I now admit that I sit zazen for a reason: I want to understand who I am (if anybody), and how I’m connected to the rest of it. And yes, I want to stop suffering and I want to help others stop suffering. When I was in despair, time passed slowly, so slowly. Now it sweeps by faster and faster, gathering momentum. The shortness of life stuns me.

Please note that clinical depression is a medical condition. This article is not intended to provide or replace treatment options for those who may suffer from clinical depression or other forms of mental illness.

If you are in need of help, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) to access free, 24/7 confidential service for people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, or those around them. The Lifeline provides support, information, and local resources. You can also text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 for free 24/7 support with a trained crisis counselor right away.

The post I Want to Tell You About Coming Apart and Struggling Through Depression appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

Robert Waldinger: What’s unique about the Harvard Study of Adult Development is that we have studied the same people for their entire adult lives. The study began in 1938, so this is its 85th year. We started with a group of teenagers from Harvard College and a group of teenagers from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Both groups, a very privileged group and a very disadvantaged group, were followed for their whole lives. We then included spouses, and now we’re studying their children, who are baby boomers, so the study has gender balance.

So watching and talking to people over the course of their whole lives, what did you learn about what makes life happy and meaningful?

Two big findings stand out. One is something our grandparents would have told us, which is that if you take care of your health, you are happier, healthier, and you live longer. That’s not a surprise, but it’s important to know there’s hard science behind this, that taking care of our bodies—not drinking too much, getting exercise, all of those things—really matters to leading a happy life.

When people in our study were committed to things in the world beyond themselves, they were so much happier.

The second finding was more of a surprise to us. We found that the people who were healthiest, happiest, and lived longest were people who had warm, closer connections with other people. So better relationships actually get inside your body and impact your health.

Of course, much of our popular culture—music, movies, television shows—is devoted to that very idea, that good relationships, particularly romantic relationships, are the key to happiness. But your study showed they also lead to better health.

Yes, that’s the surprise. We also find it’s not just romantic partners. In fact, you don’t need to have a romantic partner to get these benefits. Our study showed that it’s really the experience of being connected to somebody, or even just a couple of people, with whom you feel warm, close connections. Many of us don’t have intimate partners, but it turns out that’s not essential to the benefits we’re talking about.

What do these findings tell us about how we should lead our lives or order our priorities?

One of the things I’ve learned from doing this study is that the people who made this work for them were more active in taking care of their relationships. I used to think that my good friends are always going to be my good friends, so there was not much I needed to do to maintain the friendships.

Yet what we know is that even perfectly good relationships can kind of wither away from neglect. So we really want to be active in taking care of our relationships. I’ve been at Harvard my whole adult life, and Harvard is all about achieving things, right? I could work 24/7 and every weekend find myself at my laptop working.

But now, after seeing the results of this study, I really make myself think, Who have I not seen lately? Who do I want to connect with? I make the choice to make sure I’m connected. I will reach out to a friend and say, let’s have a cup of coffee. I didn’t use to do that, so this study has changed the way I lead my life.

There are so many things we’re told will make us happy. Money, status, luxury, security—all the things the system incentivizes us to pursue. But your study shows us that what actually makes life happier and more meaningful, and even healthier, is human connection, not things like career, success, money.

It’s true that accomplishing things we care about does feel good. But what we find is that the awards we go after, the wealth we go after, the fame we seek, don’t make people happier. It doesn’t necessarily make them unhappy either. They’re just not relevant to happiness. What’s really relevant to happiness is whether you feel engaged in activities you care about and spend time with people you care about.

If the purpose of a good society is to help people lead happy lives, if that’s the goal, then how should we change our policies in light of what you’ve found actually makes people happy?

We used to think that as long as GDP was going up, we would all be happier. But we found that’s not true. What we know is that if we invest in human capital—in human development and human connectedness—then the payoffs are big and they’re very long-term.

One of the ways we can do that is through programs of social and emotional learning in schools, which the Dalai Lama has been a big advocate of.

There’s a lot in The Good Life about social and emotional learning because it turns out to be so useful. All over the world, tens of thousands of kids have taken these programs, and they find that they do better in their academic subjects, get into trouble less often, and get into drugs and delinquency less. They are happier, healthier kids.

In this study, how do you, and your subjects, define happiness? Are you measuring happiness in a relative sense, as less suffering, or maybe the kind of ordinary unhappiness that Freud said was the best we could hope for in psychotherapy? Or is there some sort of deeper or less transient happiness that comes from the kind of close human connection you’re talking about?

Well, researchers have studied this too. They found that happiness comes in kind of two big flavors.

One is called hedonic well-being. Am I feeling happy right now? I’m enjoying the conversation I’m having with you right now, and so I can say I’m feeling happy. But an hour from now, something upsetting may happen and that will change. We’re all familiar with this kind of hedonic happiness, which can go up and down from moment to moment.

Then there’s another flavor of happiness, if you will, called eudaimonic well-being. That’s the sense that life is basically meaningful and good. It means that even if I have upsetting things happen to me, there’s a basic sense that I am okay about my life in the world.

Relationships, knowing our own hearts and minds, self-acceptance, gratitude, generosity—we can build all these pillars of eudaimonic happiness so that even when hard times come along we’ve got both inner support and outer support. That’s different from, am I going go to a nice party tonight?

Did the subjects of your study see this the same way you do—that it was their close relationships that made their lives meaningful and happy? Did they feel that way in spite of the inevitable conflicts that happen in relationships?

Exactly, they did see that. One of the clearest ways we saw it was in studying long marriages. What we saw was that the people who were the most content through these long partnerships were the people who came to understand that relationships are going to have their ups and downs, their closer times and more distant times.

Some of our couples were together for sixty, sixty-five years, and when they were in their eighties we did long interviews about their marriages. What was clear was how much they had been through with each other, how well they knew each other. They accepted each other warts and all, and gradually came to love the warts.

We saw that working out differences makes relationships stronger, and that when we can do that, we end up being more connected. We know each other better. For example, one of the things that happens in my psychotherapy practice is that people get mad at me. And sometimes I get mad at the people I work with. But when we can really dig in and work out our differences, it is so healing. It makes the relationship stronger and we trust each other more.

From a Buddhist point of view, we could say there are two different approaches to happiness, the ultimate and the relative. Our true nature, our buddhanature if you will, is a kind of ultimate level of happiness or well-being. We can experience it directly, and it does not depend on anything relative or external, such as relationships. On the other hand, we have the kind of deep meaning and happiness you’ve been describing that comes through our close connection with others. How do these two relate to each other?

Well, in the Buddhist teachings they’re not separate. My connecting with my true self and my connectedness with the world are not separate. As we meditate, as we delve into the Buddhist path, we realize that at the deepest level there is no separation between self and the world, between self and other.

At a practical level, what I find is that as we sit and get to know our own hearts and minds—the messiness and the suffering of our lives—we develop compassion. As I see how messy my mind is, how embarrassing some of my preoccupations are, I begin to say, oh yeah, everybody’s mind is like this. That is quite helpful in making me realize that we are all working with the same human condition. We are working with the same suffering and experiencing many of the same joys.

So yes, we do approach tuning into the self and tuning into the world as separate endeavors, but we get to a place when in moments we realize, oh, actually they’re not different.

You were in your thirties when you began practicing Buddhism, and you were already a psychiatrist. Did your exposure to Zen change your approach to Western psychology, or perhaps shake it up a bit?

Oh boy, did it shake it up. I was talking to Melissa Blacker, who was the teacher who gave me dharma transmission, about working with patients as a psychiatrist. And Melissa said to me, “What if at the deepest level there’s nothing to fix?”

It was like somebody poured cold water on my head or something. It was like, whoa, what is that about? It began to help me look at my work with people from a different perspective.

Yes, of course there is real suffering. Mental illness is very real and we have very good treatments for it. But from a deeper perspective, maybe this is just another expression of life not needing fixing. Relieving suffering is important, but that beyond that, there’s nothing to fix. There’s nobody to fix.

The view that we fundamentally need to change or fix who we are is not limited to Western psychology. Many religions posit some kind of original or inherent problem in our nature. But Mahayana Buddhism in particular says that our fundamental nature is good, even inherently enlightened. That’s why we talk about our basic buddhanature. So while we may be deluded on the surface, and therefore suffer, Buddhism aims at helping people tap into that more fundamental nature, which is beyond neurosis and ego.

In Zen, we talk about the world of form and the world of emptiness, our relative and ultimate natures, which are not separate. There’s this wonderful quote from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who told his disciples, “You’re perfect just as you are. And you could use a little improvement.”

I think that’s the way I approach my clinical work with people. You are perfect just as you are. The expression of you is utterly unique. It will never be replaced and needs to be treasured. But you are suffering and you may be making others suffer because of your suffering. And we do want to work on that.

So it’s both. It’s not simply accepting everything as it is. That leads to a kind of nihilism that would be dangerous. It can allow for acceptance of things that should not be accepted in the world, right? It would leave people with too much suffering. How we really want to try to make things better is through a sense of the fundamental okayness of each expression of life. That is what Zen has given me a sense of. That’s what I hope I convey to the people I work with in my psychotherapy practice, and in my role as a Zen teacher.

Let me turn the question around now. Are there ways in which your work as a psychiatrist has informed how you understand and teach Buddhism?

One of the things I’m clear about in my Zen community is that mental illness is powerful, it’s real. It’s one of the most devastating things we have to deal with in the human condition. It would be possible to say to people, “Oh, just meditate and everything will work out,” but that is not always the case. There are many situations in which suffering is not going be taken care of through meditation, or if you just became enlightened in some mythological way. Not true.

So I am quite deliberate about recommending treatment—psychotherapy, medication, couples’ therapy, family therapy—when I feel that people are stuck and could get real, powerful help from people who are expert in this and know how to do it. I don’t do that treatment myself with my Zen students—that’s crossing a boundary—but I find them people to work with.

You study life through three distinct lenses: as a Buddhist teacher, as a practicing psychiatrist, and as director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. When you look at what each of these three tells you about people’s experience of life, do you see a common thread about what makes life happy and meaningful and what doesn’t?

The Buddha’s insight was that there is no fixed, independent self. There’s no me, no Bob, who’s completely separate from everything else. And there’s no Bob that doesn’t ever change. The Buddha pointed to that misconception of a fixed, separate self as the cause of so much suffering. And he said that suffering is relieved when we really understand the interconnectedness of self and everything else.

That’s what we found in our study of adult development. When people in our study were committed to things in the world beyond themselves, they were so much happier. They felt that there was so much more meaning in their lives when their concerns went beyond the narrow concerns of the small self.

Similarly, many of the people I work with as a psychotherapist are tormented by disorders of self-preoccupation. So many of our most problematic mental problems have to do with a disorder of self. If you think about it, depression is the most awful form of self-preoccupation. It’s self-loathing; it’s inability to get beyond the self. Narcissism is a complete preoccupation with self, trying to build it up out of a desperate sense of insecurity.

And finally, in my own Buddhist practice, my most powerful moments of well-being on the meditation cushion have been those moments when, as Dogen says, body and mind drop away. It’s no longer Bob sitting on the cushion, but simply breathing, sounds, and the experience of so many things coming and going in my awareness. Those moments are profound experiences of no suffering.

The post What Really Makes Us Happy appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

There is no purer light than what we see when we open our eyes first thing in the morning.

2. Sit

Mindfulness without meditation is just a word.

3. Make your bed

The state of your bed is the state of your head. Enfold your day in dignity.

4. Empty the hampers

Do the laundry without resentment or commentary and have an intimate encounter with the very fabric of life.

5. Wash your bowl

Rinse away self-importance and clean up your own mess. If you leave it undone, it will get sticky.

6. Set a timer

If you’re distracted by the weight of what’s undone, set a kitchen timer and, like a monk in a monastery, devote yourself wholeheartedly to the task at hand before the bell rings.

7. Rake the leaves

Rake, weed, or sweep. You’ll never finish for good, but you’ll learn the point of pointlessness.

8. Eat when hungry

Align your inexhaustible desires with the one true appetite.

9. Let the darkness come

Set a curfew on the internet and TV and discover the natural balance between daylight and darkness, work and rest.

10. Sleep when tired

Nothing more to it.

This list also appears on Karen Maezen Miller’s blog, Cheerio Road.

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