Buddha is the great liberator, says Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. He taught that freedom comes from freeing your mind.

I first heard of Buddha at age eleven. My mother and oldest sister were on their second hour of shopping for our family of five, while I waited outside in my father’s shiny, green Buick. He and my younger sister were with me, and after they fell asleep, I escaped to indulge my favorite pastime of people watching. It was then that a Japanese couple walked up to me and introduced the Buddha. The strangers were members of the Soka Gakkai, a lay Buddhist organization steeped in the early teachings of a monk named Nichiren.

The couple had approached the right girl-child, as I was already focused on liberation. I considered myself an unofficial member of the Black Panther Party and an ambassador for the civil rights movement, but no one would have known this unless they’d listened to my simplified rhetoric about ending racism, especially the kind I endured daily in my desegregated middle school.

To smile and talk to Japanese strangers about Buddha, while my father wasn’t looking, was a personal act of rebellion. This was the early 1960s, and it was a world of free love, peace, and yes, Eastern religions arriving in the U.S., challenging Christianity. Since my family was Christian and protective, they would not have approved of a conversation, with strangers, about Buddha. Yet it was fate that the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, would become a revered ancestor in my life.

As time passed, I learned Buddha was not God, just like Jesus Christ was not. But they both were of God. They believed in love and peace. Both wore the cloak of being saviors for those who suffered. They protested the evils of the world, such as war and hatred, and promoted peace and love.

My interest in Buddha grew when I discovered his teaching that liberation from suffering is possible. Buddha was like Christ in that he was not only a savior and protester, but also a liberator. While Christ’s liberation was steeped in love, Buddha’s was steeped in love and a freedom that comes from freeing our minds from what causes us to suffer. In the dharma, my perception of being black was expanded beyond the discrimination I endured. The internal pain was understood as a collective one, whether others thought so or not.

After decades of walking in Buddha’s footsteps, I began to see Shakyamuni Buddha not only as an ancestor, savior, protester, and liberator, but as a shaman. His quest in the woods, sitting on the roots of trees, led to a deep seeing and knowing about suffering. I see the Buddha as a shaman who taught not from his intellect but rather from the wisdom of his quest in nature, as would any shaman of the earth.

In the end, it isn’t Buddha or Buddhism that I am interested in. Often when I say this to people, they laugh because they see me stand before them in a Buddhist robe. But I am standing in liberation.

In His Image

In drawing the Buddha’s curved hands and gentle smile, Ira Sukrungruang finds peace.

I was born into a Buddhist family, with a statue of Buddha in nearly every room. Every Sunday we went to the Thai Buddhist temple of Chicago, Wat Dhammaram, which was once an elementary school, and we prayed to the gold Buddha residing in the former gymnasium. I wore a Buddha around my neck, my father wore several that clinked when he walked.

The image of Buddha was everywhere in my life. So much so that I became obsessed with his image. My aunty Sue encouraged my obsession. One day, she gave me a notebook.

“This is for drawing Buddha,” she said.

I had been doodling Buddha on scrap pieces of paper all over the house—his pointed head, curved hands, and long fingers. I also doodled boxes within boxes within boxes—endless geometric shapes. I was seven, and my head swirled with patterns and Buddha.

“Draw him when you feel anxious,” Aunty Sue said in Thai, “when you need to calm yourself.”

I was an anxious boy, whose legs bounced uncontrollably, who chewed the side of his cheek until it bled.

“Keep his image in your mind and remember to take deep breaths.”

I nodded because whenever my aunt spoke, she possessed a calm that stilled me.

“Remember to breathe,” she said, “like when you meditate. Breathe in, poot. Breathe out, toa.”

I told her okay.

“Draw the Buddha in the living room. Come show me when you’re done. Okay?”

I sat on the living room floor, the green carpet soft against my skin. Buddha sat above me. From the kitchen the sweet aroma of cooked jasmine rice fragranced the house. I opened the notebook on my lap and began drawing. First, his torso, the delicate V of it, then his face and the gentle curl of his lips, and then his eyes, about to wake from a pleasant dream.

Drawing Buddha was a form of meditation, and at the beginning it was difficult, just as stilling the mind is difficult when meditating for the first time. Too many thoughts invade. Negativity seeps through the barriers of your brain you thought you had fortified. When drawing, I wanted to draw a perfect Buddha, as pristine and golden as he is. This perfection frustrated me. Made me crumple up balls of paper. Made me erase over and over until the paper thinned and tore. But eventually, the act of drawing, the act of keeping him in my mind was more important than a crooked eye or a smile that looked vampiric. It was drawing that was important, not what was drawn. Wasn’t that how Buddha gained enlightenment? Sitting under the Bodhi Tree, letting the world whirl around him?

Over time, I let the pencil lead the way, let it follow the curve of his hands. Let it dimple the rivulets of his hair. Let it waterfall the creases of his robes. Let the image of him, in my steady hand, bring me peace.

The Buddha’s Greatest Teaching

You’d be amazed how much your spiritual journey parallels the Buddha’s, says Melvin McLeod. But he took the big step that woke him up. You can take it too.

The Buddha gave many teachings over the course of his long life, and they’ve been expanded on by great meditators in the 2,600 years since then. Yet the Buddha’s most important teaching is the story of his own journey to enlightenment. It’s the essential guide for our own spiritual journey.

So, let’s take a look at the Buddha’s path, stage by stage. I think you’ll be surprised how similar his spiritual journey initially was to ours. Then he took a big step, a surprising, counterintuitive step. It made him the Buddha, and we can take it too.

The Buddha was born into a royal family in what is now Nepal. This was the epitome of privilege at that time, the equivalent of being born into some tech billionaire’s family today. He had all the luxury and pleasures one could want.

Privilege is designed to shield people not only from suffering, but from the knowledge of suffering. But as we all know, no matter how good our life is, how insulated we are, eventually we have to acknowledge the reality of illness, old age, death, and all the world’s other sufferings.

That is what happened to the Buddha. He broke through the cocoon of luxury his family had built around him and woke up to the suffering of beings. His heart opened with compassion, and he saw that all the pleasure and wealth in the world does not protect us from old age, sickness, and death.

This realization ended the first stage of the Buddha’s journey: he’d enjoyed a life of material success and then he’d seen its ultimate futility.

I’m guessing that like the Buddha, you too have realized that material success doesn’t solve life’s most important problems. So, like the Buddha, you’ve embarked on a spiritual quest for the meaning and happiness that materialism can never give us.

This begins the second stage of the Buddha’s journey, and ours. We go from material struggle to spiritual struggle.

Seeking an answer to the problem of suffering, the Buddha left his family’s palace and went off into the forest, where he tried all the powerful spiritual methods of his day—yoga, concentration, tantra, asceticism. He was disciplined, dedicated, and courageous, and he became an outstanding practitioner.

But it wasn’t working. Try as he might to deny, purify, change, improve, or transcend himself, his practice did not deliver an end to suffering. It didn’t work to try to become someone different or better than he was.

That might be your experience too. It is certainly mine. Practicing with some self-improving goal in mind—whether it’s enlightenment, healing, becoming some great meditator, or just being a better person—we find that we’re still suffering. And try as we might, it’s extremely difficult to avoid tainting our practice with at least some goal orientation.

Up to this stage, our journey has been similar to the Buddha’s: we have seen the futility of material struggle and sought answers in spiritual practice. We’re working hard in our struggle to achieve something spiritually, and although it may not be working that well, we haven’t given up.

But here the Buddha did something we haven’t yet—he did give up. This was the third and final stage of his journey to enlightenment.

He stopped all struggling, both material and spiritual. He stopped the self-indulgence of material struggle and the self-abnegation of spiritual struggle. He took a middle path of just being who he really was.

Who he really was—who we all really are—was an awakened one, a buddha. He didn’t have to cultivate awakening; all he had to do was stop doing the things that obscured it, like trying to become something he wasn’t.

When he finally ceased all his struggle while seated under what became known as the Bodhi Tree, he saw himself and all reality as they really are—perfect, complete, and joyful. There was nothing that needed to be done because nothing needed improvement. He saw that we suffer because we don’t know this, mistakenly seeing ourselves as separate, solid, and imperfect.

The Buddha realized that because enlightenment is our natural state, we don’t need to seek, create, or achieve it. This struggle only obscures our true nature, and when we stop struggling we naturally awaken. This is the key to Buddhist meditation.

The Buddha is often portrayed reaching down to touch the ground after his enlightenment. But I think he’s doing more than gesturing toward the earth. I think he’s pointing us toward this whole reality, which is perfect and good. He’s telling us that this very reality is his true home, and it is ours. We don’t have to struggle to be anyone or anywhere else. The seat of enlightenment is right here where we are. We just have to realize that. This is the Buddha’s greatest teaching.

Siddhartha’s Son

Siddhartha gave up everything to seek enlightenment. That story, says John Tarrant, is a linear depiction of a nonlinear event.

Imagine yourself a prince named Siddhartha, raised in a world in which the concealed knowledge is of old age, sickness, death, and the path to know the nature of mind. Messengers come from the gods and demonstrate this secret knowledge to you. You take it in. Then, secretly, at midnight, with a single backward glance, you turn away from your wife and newborn child. The hooves of your great white horse are muffled, and—with your only friend—you steal away. Earth spirits cast a slumber on the guards, and soon you’re out of the palace and riding through the night. At dawn you arrive at a place where the deer are not afraid. You dismount and take a free breath. You swap your silk clothes for a passing hunter’s coarse, red linen. As he departs, your friend weeps and your horse, too. Then you enter spiritual training.

When I first met this compelling story, I took it as encouragement to sacrifice, to work hard at spiritual matters, turning the whole of myself toward a transformative change. The extremity of the departures and losses struck me, also their repetitions; Siddhartha lost his mother when he was a baby, and in turn he abandoned his son. The pain of such recurrences is profound, and led him to turn to the deepest matters.

I didn’t quite fit my own, Tasmanian, culture; I couldn’t find a ready-to-wear outfit. After a succession of improvisations—working in the mines, working a fishing boat, working for land rights—I realized my question was an inner one: Who was I?

So, without knowing anything about the dharma, I gave up most things in order to study Zen. When I went through the gates of departure, the pieces of the Buddha story became natural, archetypal, stops on the way. I wanted to see the world differently, but I had no clue how to do that.

In the final piece of his story, the Buddha, having sat all night under a great fig tree, was attacked by Mara, the Lord of Death, facing terrors I was personally familiar with. As the first birds called, Buddha looked up and saw the morning star and cried out: “Now I see that all beings have the nature of the Tathagata. Only their delusions and attachments prevent them from realizing this.”

Everybody in our temple worked hard to awaken, but the effort was full of, well, effort. I was trying to get freedom, yet even my quest was full of desire.

There was the matter, too, of the children. Siddhartha abandoning his son on the night of his birth touched me. The night my daughter was born, she rested on my chest, and the tenderness of her skin seemed to be a mystery beyond the stars. She and I were both included in that pattern, along with her mother, the doctors and nurses, and the scent of plum blossom through the widow.

As my daughter grew, I took her with me when I traveled to teach retreats. The idea was that we could have silence, peace, and awakening in the middle of life. Other children came to retreats too. They’d take lunches and hurtle off up the creeks, coming back in time for supper.

I found that my story was an odd rhyme with Buddha’s story. There was a child, though she was a girl, not a son or prince like Buddha. I carried her onto an airliner, and she wailed all the way across the Pacific. It’s as if when I left the palace, the spirits tried to help me steal away, but she made all the noise in the world. So that’s the way we left the palace—together. A steward, saying “It’s hard to have a nipper,” secretly passed me a bottle of champagne from first class. He was like the farmer Sujata who offered Buddha blessings and nourishment.

I found I could enter Buddha’s story anywhere, and the journey itself was a resting place. The light seemed not to play on the story, but to strike the shards. The intelligent thread of instructions—this is how to do it and what to sacrifice—was all reasonable and even respectable. But my mind wasn’t reasonable or respectable. For me the light was in the leaves and tips of the grass, in the feelings as well as the thoughts.

Anywhere, I could enter Buddha’s story anywhere. Here was always good. As Chan ancestor Mazu Daoyi said, “Your thoughts and feelings are Buddha.” We’re not living the wrong life. The life we have now is Buddha’s life.

An Enlightened Community

Laywomen and men, monks and nuns—all were held in equal regard. Wendy Garling on the Buddha’s fourfold sangha.

My journey as a Buddhist began when I was a hippie, traveling in Nepal and India. Serendipitously, I visited Tibetan communities where I experienced, for the first time in my life, the depths of human potential for kindness and generosity. In shrine rooms amidst a cacophony of color and sound, I encountered riveting teachings from brilliant lamas that changed my life. One day in 1979, at the Delhi train station, I met a kind lama who turned out to be my root teacher and a cherished constant in my life until his passing three decades later.

Looking back, I see how fortunate I was that my introduction to the dharma was not gendered. I never heard that as a woman I was a lesser candidate for buddhahood than a man, or felt marginalized within a sangha by a hierarchy of males, or felt pressured by a teacher for sex. It’s been gut-wrenching that so many dharma sisters across all lineages have had just these experiences, with horrific stories of abuse continuing to emerge. And then there is the heartbreaking finger pointing at the Buddha himself; some say that he set the precedent for misogyny and patriarchal hierarchy.

And so, I take a breath and dive into stories of the Buddha to find answers for myself. What was he really like? What was his regard for women? From years of this research, my faith in him has only deepened. For me, there are a couple of stories that eclipse millennia of Buddhism’s misogyny. They’ve become guideposts for me as a female Buddhist, beacons in my practice, writing, and teaching. Let me share them with you.

Shortly after his enlightenment, the Buddha declared the goal of creating a fourfold sangha of disciples comprising both lay and monastic women and men. With an eye on his legacy, he intended that representatives from all four groups would become accomplished practitioners and dharma teachers during his lifetime. We know he actualized this model because in canonical sources he goes on to laud two dozen “foremost” women as exemplars of his highest teachings. Khema, for example, was recognized as the role model for embodying wisdom; Samavati for loving-kindness; and Khujjuttara for superior learning.

The Buddha’s equal regard for women was also underscored when he was asked to settle a dharma dispute between quarrelsome monks. Rather than make a ruling himself, he turned to his most accomplished disciples and appointed one judge each from the fourfold community. Mahaprajapati, a female monastic, and Visakha, a laywoman, were selected as equal judges along with a monk and a layman to rule on the accuracy of the dharma discourse in dispute.

At the end of his life, the Buddha expressed satisfaction that his mission of creating a fourfold sangha had been accomplished. Imagine how different Buddhism would be today if his nonhierarchical, gender-balanced model for dharma community had endured!

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These ceaseless changes are the experiential basis of the Buddha’s quiet proclamation of the truth of “no solid self.” Let’s pause for a moment to consider this, as the Buddha’s primary teaching of selflessness might not seem to agree with our experience. “No self?” we may ask. “If that’s true, then who is reading (or writing) these words?”

The unexamined self feels like an isolated, self-sufficient, permanent individual, essentially separate from others and all that surrounds it.

Before we closely examine our experience, many of us assume we are essentially the same person throughout our lives. We are born, grow up, develop, and mature. All of that is my experience; all of that happens to me. We feel certain that there is a constant “I” somewhere near the center of all our experiences, though we are somewhat unclear about the precise nature of this assumed-to-be enduring essence.

So the great path of awakening begins with asking ourselves a tiny question: “What is the experience of being me?”

Even though I’ve heard the basic Buddhist teachings of impermanence and no self for many years, I often proceed through my day on automatic pilot, acting as though I’m an autonomous, sovereign self. I feel and act as though I’m a completely independent, permanent person. Right here in the midst of the swirling tempests of everyday events rapidly arising and falling away, I continue to act as though I have an infinite stretch of time before me. My actions and inaction suggest I feel I will live forever, even though, rationally, I understand the truth of impermanence. Yes, of course I can admit that things are always changing, but still I wonder: isn’t there a rock-solid unchanging “me” hidden somewhere underneath it all?

This unexamined self feels like an isolated, self-sufficient, permanent individual, essentially separate from others and all that surrounds it. Yet even a few moments of self-reflection suggests otherwise. My body is not the same as when I was eight or eighteen years old. If all humans are mortal, then my life will also end, exact time of departure unknown. Similarly, all my feelings of happiness and sadness come and go, arise and cease, changing gradually or suddenly, but always, inevitably, changing.

Looking closely, I also see that I’m not a self-contained, entirely independent individual. I need food, water, and air to survive. I speak and write a language generously passed on to me by others from long ago. I engage in everyday activities that were all part of my cultural training from childhood onward: brushing my teeth, exchanging greetings of “good morning” and saying “good night,” attending ceremonies, weddings, funerals.

Even at the most basic level of existence, I did not arise as a spontaneous, self-created human being. I was born and nurtured through the union and love of my parents, and they are also descendants of many ancestors before them. We are all “dependently related” beings, developing and aging in rapidly changing societies.

So what? Why does all this matter? Because when we ignore these basic truths, we suffer. When we conduct our lives as though, all evidence to the contrary, we are separate, permanent, unitary selves, we find ourselves constantly living in fear of the large, looming shadow of change. Actions based on a mistaken sense of self, or “ego,” as an unchanging, isolated essence are filled with anxious struggle. We fight many futile battles against the way things actually are. How are they really? They are changing, connected, fluid. It’s as though we are standing waist-deep in the middle of a rushing river, our arms outstretched wide, straining to stop the flow.

This mistaken sense of self arises as a solidified set of beliefs about who we are and how the world is. When we proceed on that basis, all our life experiences are filtered through a rigorous, simplistic, for-and-against screening process: “Will this person or event enhance my permanent sense of self? Will this encounter threaten the ideas I’ve already accumulated?” Believing the inner voice of deception, we grasp and defend and ignore in service to an illusion, causing suffering for ourselves and others.

Letting go of the false sense of self feels liberating, like being released from a claustrophobic prison of mistaken view. What a relief to discover that we don’t have to pretend to be something we’re not! The initially surprising and challenging news of “no solid self” turns out to be a gentle invitation into a more spacious approach to living and being with others. Releasing fixation on permanence goes hand in hand with taking brave steps toward more communication and harmony in our lives, our actions, our relationships, and our work.

We might call this fluid inter-being an “open self,” one that is more sensitive to other living beings and nature. This open sense of self allows us to proceed from empathy and compassion for ourselves and for those suffering around us and elsewhere. With the dissolving of the seemingly solid walls of ego’s fragile tower, our experience is porous and permeable, less cut off and isolated. As we gradually release the old commitment to conquering the unconquerable, to denying the undeniable, we explore the many genuine and fresh possibilities in our ever-changing situation.

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Teaching 2,500 years ago, the Buddha had a lot to say about change. He called it annica, or impermanence, and listed it among the three fundamental marks of all existence. Everything that exists, he told us, is subject to change. As hard as we might look, we will never find anything that does not change. The Buddha said that understanding this is an integral part of living an awakened life. Nothing lasts forever, and our jobs are certainly no exception.

This may sound like bad news. Stability can be comforting, at work and everywhere else. Many of us have an instinctive fear of change, and this can lead to real suffering. We fear losing what we have, not getting what we want, or getting what we don’t want—all of which are forms of change. And changing jobs can be among the scariest changes many of us have to face.

Yet I think when we understand the ubiquity of change, it becomes a bit less frightening. If everything is always changing, that means we’re experiencing change all the time. It’s nothing extraordinary or unusual. It’s nothing new. Change is just the normal course of human life, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

When we contemplate leaving a job, for example, we often think of this as a choice between changing or not changing. But if we understand the Buddha’s teaching of impermanence, then that is not really the choice we face at all. Change is everywhere, so we are never choosing between change or no change. We are just choosing between different sorts of change.

Rather than asking ourselves if we want to change jobs, we can start asking ourselves how we want our jobs to change. The change itself is a given. The only question is what that change will look like and how we might influence the change we see.

That doesn’t necessarily make the decision to leave a job an easy one. At times, it might even make it harder!

After all, if we assume our current job will stay the same, then we’re choosing between the known and the unknown. But when we acknowledge that change is everywhere, we’re always choosing between two unknowns. Our job will change whether it’s a new job or the one we already have. How can we possibly know we’re making the right choice?

We can’t. One of the many lessons of this pandemic is that the future is always uncertain. I didn’t know anyone in 2019 who predicted that 2020 would turn out the way it did. Or predicted correctly in 2020 what 2021 would be like. We’ve come face-to-face with life’s uncertainty. Yet while this uncertainty can be frightening, it also lets us off the hook. We can never know the future. That’s a given. So we make the best decisions we can, but we can’t be expected to predict every possible outcome. We will make mistakes, and that is okay.

Meditation can help. Buddhists believe that seeing things clearly is always preferable to living in an illusion, and meditation helps us develop this skill of seeing the world as it really is. This is what mindfulness is all about. I think of it a little like cleaning my glasses each morning. Mindfulness is the practice of seeing clearly and paying attention—paying attention to the world around us as it actually exists, rather than as we might wish it was.

If you’re trying to decide whether to leave your job or not, try to look at your options as clearly and thoroughly as you can. Be honest with yourself. What kinds of changes might these new opportunities bring? What sorts of change might you experience in your current job? And how much of the change you’re looking for is really about your job anyway? Many of us suffer in our work, and yet often our job is not the root cause of that suffering. Do we need to dig deeper to find the change we really need? Do we need a different sort of change altogether?

If you already have a new job—whether by choice or by chance—try to notice what is changing and what is not. How does the change you’re experiencing in the new job differ from the changes you experienced before? What hasn’t changed in the way you thought it might?

Even if you haven’t left your job and have no plans to, notice how it, too, is changing. For some of us, this pandemic has felt at times like an endless loop, where every day is exactly the same. Yet the Buddha tells us that change is everywhere, even in this seeming monotony. If we’re not seeing the change, we’re not looking hard enough. Try looking harder.

The ancients had a saying that we can never step into the same river twice. The same could be said of every office, warehouse, factory, or store. No place of work truly stays the same. Every day we are doing a different job. It doesn’t matter if we have a new title, new boss, new employer—or nothing new at all. Every day is our first day.

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When my mother died, it was running that helped me to ride the waves of my grief. I was twenty years old and had only been sitting for a few months, but I’d been running for ten years and intuitively knew I could use breath and rhythm to move the most overpowering feelings through my body. Years later, my brother died of an overdose. By then I’d learned how to move into stillness—to use my mind, my breath, and my body to gently hold the pain until I could release it or until it faded of its own accord, having exhausted its energy.

I sensed that one way to counter my sadness was to run with and through it.

But even at other times, when my pain was simply the ache of everyday living, running still provided me with a balm. Long before I’d learned of endorphins or opiate receptors, years before I’d heard of “the zone,” I sensed that one way to counter my sadness was to run with and through it. Over time I came to see there’s two main kinds of pain: pain we must understand and pain we can only bear. So when sitting with my feelings became too difficult, running with them helped me to feel without fixing, to let what was there be there without judgment or suppression.

To this day, running continues to be a very simple and reliable source of joy for me. Joy at being able to inhabit and use this body. Joy at the wonder of breath and movement and the mystery that is this life.

That’s why during this time, which has been marked by so much loss, so much change and uncertainty, I’m once again turning to stillness and movement to find ease and stability. Every day I sit for a while, then I lace my shoes and go out, not to avoid or run away from the real challenges that we’re all facing, nor because I hold any illusions that running will change the world. I run for a much more humble but irrefutable reason: at its best, running changes me. It helps me move past the constricted view that melancholy brings and it allows me to see that there’s always, always a much wider—in fact, unlimited—range of possibilities.

How to Practice Still Running

Just as breath is the core of seated meditation, it’s also the basis of a strong moving meditation. When you go out for your next run, try the following guidelines and use your breath as the fulcrum for still running.

1. Begin by running at a pace that you can maintain with full attention for the duration of your run. In the beginning, you may need to run slower than you’re used to so you can sustain a rhythm that will allow you to stay relaxed and focused.

2. Place your attention on your hara—a spot about three finger-widths below the navel—and imagine this as the ground or “seat” of your breath. Feel the inhalation and exhalation moving in and out of your body in time with the rise and fall of your abdomen, and keep your attention anchored on this point. If you get distracted, work with your thoughts the same way you do in seated zazen: see them, let them go, and return to your breath. Let every cell in your body, every thought of your mind, be nothing but breath.

3. Next match your breath to your stride, experimenting with different breathing patterns. First, try inhaling for three steps and exhaling for four in a 3:4 pattern. If you’re running faster, try a 2:3 pattern, placing your attention on the exhalation and letting the inhalation happen by itself. Notice the difference in your body and mind when you lengthen the exhalation, or when you allow it to be the same as the inhalation (a 3:3 or 4:4 pattern). I find that letting the exhalation be slightly longer quiets down my thoughts and settles my body.

4. Keep your mouth closed and breathe through your nose as you run, or inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. Be careful not to hold your breath or let the exhale get too long before you inhale again. If you start gasping, slow down a bit. Walk if you have to. Just stay connected with your breath and your hara as you move. Continue running at a steady pace, letting your breath flow as you feel your body moving through space.

5. Allow yourself to be fully present to your thoughts, your feelings, and the act of running. Many people spend their running time wishing that it was over; few are actually present as it’s happening. I think this is a disservice to you and to running. So, as my first teacher, Daido Roshi, used to say, “Do what you’re doing as you’re doing it.” Forget about what happened before or what comes next. If you can do this, you’ll be making room for joy to naturally arise—the joy of being fully in your life as you’re living it.

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According to the Buddhist teachings, difficulty is inevitable in human life. For one thing, we cannot escape the reality of death. But there are also the realities of aging, of illness, of not getting what we want, and of getting what we don’t want. These kinds of difficulties are facts of life. Even if you were the Buddha himself, if you were a fully enlightened person, you would experience death, illness, aging, and sorrow at losing what you love. All of these things would happen to you. If you got burned or cut, it would hurt.

But the Buddhist teachings also say that this is not really what causes us misery in our lives. What causes misery is always trying to get away from the facts of life, always trying to avoid pain and seek happiness—this sense of ours that there could be lasting security and happiness available to us if we could only do the right thing.

Suffering can humble us. Even the most arrogant among us can be softened by the loss of someone dear.

In this very lifetime we can do ourselves and this planet a great favor and turn this very old way of thinking upside down. As Shantideva, author of Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, points out, suffering has a great deal to teach us. If we use the opportunity when it arises, suffering will motivate us to look for answers. Many people, including myself, came to the spiritual path because of deep unhappiness. Suffering can also teach us empathy for others who are in the same boat. Furthermore, suffering can humble us. Even the most arrogant among us can be softened by the loss of someone dear.

Yet it is so basic in us to feel that things should go well for us, and that if we start to feel depressed, lonely, or inadequate, there’s been some kind of mistake or we’ve lost it. In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is where real transformation can take place.

As long as we’re caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we’re always running away from discomfort, we’re going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and disappointment, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us to develop inner strength.

And what’s especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think we’ve hit the bottom, when things are at their worst. Instead of asking ourselves, “How can I find security and happiness?” we could ask ourselves, “Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace—disappointment in all its many forms—and let it open me?” This is the trick.

There are various ways to view what happens when we feel threatened. In times of distress—of rage, of frustration, of failure—we can look at how we get hooked and how shenpa escalates. The usual translation of shenpa is “attachment,” but this doesn’t adequately express the full meaning. I think of shenpa as “getting hooked.” Another definition, used by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, is the “charge”—the charge behind our thoughts and words and actions, the charge behind “like” and “don’t like.”

It can also be helpful to shift our focus and look at how we put up barriers. In these moments we can observe how we withdraw and become self-absorbed. We become dry, sour, afraid; we crumble, or harden out of fear that more pain is coming. In some old familiar way, we automatically erect a protective shield and our self-centeredness intensifies.

We can become intimate with just how we hide out, doze off, freeze up. And that intimacy, coming to know these barriers so well, is what begins to dismantle them.

But this is the very same moment when we could do something different. Right on the spot, through practice, we can get very familiar with the barriers that we put up around our hearts and around our whole being. We can become intimate with just how we hide out, doze off, freeze up. And that intimacy, coming to know these barriers so well, is what begins to dismantle them. Amazingly, when we give them our full attention they start to fall apart.

Ultimately all the practices I have mentioned are simply ways we can go about dissolving these barriers. Whether it’s learning to be present through sitting meditation, acknowledging shenpa, or practicing patience, these are methods for dissolving the protective walls that we automatically put up.

When we’re putting up the barriers and the sense of “me” as separate from “you” gets stronger, right there in the midst of difficulty and pain, the whole thing could turn around simply by not erecting barriers; simply by staying open to the difficulty, to the feelings that you’re going through; simply by not talking to ourselves about what’s happening. That is a revolutionary step. Becoming intimate with pain is the key to changing at the core of our being—staying open to everything we experience, letting the sharpness of difficult times pierce us to the heart, letting these times open us, humble us, and make us wiser and more brave.

Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.

If we’re ready to try staying present with our pain, one of the greatest supports we could ever find is to cultivate the warmth and simplicity of bodhichitta. The word bodhichitta has many translations, but probably the most common one is “awakened heart.” The word refers to a longing to wake up from ignorance and delusion in order to help others do the same. Putting our personal awakening in a larger—even planetary—framework makes a significant difference. It gives us a vaster perspective on why we would do this often difficult work.

There are two kinds of bodhichitta: relative and absolute. Relative bodhichitta includes compassion and maitri. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche translated maitri as “unconditional friendliness with oneself.” This unconditional friendliness means having an unbiased relationship with all the parts of your being. So, in the context of working with pain, this means making an intimate, compassionate heart-relationship with all those parts of ourselves we generally don’t want to touch.

Some people find the teachings I offer helpful because I encourage them to be kind to themselves, but this does not mean pampering our neurosis. The kindness that I learned from my teachers, and that I wish so much to convey to other people, is kindness toward all qualities of our being. The qualities that are the toughest to be kind to are the painful parts, where we feel ashamed, as if we don’t belong, as if we’ve just blown it, when things are falling apart for us. Maitri means sticking with ourselves when we don’t have anything, when we feel like a loser. And it becomes the basis for extending the same unconditional friendliness to others.

If there are whole parts of yourself that you are always running from, that you even feel justified in running from, then you’re going to run from anything that brings you into contact with your feelings of insecurity.

I’m here to tell you that the path to peace is right there, when you want to get away.

And have you noticed how often these parts of ourselves get touched? The closer you get to a situation or a person, the more these feelings arise. Often when you’re in a relationship it starts off great, but when it gets intimate and begins to bring out your neurosis, you just want to get out of there.

So I’m here to tell you that the path to peace is right there, when you want to get away. You can cruise through life not letting anything touch you, but if you really want to live fully, if you want to enter into life, enter into genuine relationships with other people, with animals, with the world situation, you’re definitely going to have the experience of feeling provoked, of getting hooked, of shenpa. You’re not just going to feel bliss. The message is that when those feelings emerge, this is not a failure. This is the chance to cultivate maitri, unconditional friendliness toward your perfect and imperfect self.

Relative bodhichitta also includes awakening compassion. One of the meanings of compassion is “suffering with,” being willing to suffer with other people. This means that to the degree you can work with the wholeness of your being—your prejudices, your feelings of failure, your self-pity, your depression, your rage, your addictions—the more you will connect with other people out of that wholeness. And it will be a relationship between equals. You’ll be able to feel the pain of other people as your own pain. And you’ll be able to feel your own pain and know that it’s shared by millions.

Absolute bodhichitta, also known as shunyata, is the open dimension of our being, the completely wide-open heart and mind. Without labels of “you” and “me,” “enemy” and “friend,” absolute bodhichitta is always here. Cultivating absolute bodhichitta means having a relationship with the world that is nonconceptual, that is unprejudiced, having a direct, unedited relationship with reality.

That’s the value of sitting meditation practice. You train in coming back to the unadorned present moment again and again. Whatever thoughts arise in your mind, you regard them with equanimity and you learn to let them dissolve. There is no rejection of the thoughts and emotions that come up; rather, we begin to realize that thoughts and emotions are not as solid as we always take them to be.

It takes bravery to train in unconditional friendliness, it takes bravery to train in “suffering with,” it takes bravery to stay with pain when it arises and not run or erect barriers. It takes bravery to not bite the hook and get swept away. But as we do, the absolute bodhichitta realization, the experience of how open and unfettered our minds really are, begins to dawn on us. As a result of becoming more comfortable with the ups and the downs of our ordinary human life, this realization grows stronger.

We may still get betrayed, may still be hated. We may still feel confused and sad. What we won’t do is bite the hook.

We start with taking a close look at our predictable tendency to get hooked, to separate ourselves, to withdraw into ourselves and put up walls. As we become intimate with these tendencies, they gradually become more transparent, and we see that there’s actually space, there is unlimited, accommodating space. This does not mean that then you live in lasting happiness and comfort. That spaciousness includes pain.

We may still get betrayed, may still be hated. We may still feel confused and sad. What we won’t do is bite the hook. Pleasant happens. Unpleasant happens. Neutral happens. What we gradually learn is to not move away from being fully present. We need to train at this very basic level because of the widespread suffering in the world. If we aren’t training inch by inch, one moment at a time, in overcoming our fear of pain, then we’ll be very limited in how much we can help. We’ll be limited in helping ourselves, and limited in helping anybody else. So let’s start with ourselves, just as we are, here and now.

Excerpted from Practicing Peace, by Pema Chödrön. © 2006 Pema Chödrön. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications.

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But what exactly is mindfulness? The sutra does not offer a definition, but we think we know: mindfulness is awareness, consciousness. To be mindful of something is to be conscious of it.

But if we think about this further, we see that mindfulness is even more: mindfulness is life. Because being alive is being conscious; even if we’re sleeping and, as we say, unconscious, consciousness is functioning in some way. So being alive is being conscious, being consciousness—being mindful.

Of course, consciousnesses is subject to all sorts of conditioning. My consciousness, let’s say, conditioned by my being a male, an English speaker, and a white person, is different from yours, if you are, say, a female and a Black person and a French speaker, and so on. We are conditioned by our historical period, our group identity, our economic class, our family, and our individual experiences. And as we now see so clearly, such conditioning is not trivial; it cannot be easily dismissed.

But when it comes to basic consciousness, the light that illuminates the mind, let’s call it, all humans (indeed everything that lives!) shares something fundamental.

The job of the Mindfulness Sutra is not to analyze all this, but rather to show how to practice so as to enhance and develop the mindfulness that is automatically there, so we can purify the mind, end suffering, and achieve the path, the goal.

I find all this truly amazing. Being a conscious human being is already a great blessing. You are already mindful. You are most of the way to nirvana already!

Now all you have to do is refine and train that mindfulness, reorient it enough to let it do what it naturally will do but has been blocked from doing by conditioning. This is why, despite the first noble truth that all conditioned existence has the nature of suffering, the Buddhist tradition tells us we are born into “a precious human life.” Yes, there is plenty of suffering, but we have what it takes to overcome it.

The Mindfulness Sutra delineates four foundations, or four practices, to develop mindfulness: mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of sensations/feelings, mindfulness of mind/consciousness, and mindfulness of what are called “mind objects.” If we assume these four practices are cumulative, each one leading to the next, then mindfulness of mind objects brings us close to the goal—awakening.

The sutra provides several lists of mind objects—traditional lists like the five hindrances (five typical disadvantageous states of mind, like doubt or obsession), and various other common lists of problematic mental and emotional states. It also provides lists of positive objects, including the mental and emotional states that lead to awakening (called the seven factors of awakening), and the four noble truths, the basic Buddhist map of existence.

All this tells us that to be mindful of mind objects is to know how to distinguish between states of mind that tend toward suffering and trouble, and states of mind that lead in the direction of purification and peace.

In other words, if you develop mindfulness fully, you will eventually see the basic shapes of consciousness—both positive and negative—that we all share. In effect, you will feel your way through and beyond your individual conditioning, and you’ll see more or less what it is to be alive, including all the joys and sorrows of our condition.

The actual effect of this, if you feel it deeply enough, is a sense of solidarity with everyone who shares—despite the differences they may have from you—a human mind and heart.

This is what I believe the Buddha means by purification of mind, the end of suffering, the path, and nirvana. Just this: to know what we are, and that we all share this human experience together.

This of course is a Mahayana interpretation of the Mindfulness Sutra, emphasizing that the path of mindfulness is also the path of caring. In the end, to be mindful is to profoundly accept, with love, all that lives, humans and non humans alike. And out of this love comes a deep commitment to help and not to harm. Because life wants to protect and preserve itself, when your mindfulness practice shows you that you are not only yourself and your family and your group, but you are life itself, then naturally you are benevolent. You want to be of service.

And this is the basis of Buddhist ethics. It is awakening itself.

In the Pali canon, the early teachings, the Buddha in his former lives is called “the bodhisattva,” a buddha in training. During those lives his main practice wasn’t meditation or insight. It was devotion and kindness. These practices enabled him to finally be born as Buddha so he could attain awakening in order to be of service to people in our world, in our historical era.

In Mahayana Buddhism the idea of the bodhisattva is generalized to include all of us. It’s as if each one of us is, like the Buddha, a very special and precious person. Each of us is going to be a buddha someday and we are preparing ourselves for this, just as Buddha did, by practicing kindness and benefitting and loving others. There are as many kinds of bodhisattvas as there are kinds of beings, each one with their unique way to help, from their unique position in this lifetime.

This means that although a lifetime of awakened mindfulness practice will show us our identity with, solidarity with, and love for all beings, our individual karmic conditioning, as male or female, white or Black or brown, wealthy or poor, educated or not, and so on, will give us a position from which we can reach out. So our identity with one another and all of life gives us the basis for morality. And it is the passion of our difference that gives us what we need so that we can illuminate one another, and serve one another with love. So awakening equals our sameness (love), and our difference (loving action).

Western Buddhism has been focused on meditation practice partly as a reaction to Christianity’s emphasis on faith: meditation is experiential—you sit and find out for yourself. But throughout its history in Asia, meditation practice has not been as central to Buddhism as it is in the West. Because the truth is, Buddhism has always been more about cultivating loving and peaceful action—a way of life—than about achieving concentration and insight through meditation. The reason to cultivate concentration and insight is to purify the mind of its deeply rooted selfishness, so that the deeper heart of love— called buddhanature in Mahayana Buddhism—can shine through.

The bodhisattva path is usually defined by six practices, known as the six paramitas, or perfections: generosity, ethical conduct, patient forbearance, joyful effort, meditation, and transcendent insight, or prajnaparamita. Meditation and insight have their place here for sure, but in the context of four other practices that emphasize conduct.

Generosity

Generosity is open-heartedness—giving material, psychological, and spiritual gifts. It means working to always expand the heart and the view, so you see beyond the smallness of your world a boundless world of generosity of spirit.

Ethical Conduct

Ethical conduct is built on a foundation of love. In order to benefit and never harm others, the bodhisattva keeps in check all forms of conduct that would directly and indirectly hurt others and promotes all forms of conduct that would directly and indirectly benefit others.

I think that in a complex world, bodhisattvas will always be what we might call political, in the sense that their caring and their thoughtfulness would lead them to be active in promoting policies and candidates and attitudes and programs, as well as all forms of personal conduct, that would reduce harm and promote benefit for all. Now we are much focused on the environment, and on anti-racism and economic justice in the United States, long overdue. Certainly bodhisattvas see wise action in these areas as central to the path.

Patient Forbearance

Patient forbearance is the ability to accept and be open to all kinds of difficulty and loss. Bodhisattvas work hard to benefit others, but they are never disappointed because they are willing to accept whatever outcomes occur as the basis for further action. Loss will come, pain will come, defeat will come, and every loss, pain, and defeat is a chance to deepen and bring more wisdom and stability to our love.

Joyful Effort

Joyful effort is the bodhisattva’s commitment to always continuing the practice, lifetime after lifetime. The Mahayana path reinterprets the teaching of early Buddhism that seems to point toward means and ends—as in the Mindfulness Sutra, training that will lead to the goal of nirvana. In Mahayana Buddhism, process and goal are one and the same; means and ends merge. Bodhisattvas go on and on being reborn into this world out of love for sentient beings. Awakening is their practice.

While ethical choices in a complex world are certainly difficult—who can know for sure what is to be done or not done?—the basic ethical practice of a bodhisattva is simple: caring, energetic effort for the general good, endlessly cultivated and deepened: the ongoing and active transformation of selfishness into love.

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“We’re living with people we love and we don’t know how much longer that will be true,” my friend said.

“We’ve got to value that.”

He’s right, of course. It was sad to hear how his brother-in-law was suddenly bereft. Although I suppose death always seems sudden when it actually happens. But it’s hard to remember our mortality day by day, moment by moment.

“Do you think that religious believers, people who believe in the afterlife, have an easier time at the end of their lives than others?” he asked.

I stopped to consider this question. He seemed to think it was unquestionably true.

“You can completely disagree with me if you want,” he said.

“I don’t know, to tell the truth,” I said. “I think there are believers who have a hard time at the end. And non-believers who do okay.”

What I really think is that none of us knows how we will do.

My primary spiritual mentor, Buddhist teacher Larry Rosenberg, has taught that we need to face our fear of death in a raw and unadulterated way. His whole teaching was about facing fear.

“If we all theoretically have the same amount of fear,” Larry said, “but one person’s fear is muffled by some religious belief, that’s actually a bad thing. The only way to move beyond fear is really to face it. But you need to face all of it. In that way it’s better to have no faith at all.”

The Gospels suggest that even Jesus, in the garden when he saw what was happening, and even (in one Gospel) on the cross, faced real despair at the end of his life. He wasn’t shielded by his special relationship to God. He had the full human experience.

A couple of days after the conversation with my friend, I asked my wife what she thought. She spent a summer working in an AIDS hospice when she was in Divinity School, and saw any number of people die. Some had peaceful deaths. Some deaths were terrifying. But she didn’t think they divided up according to religious belief.

For some people trust comes naturally. Others need to practice it.

“It didn’t seem to matter if they believed in God or not. What was important was something beyond that.” She’d spent a fair amount of time talking to one of her mentors about this question, and the woman agreed with her. “The thing that was important — what some people seemed to have and others didn’t — is what I call trust in life. Some people were able to relax and settle into what they were going through, others weren’t. They fought and resisted.”

It wasn’t a matter of believing some particular thing. It was a matter of trusting life.

I’m reminded of a question I once asked my brother. I was rereading the Gospels, many years into my Buddhist practice, and I asked him how he translated the famous verse that evangelicals always quote, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” My brother is a lifelong Christian, also a scholar of Greek (and Hebrew). He teaches a Sunday school class where he translates from the original language.

“I don’t translate that word as believe,” he said. “It’s not a matter of assenting to some set of propositions. The word means something more like trust. Trust in me, in this way of life I’m showing you.”

Trust in life.

I think I lost that trust when my father died, or perhaps even earlier, six months before, when I found out he had leukemia. I was sixteen years old. In the interim I knew my father had a fatal illness, but kept thinking about ways he could beat it: he might have been diagnosed incorrectly; someone might find a cure; he might be the one person in the history of the disease not to die of it. I imagined all kinds of possibilities. They went up in smoke when he died.

I knew intellectually that anyone could die anytime, that there were no guarantees. But there was a natural order of things, a man was supposed to grow old and die, and when my father didn’t have a chance to grow old, I lost my faith in things. I lost trust.

There was a long period when I couldn’t get it back. I tried to return to the Presbyterian church in my early twenties, and to the Christian church in general; I tried for 10 or 15 years. I think now that I was trying to understand something intellectually that wasn’t intellectual. I was trying to believe things that weren’t believable.

It was like banging my head against a wall.

There was one moment that I think of as the low point of my futility. The church I attended was large, and in order to give people a chance to relate it created small study groups where people could get to know each other. My first wife and I joined one, and there we were, in our early twenties, hanging out with a bunch of older people in the stuffy apartment of a fiftyish woman, some kind of Christian educator. She had a Masters degree and led the discussion. At one point, speaking of some missionaries, she said, “I don’t know how they do what they do. Actually, I do know. They have a very strong prayer life.”

“A strong prayer life”, I thought. “What the hell is that? Where do you get one of those?”

I spent a period of years when I had no religious or spiritual life at all (except my life as a writer, which I knew to be spiritual in some way, but that aspect of it was elusive, hard to put my finger on), then met a woman for whom religious life was as natural as waking up in the morning. It wasn’t that she believed some particular thing. She had that quality of trust, even in the face of adversity. She trusted in life. That was probably, at some deep level, what attracted me to her. She had something I needed.

She wanted us to have a spiritual practice in common, and she could sense my anger at Christianity. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the religion, in my opinion; there was something wrong with me. I was somehow unacceptable, or unaccepting, so we went to a meditation center in Cambridge, where she was in graduate school.

There, Larry Rosenberg taught me to sit in a certain way, give up my intellectual endeavors, settle into my body, and accept what I found there and what I was. He taught me to accept life. To trust life. He was also teaching me what prayer was. He was giving me a strong prayer life.

I wouldn’t hesitate, in fact, to call meditation the practice of trust in life. For some people such trust comes naturally. Others need to practice it.

I didn’t need someone to tell me what prayer is theoretically. I needed someone to say: sit this way. Hold your body this way. Settle into yourself. Feel yourself breathing.

And trust that. Trust life.

That’s how you get ready to die.

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This breakup was bound to happen sooner or later. You see, I didn’t know myself enough—my inherent value. I didn’t know how to set clear emotional boundaries.

Many years have passed. Now, I’m wholeheartedly thankful for this experience because the hurt broke me open and led me to the path I am on. I studied spiritual psychology, found the dharma, and took refuge. During my healing process, I came across Buddhist teachings on the four brahmaviharas, the four divine abodes: metta (loving-kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy), and upekkha (equanimity). Practicing with these four states of mind helped me learn to navigate relationships, and I was able to see the light after years of pain. The brahmaviharas have become my dwelling place, where I feel at peace and whole.

Now, as a mindfulness teacher and life coach, I meet countless people who are in unbalanced relationships with colleagues, family, friends, and romantic partners. Lack of boundaries manifests in myriad ways. Many of us have developed a belief that we must be overly nice, pleasing, or helpful to escape feelings of unworthiness. This false belief can lead to resentment, anger, and shame.

Boundaries enable us to feel safe and empowered in our relationships. In every situation, boundary-setting is an act of compassion that takes courage, consistency, and knowing what you want. Prioritize setting firm, compassionate boundaries and communicating authentically with others. It’s essential for your well-being and happiness.

To help you set better boundaries, here are some suggestions based on the four brahmaviharas.

Metta: Loving-kindness

Metta meditation can help you befriend and value yourself, and thereby assist you in setting boundaries.
To practice metta meditation, sit or lie down comfortably and invite a sense of relaxation. Take two or three deep breaths with complete, slow exhalations. Let go of any concerns or thoughts of the past or the future. Bring a quality of stability into your body and perhaps imagine the breath moving through it, filling your lungs and your heart area.

Get in touch with a feeling of loving-kindness toward yourself and offer the following phrases: “May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be safe. May I be peaceful and at ease.” While you say these phrases, allow yourself to receive the good intentions they express.

After some time directing loving-kindness toward yourself, bring to mind a friend or someone in your life who has deeply cared for you. Then slowly repeat the loving-kindness phrases: “May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.” Again, try to feel the heartfelt intentions of wishing for someone’s well-being. If feelings of loving-kindness arise, stay with them.

As you continue with the meditation, bring to mind other loved ones, such as a friend or pet; a neutral person, such as a neighbor; a spiritual figure who’s particularly meaningful to you; and finally, people with whom you have some difficulty. For each person, repeat the phrases “May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.”

It’s important to know that sometimes while practicing metta meditation, difficult feelings may arise, including shame, grief, and anger. If you experience this, know that it’s completely normal. As best as you can, notice what you’re feeling and stay with it—with patience, gentle acceptance, and kindness. If it’s a stretch to stay with the feeling, you can choose to direct the loving-kindness to a different person, or to direct it toward the difficult feeling, or to take a break. You always have the choice.

Practicing metta meditation can help you reconnect with yourself and others and rebuild your self-esteem, one loving phrase at a time. Practicing loving-kindness toward yourself will help you identify and clarify your needs. When expressing your boundaries, clarity is essential; be specific about your needs when talking to others (and to yourself). It’s okay to say no. Prioritize self-care and work on personal healing. Ask yourself, “Where do I need to place boundaries? Why?”

Karuna: Compassion

As the heart begins to open, compassion allows us to hold our pain (emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual) in a field of acceptance. We become aware of our own distress and that of others, increasing our capacity for empathy.

Tune in to your emotions. Meet them with kindness, grace, and acceptance. Even when a difficult emotion arises, meet it with compassion as best as possible. Observe it without pushing it away or grasping onto it. Ask yourself: “Why am I feeling this way?”

Practicing with compassion, you learn to hold your pain kindly and gently. This enables you to see our entire experience from a different angle, and you gain insight. You come to understand the causes that drive you to abandon and betray yourself.

Personal boundaries are loving guidelines that can help you not get lost in a sea of other people’s needs, feelings, opinions, and expectations. In setting boundaries, you’re not only being compassionate toward yourself, you’re being generous enough with the other person to be truly honest with them. This honesty is also an act of compassion.

Mudita: Sympathetic Joy

Mudita, which is the practice of finding joy and delight in the happiness of others, is like a flower in full bloom, radiating beauty, grace, and contentment. As we start appreciating ourselves, caring for our emotions, expressing our needs, and realizing that we have the agency to care for our needs, we naturally experience more joy, gratitude, and happiness, including mudita. Ask yourself: “How do I want to feel when relating to myself and others?”

Upekkha: Equanimity

Equanimity is a state of psychological stability and composure. Equanimity enables us to “be” with whatever arises rather than fighting against it. We’re okay with life, however it unfolds.

Equanimity can assist in your efforts to remain consistent when establishing boundaries for yourself and others. As you learn to establish boundaries, sometimes things won’t go as you hope. You may struggle with the thought of disappointing others, or you may struggle to find the words to communicate your needs. This is all a natural part of the process.

Setting better boundaries will take time and effort, but your consistency will pay off. Confidence and self-respect will follow.

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I am of the nature to age.
I am of the nature to become ill.
I am of the nature to die.
I will be separated and parted from all that is dear to me.
I am the heir to my actions.

While at Sati, and later as a volunteer at the Zen Hospice Project (now Zen Caregiving Project), I reflected silently on each line, feeling the emotions that arose with each statement while trying to remain as still as possible with the agitation. Reflecting on the five remembrances is a fact check, and this helped me become more authentic with people who were in their last days of living. Authenticity requires recognizing and releasing the culturally laden, death-denying strategies for making people (and myself) feel good about dying by reassuring them (and myself) they’d survive. Fact check: they were on an accelerated dying path, along with the other twenty-plus people in the hospital unit, and no royalty-minded, faultily constructed facade of immortality could obscure that reality.

In the Buddhist chaplaincy world, we remind ourselves that we are constantly in the state of dying. But in the broader culture of a booming cosmetics industry, we are constantly fooled into believing that if we have the means to secure a drink from the fountain of youth, we will never age, become ill, or die. Through our cultural investments in cosmetic obscuration and longevity, we are set up to experience devastating shock when we inevitably encounter illness and death.

How often should you reflect on the five remembrances? Whether a fact check in the form of the five remembrances is needed occasionally or frequently depends on how averse you are to facing the realities of aging, illness, and death. Living where we live, in this society, I would suggest engaging in this reflection practice at least monthly to counter the cultural illusions of permanence that lead to shock and despair when reality dawns.

The five remembrances can be written on an altar card and placed among the other precious altar items we will be parted from. They can be chanted on the full rotation of the moon to underscore the passing of time, perhaps as we recall Dogen’s exhortation: “Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.”

Of course, a five remembrances practice need not be limited to a Buddhist context, for its truths are universal and can be contemplated as an important part of any spiritual path. Perhaps through this practice we can contribute to a culture where older people are honored, resources to care for the sick are more accessible, and we learn to say “goodbye” to the dying like we say “hello” to those being born—with deep appreciation for the gift of good health when we have it, the life stages of our aging, and our fleeting lives, without the shock and despair that prevent us from offering love and authentic care.

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We hear a lot about meditation practice as something that opens us to a place of deep stillness and inner quiet. But your own experience might come closer to rocking back and forth between thinking, worrying that you shouldn’t be thinking, and struggling to get to some place where your thinking just drops away.

As an old teacher of mine once put it, “Unless you’re brain dead, you’re going to have thoughts.” Since you come to the cushion with the mind you have, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions will likely be present in your meditation. It is your relationship to them, and your awareness of their place in your meditation, that will shift as you deepen our practice.

Remember that nothing comes from outside of the mind. The mind includes everything; this is the true understanding of the mind.

You can let go of the idea of engaging in battle with your thoughts. You don’t need to force anything. If you refrain from trying to stop your thinking process, you allow it to stop by itself. When a thought comes into your mind, whatever it might be, let it come into your mind. It is just a thought. Then release it. You don’t have to follow it or pursue it. Your mind will begin to calm down.

Remember that nothing comes from outside of the mind. The mind includes everything; this is the true understanding of the mind.

As spectators watching ourselves, we constantly check to see whether or not we’re doing well. We want feedback on our progress. We might ask ourselves every few moments: “Am I doing all right? Am I meditating correctly? Am I getting somewhere?” Part of us seeks reassurance that we’re on the right track and that the time and effort we’re investing is making a difference. We compare ourselves to an idea/ideal we hold in our imagination. But that constant comparison keeps us from simply being in the moment.

What happens if we drop the role of spectator? Perhaps we worry that if we let go of our thinking, watching, judging overseer, then we won’t know if we are advancing in our practice. It’s true—we won’t—and that’s a good thing.

While you are following the breath, drop the notion of “I am breathing.” Focus on the inhale, and count “One,” then focus on the exhale, and count “Two.” Let go, again and again, and be present to whatever is real in that moment. Nothing more. Absolutely no thinking required.

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