Joining Heaven and Earth

Yesterday I went skiing for the first time in 30 years. That other time was so long ago, and so little memory remains of it, that it would probably be more telling to say that yesterday I went skiing for the first time in my life.

After taking about an hour of basic lessons with groups of children and feeling frustrated with the bunny slopes, we hit the lifts. One of the people in our group is an avid skier and a good coach, and he led us through progressively more challenging (and frankly, at times, downright terrifying) slopes.

By mid-afternoon, we found ourselves on a blue trail—an intermediate course peppered with steeper hills, narrow passages, and moguls (violent little bumps in the snow that some people use to become momentarily airborne).

A Trial by Fire (and Snow) 
The situation was choiceless; we were going down that mountain one way or another, and the best way down was to follow our friend's coaching and learn to carve sharp turns back and forth from one side of the slope to the other, slowing our descent as much as possible. Along the way, there were many falls, but we picked ourselves up, shook the powdered snow out of our pants, laughed off our embarrassment, and continued. All around us, other skiers and snowboarders zipped by, narrowly avoiding crashing into us. At one point, a snowboarder came flying out of the woods through the air and wiped out directly in front of me; I leaned into a sharp turn and navigated around him by an inch or two. Later, an inexperienced skier actually did crash directly into my partner; no one was hurt, thankfully. Gradually, we learned to hold our balance and position our bodies, keep our skis apart, navigate the turns—and the most important skill of all—how to stop (even if, now and then, our stopping sometimes looked more like wiping out).

For those of you who practice yoga but don't ski, imagine doing Utkatasana (chair pose) for six straight hours, in a walk-in freezer, during a violent earthquake, all the while having to jump from one spot in the room to another (without breaking the pose, and with long, slippery, greased sticks attached to your feet) to avoid crazy people who are wildly running through the room trying to knock you over and throwing handfuls of snow in your face.

"You're walking. And you don't always realize it,
but you're always falling.
With each step you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you're falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
at the same time."

- Laurie Anderson

After the harrowing ordeal of the blue trail, we returned to one of the easier green trails that we had been on earlier. But something was different this time. The blue trail had almost made me soil my pants; but I had survived it. Now, suddenly, the green beginner's trail—which had previously seemed incredibly difficult, too—was, literally, a breeze. I went down it once, and gained the confidence to let myself pick up more speed and carve wide turns back and forth. This time, I didn't fall. We went up again and came down a second time, and I picked up even more speed. I had no speedometer to measure—but I think I must have hit 40 mph. I was zipping past slower people and carving half-moons around them. Although there were moments when the speed and the bumps made me fear that I might lose control, I didn't. I stayed relaxed and in the flow. And it was exhilarating. I couldn't wait to get back on the lift and do it a third time.

By now, my regular readers may be wondering what possible relevance all of this has to my usual subjects: meditation, Buddhism, yoga and spirituality. Well, let me tell you.

Joining Heaven and Earth
Skiing is a metaphor for life. Life is not always smooth going. It can be chaotic and messy and terrifying and dangerous. It can—it does—push us out of our comfort zones and takes us to places we think we shouldn't be. Sometimes we lose control; we wipe out and get snow in our pants, or we crash head-on into another person when conflict arises. The situations that challenge us push us to learn to adapt faster. The people who irritate or threaten us challenge us to develop skillful ways of responding: less reactivity and aggression, more patience, compassion, and forgiveness.

"The bad news is: you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is: there’s no ground." 

- Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Certain Buddhist traditions speak of the principle of "joining heaven and earth." This is a lyrical and symbolic way of talking about synchronizing mind (heaven) and body (earth) in flowing, present-moment awareness. Through meditation, yoga—and yes, skiing—we can experience the freedom, contentment and relaxation that comes when mind and body are synchronized and we are fully awake to our experience as it unfolds. We stay right here, on the dot of the present moment, even—or especially—as we speed down the mountain and navigate more or less skillfully through whatever bumpy and chaotic situations life throws at us.

May we all become more skillful navigators and experience fewer crashes. When other, perhaps less skilled people crash into us, may we learn to forgive rather than escalate conflict. When the slopes become terrifying and seem impossible for us to ride, may we develop the confidence to stay present—and keep going. And when we fall—for we will fall, and spectacularly—may we always maintain our sense of humor about it.

With Adrian Molina

Meditation 101

As people begin preparing their resolutions for the New Year, many will have "learning to meditate" near the top of their lists. In my observation, the best way to learn to meditate is through face-to-face instruction from someone experienced in the practice, who can answer questions and help you work with obstacles that may arise. If you can do it that way, I recommend it. But that's not always possible; and, in any case, it's also helpful to read written instructions.

The following basic instructions in meditation practice were first published on this blog five years ago. I'm reposting them now because — whether we are brand new to meditation or have been practicing for years — we can never hear them too many times. And each time we hear them, we may hear something new.

The first time I heard meditation instruction, it was presented in terms of three simple building blocks — a mnemonic device that I’ve always found it helpful to recall. The three basic building blocks of sitting meditation are: Body, Breath, and Mind.

Even within Buddhism, there are many types of meditation that utilize different techniques designed to accomplish different things (not to speak of all the meditations found in other spiritual traditions). The type of meditation described here is called shamatha, translated as Tranquility or Calm Abiding or Peaceful Abiding. As those labels suggest, its main purpose is to calm the mind, and to help us train in the ability to “abide” or stay present with what is happening right here, right now.

Training in this kind of Tranquility meditation is the first step in really getting to know our own minds, and creates a foundation for everything we do on the spiritual path.

"The method that the Buddha discovered is meditation. He discovered that struggling to find answers did not work. It was only when there were gaps in his struggle that insights came to him. He began to realize that there was a sane, awake quality within him that manifested itself only in the absence of struggle. So the practice of meditation involves letting be."

-- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

A: Body

The first part of the practice involves how we work with our body during meditation. Taking the right posture is essential, because the state of the body reflects and affects the state of the mind: the mind-body continuum. A slouching posture leads to a slouching, dull state of mind — and vice versa. A proper, upright posture embodies the qualities of strength, dignity, and bravery, and sets the stage for engaging with your mind in the practice of meditation.

• Sit up straight, allowing the spine to lengthen naturally — as if an invisible string attached to the crown of your head were lightly pulling you upward. If you're in a chair, you might try sitting forward rather than leaning against the back of the chair; your feet should be flat on the floor. If you're on a cushion, cross your legs comfortably in front of you.
• Let your arms drop to your sides, then gently lift only your forearms — keeping your upper arms parallel to the torso — and bring your palms to rest lightly on your knees or your thighs. The placement of the hands should not be so far forward that it causes your shoulders to slouch, and not so far back that it pinches the shoulder blades. Find the right spot to allow your back and shoulders and neck to rest upright, without straining.
• Keeping the eyes open, direct your gaze down at a point three to six feet in front of you, not looking at anything in particular but allowing the gaze to rest in one spot rather than roaming or following distractions. Allow your eyelids to relax, and soften the gaze so that you're "looking without staring." If you've practiced other meditation techniques that involved closing the eyes, it may seem awkward at first to practice with eyes open, but give it a try and see what happens. Keeping the eyes open is a step towards integrating the practice of mindfulness into everyday life, rather than making mindfulness something separate from your life that can only be practiced under restricted conditions.
• Relax the stomach muscles, the torso, the throat, the jaw. Bring the tip of the tongue to rest lightly on the spot where your upper teeth meet the roof of your mouth, allowing the lips to part slightly if it feels comfortable.

B: Breath

The second part of the practice involves where we place our minds during meditation. We could choose almost any object — an image, a sound, a particular word or series of words — but most people find that the simplest and most convenient object to use in shamatha meditation is the breath. It's free, you carry it with you everywhere you go, and it's already happening — it requires no particular effort. In one sense, sitting and resting our attention on the breath is the simplest thing we could possibly do; yet the cumulative effects and implications of this practice are profound. Breathing is an expression of the present moment; each breath is slightly different from every other breath, and it is only happening right now. Tuning in to the breath is tuning in to the present moment.

• Breathe naturally, however you find yourself breathing in this moment: fast, slow, shallow, deep, whatever. Don't make any particular effort to breathe in a certain way, or to control the process. Just be with whatever kind of breath you have right now. If you can, breathe through the nose.
• Bring your attention to rest lightly on the full cycle of breathing, both in and out. Allow yourself to identify with the soothing quality of the breath.
• Notice where you feel the physical sensations of breathing most acutely. Maybe it's in the rising and falling of the abdomen, or in the slight warm and cool tickling sensation at the ends of your nostrils as the breath goes out and comes in. Wherever it is for you, rest your attention on that physical sensation.
• If you can, place a slight emphasis of attention on the out-breath. Feel yourself going out with your breath and dissolving into space, letting go of conceptual mind. Allow the in-breath to happen naturally, and again go out with the out-breath and dissolve.
• Notice the quality of the moment after one breath has gone out, before the next breath has started to come in. What is your mind like in that moment?

C: Mind

The third part of the practice involves how we work with our minds. Having attempted to sit and rest our attention on the breath for a few moments, we have probably discovered — perhaps to our dismay — that our mind is restless and prone to wander away. We find ourselves thinking about lunch, reliving an argument with our ex-boyfriend, reveling in a sexual fantasy, fretting over our job, stewing in old feelings of shame or resentment, worrying about our loved ones, or desperately seeking entertainment by looking for shapes and patterns in the carpet in front of us: the possibilities are literally endless. Our minds seem to hop from one distraction to another with total disregard for our noble intention to stay with the breath. Welcome to your "monkey-mind." Through regular shamatha practice, we can begin to train the monkey to stay in one place for longer periods of time, and we can even learn to regard its antics with humor and compassion.

Usually, when we have a thought or a feeling, we run with it: our minds seem to control us, rather than us controlling our minds. By practicing shamatha, we train in the ability to recognize our thoughts without being driven by them. But the goal of shamatha is not to "get rid of" thoughts — this is a common misconception. The goal is to see ourselves clearly, and with compassion, by touching in with whatever we're experiencing, and then coming back to the present moment and the object of meditation. Precision and gentleness are the keys.

• When you become aware that your mind has wandered off into a thought, feeling, or fantasy, gently touch on it and return your attention to the breath. Whatever kind of thought or feeling it was, try to see it without judgment or criticism: in the practice of shamatha, there are no good thoughts or bad thoughts. No thought is to be condemned or praised — that's just more thinking.
• You may find it helpful to mark the moment of transition between thinking and returning to the breath by "labeling" your thoughts. When you recognize you've been thinking, say to yourself mentally: "Thinking." Apply this labeling technique with a light touch -- like touching your thoughts with a feather. Don't try to shoot down your thoughts or squash them, but simply recognize them, let them go, and come back to the breath.
• Above all, be gentle with yourself, and relax.

Smartphone Addicts Anonymous

You've seen them before: the zombie hordes of people walking down the street, not looking where they're going, staring into the glowing screens in their hands. The groups of friends sitting around the dinner table or standing in a bar, not talking to each other, staring into the glowing screens in their hands. The business meetings where colleagues barely pay attention to each other or to the subject of the meeting, absorbed in other business that's happening simultaneously on the glowing screens in their hands.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the zombies too (or at least a part-time zombie). I have a small device with a glowing screen that I carry with me everywhere I go. It connects me to my work. It connects me to my friends. It connects me to my family and my partner. It connects me to my teachers and sources of inspiration on the path. But it also, at times, disconnects me from all of these things and becomes an annoying distraction from the things that are truly important. As my friend Mario put it, "I would feel lost and isolated if it wasn't for my cellphone; but I've also felt lost and isolated because of my cellphone, if that makes any sense."

Mind-Altering Technology
Smartphones are a powerful, mind-altering technology that is transforming the way we interact, the way we work, and the way we live. We've become addicted to the constant buzz of activity and the never-ending flow of communication and information that streams invisibly through the air and into our pockets, our purses and our hands. Like Pavlov's dogs, we hear the ping or feel the vibration of an incoming stimulus, and we salivate. We reach instinctively to take in the stimulus, often acting on auto-pilot. We don't pause to think. Buzz buzz buzz, we react.

It doesn't matter where we are, or how inappropriate it is to be interacting with a glowing screen. The buzz comes, and we need that fix. It might come during a romantic dinner, and we are lured away from the beauty of the present moment because we have to check to see if that email was important. It might come during yoga class, and we are drawn away from our practice because someone commented on our Facebook post about going to yoga class. It might come while we are driving, and we are distracted just long enough by that text message that we run a red light and crash into another car.

These are not made-up examples. These things happen in real life, all the time. And they are fueling a growing backlash against our societal addiction to smartphones. There are laws now against texting while driving because too many people died or killed others while doing it. Even the number of people injuring themselves while walking and talking on their cell phones is soaring; one expert estimates it may be as high as 2 million people per year. There are pleas before every movie not to use your phone during the movie, because some people are so self-absorbed that it doesn't occur to them (without being told) that a glowing screen or a phone conversation in a silent, dark theater might actually bother the people around them. I've been to yoga classes where almost everyone in the room sits up from the final relaxation posture and reaches immediately to check their smartphone, without even standing up first. One yoga teacher I know makes a habit of going around the room and turning people's cell phones face-down (because they apparently don't think to do it themselves), so they don't actually stop in the middle of a yoga posture to see the photo of what their friend is eating for dinner.

Down the Rabbit-Hole
Like any other mind-altering technology, smartphones have their usefulness. I love mine. Actually, I recently got a new one and have been experiencing a renewed phase of immersion as I get to know the device's features. But I also struggle, like many people I know, to find the right balance. How do I use my smartphone in a way that is actually smart, a way that modifies my experience for the better? How do I avoid becoming lost in the trance of technology and information? How do I respond mindfully to the constant buzz buzz buzz that tugs at my attention and pulls me out of the present moment and into a glowing, virtual realm of stories and news and pictures and comments and videos? How do I avoid becoming a smartphone zombie? There are no easy answers.

One of my colleagues at work — a programmer, someone who works with technology for a living — carries an archaic flip-phone that isn't good for much more than phone calls. Pecking out a text message on it is so time-consuming that it becomes an unattractive proposition. She refuses to upgrade to a newer, smarter phone. Perhaps that is her way of fighting the zombie apocalypse. Perhaps she knows that once you go down that rabbit-hole, it's hard to find your footing again. It's a slippery slope. Once you start spending as much time photographing your afternoon cupcake with your smartphone, enhancing it with digital filters, and posting Instagram pics of it as you spend actually enjoying the cupcake, you know you have a smartphone problem. (And if you use hashtags like #cupcake and #booyah to describe your cupcake, God help you. You've gone all the way down the rabbit hole.)

Life Without Smartphones?
When I lived in the monastery, we were in a very remote, rugged place, an hour's drive away from the nearest cell phone signal. And I have to admit that, after the initial detox period, there was a tremendous feeling of liberation that came from having no cell phones around. No annoying chirps or musical ringtones to shatter the silence, no incessant little tug at your attention, no relentless stream of largely useless and pointless information, no buzzing in your pocket that calls you away from your meditation session and into the realm of other people's distractions. One thing you find out pretty quickly is that you can manufacture plenty of distractions to keep your mind occupied, all by yourself, without any assistance from a little glowing screen that follows you everywhere and feeds you a constant diet of sensory and intellectual stimuli.

Now that I live back in New York City, smartphones surround me once again. And to be honest, I think having a smartphone makes living in a city like New York easier. This is not the monastery, and my obligations and activities are very different. I don't relish the idea of living here without one. But it's a double-edged sword.

My friend Mario was riding the tube in London recently, with another friend, and he looked around to realize that almost everyone else on the train was staring into the glowing screen in their hands. He was reminded of this scene from the film Wall-E, which seems alarmingly like the dystopian technological future into which we are all heading.

Getting a Grip on Your Smartphone
Lately I've been working with a couple of simple practices to help me develop a bit of mindfulness — and do some harm reduction — around my smartphone habits. Sometimes when my partner and I sit down to dinner, we put our phones face down on the table — or, better yet, leave them in the other room — and agree not to check them until we've finished our dinner together. Some people have adopted even more extreme measures: when you're out to dinner with a group, everyone stacks their phones in the middle of the table, and the first one to check their phone picks up the tab.

Another thing that I find helpful is something the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa recommended to his students when they watch TV: he told them to try, while watching TV, to maintain an awareness of the physical space between themselves and the TV set. I try to do this sometimes with my smartphone. Just to be aware of that two or three feet of space between me and the glowing screen in my hand helps me step back and frame the experience, rather than getting lost in it.

As with any addiction, the first step towards getting better is to admit that there's a problem. So let me be the first to say it.

My name is Dennis, and I'm a smartphone addict.

Slay Your Own Dragons: Freeing Yourself from the Grip of Materialism

"We are living in a material world. And I am a material girl."

With that simple lyric, Madonna pretty much summed up modern society. But she was only pointing out the obvious: this is a world where materialism dominates. The phrase, "The one who dies with the most toys wins," is not just a sad joke but is actually many people's life philosophy. Madonna mocked materialism while simultaneously milking it all the way to the bank and becoming one of our society's wealthiest pop icons. Her song was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But the materialism Madonna sang about goes much deeper than pop culture. It's rooted in the prevailing philosophical outlook of our times, which is scientific materialism. This outlook tells us, with a lot of very convincing studies and theories to back up the idea, that we are nothing but physical matter. Any experience of consciousness we have, whatever thoughts and emotions we feel, whatever inkling we have of some kind of spiritual dimension of our being, is only the byproduct of chemical reactions, material neurons firing in a material nervous system. Not surprisingly, this view encourages us to focus on maximizing our own material well-being and pleasure, since there is nothing else to live for.

This outlook tricks us into thinking that we can make ourselves permanently and securely happy if we just line up the right material circumstances. Get our bodies in shape, make lots of money, surround ourselves with nice things and pleasurable experiences, live in the right house and wear the right clothing and accessories, hang out with the right people and consume the right food and drink, get the right surgeries….the list could go on. And there is nothing wrong with having any of those things. But if we believe that material objects or experiences are the key to sustainable contentment, we are setting ourselves up for failure. No matter how much good stuff we have, as human beings we are wired to want more, and we are also wired to fear losing what we already have. We feel attached to our pretty things, but our pretty things don't last. Therefore, we suffer. "Mo' money, mo' problems," as another pop song wisely observes.

More Than Skin Deep
But materialism rules our minds and causes us to suffer in even deeper, more insidious ways—ways that are more subtle, harder to see. We also become attached to our ideas and points of view, and we harden them into ideologies that give us a more solid sense of identity and control over our lives. But our ideologies—our "isms"—end up putting us in a box, and anything that doesn't fit in our little box of ideas, anything we disagree with, becomes our enemy. Look at the front page of the newspaper and you can see where this leads us. Our world is locked in a maelstrom of warring ideologies and conflicting belief systems. And everyone thinks they are right.

For those of us attempting to walk on a spiritual path in life, there is a third kind of materialism—which is perhaps the most insidious kind of all. The pioneering Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa coined a term for this: he called it "spiritual materialism." We fall into the trap of spiritual materialism when we begin to use our spiritual practice to build up our ego—our spirituality becomes a project for building a bigger, better, happier, more secure "me."

Authentic spiritual practice, on the other hand, makes us less self-centered, less interested in making "me" happy and satisfying the demands of the ego—and more open and compassionate towards others. Genuine spirituality is actually rooted in having seen through the game of ego and the whole project of "me," and no longer quite believing in the stories that ego constantly tells about itself. From a Buddhist point of view, what we regard as "me"—the ego—is illusory, like a mirage. It appears to be there, but it's only a trick of perception. And it's as changeable and unreliable as the weather. We use the crutches of material comforts and ideologies and beliefs to prop up this illusory ego and convince ourselves that it's solid and real.

When Ego Hijacks the Spiritual Journey
Unfortunately, the ego can also hijack our spiritual practices and use them to further ensnare us in a web of illusions. We can become attached to religious forms and rituals—which are, after all, only tools—and confuse religion for spirituality. We can play dress-up and present ourselves to the world as a very "spiritual person," someone who floats through the room in white clothing and prayer beads, whispering words of wisdom while inwardly judging and looking down on others as being less "spiritual" than we are. We can get lost in the ego's craving for "bliss" and convince ourselves that our yoga and meditation practices should just make us feel good, and that everything is supposed to be "love and light" all the time. We can walk away from anything on the spiritual path that challenges us or makes our ego feel uncomfortable. If we take this easy way out, then we merely skim along on the surface of spiritual inquiry, never going beneath to discover the deeper and darker layers of our psyche—our shadow, our dark passengers—which also call for our attention and our care.

In the Gnostic gospels, Jesus warned: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

If we engage deeply enough and authentically enough with the spiritual path—regardless of which tradition we are practicing—we are bound to discover truths about reality that insult our ego. Even without a spiritual path, life itself is bound to deal us blows that humble us and bring pain. And by turning our attention within, we are bound to get in touch with aspects of ourselves that are unsavory and would be more comfortably left unexamined. Yet it is precisely these things that will set us free when we bring them into the light of compassionate awareness.

"Learning to look deeply to see into the true nature of things," wrote Thich Nhat Hanh, "having direct contact with reality and not just describing reality in terms of notions and concepts, is the practice."

The authentic spiritual path is not a walk in the woods. Or, rather, it is, but those woods are not all dappled sunlight and chirping birds and warm breezes. The woods that make up our lives also include dark and haunted passages, swampy bogs with poisonous airs where the unwanted, unseen parts of ourselves lurk like ghostly villains in a fairy tale. To live our lives fully, to awaken and have direct contact with reality and not just describe it in terms of our concepts, we must leave the comfortable, ivy-covered stone walls of our ego's protective castle and journey out into the uncharted and unknown reaches of our actual experience. The journeying may not all be pleasant. But wherever we go, whatever we find—it all belongs to us, and we must come to know it. It is the kingdom to which we are the heirs, and we must pass through every square inch of it, bogs and ghosts and all. We must go out and slay our own dragons. No one else can do it for us.

Or, we could just remain in our castle of materialism—bathed in luxury, our notions and concepts and ideologies unchallenged, floating on a blissful cloud of so-called spirituality—and pretend there isn't anything scary outside the walls of the castle. That's definitely an option. But for how long?

Dreams, Part Three: Significant Dreams

This is Part Three of a four-part series on dreams. Part One looks at the meaning of dreams, and dream interpretation. Part Two explores how Buddhism uses dreaming as a metaphor for life itself. Part Three describes several types of spiritually significant dreams. Part Four offers practical methods for working with dreams and the sleeping state.


For the most part, Buddhism doesn't dwell much on the content of dreams, and it doesn't pursue a methodology for interpreting them. The focus in Buddhism is more on the act of dreaming itself, and on recognizing the nature of dreams as a vehicle for realizing the nature of mind. Dream content is regarded as being somewhat like the thoughts we experience in meditation: it's neither good nor bad, but the bulk of it is imaginary, and in most cases no particular importance is to be attached to it. However, there are exceptions to every rule, and several types of dreams are considered to be potentially significant.


"Lucid Dream E," Parke Harrison


Precognitive Dreams

In Tibetan Buddhism -- the most mystical of the Buddhist traditions -- some dreams are considered to be prophetic or revelatory. This is particularly common among highly realized meditation practitioners. The Dalai Lama, for example, has spoken about having dreams that helped him locate or confirm the identity of reincarnate lamas. But even at a more mundane level, ordinary people sometimes experience dreams that seem to have a precognitive aspect.

I once dreamed of an old friend I hadn't seen in years, someone I had lost touch with and rarely even thought about. The very next morning after I had that dream, I had an appointment with a doctor, and was waiting in a subway station on the Upper East Side, a part of New York City where I did not usually go. The subway car doors opened, and it so happened that the old friend I had dreamed about the night before was standing right there in front of me. In a city that holds 12 million people on a typical day, he just happened to be riding the same subway, at the same time, in the same car, at the same door, and I happened to be waiting to step through that door, and I happened to have dreamed about him the previous night after not having thought of him in a very long time.

A nihilist would scoff at the suggestion that there was any connection between the previous night's dream and that chance encounter in the subway; he would argue that it was mere coincidence. A New Ager might make too much of the whole thing, and perhaps suggest that we were meant to be soul mates, or that we have unfinished karmic business whose nature can be revealed in the Akashic records or the Enochian scrolls for a low fee of just $100. A Freudian would probably brush off the coincidence and focus on the friend's appearance, with the goal of suggesting that I subconsciously equate this friend with my mother or father. A Jungian, at least, would allow space to contemplate the mystery -- the astronomically unlikely synchronicity -- of the convergence between that dream and the following morning's chance encounter in an out-of-the-way part of town.


Lucid Dreams

Among the most advanced meditation techniques taught in the Tantric Buddhism practiced in Tibet is dream yoga, or lucid dreaming. In the Kagyu lineage, dream yoga is usually introduced as part of the Six Yogas of Naropa, a set of esoteric teachings that are practiced extensively during the traditional three-year retreat. Dream yoga, therefore, is regarded as a practice for a few highly trained individuals. Through lucid dreaming, the meditation practitioner is able to train in recognizing and resting in the nature of mind right within their dreams. It is said that very advanced practitioners of dream yoga are able to maintain the same unbroken level of awareness and lucidity 24 hours a day, through all stages of waking and sleeping.

But again, on a more mundane level, many ordinary people also experience lucid dreaming -- either occasionally, or cultivated through regular practice. My friend Susan has been a frequent lucid dreamer since childhood, and says that her dreams are more often lucid than not. When she was a child, her grandmother, also a frequent lucid dreamer, used to teach her methods for working with her dreams; after her grandmother died when Susan was 15, Susan continued for years to meet up with her in lucid dreams, in the old Penn Station, whenever she needed guidance.



Sometimes lucid dreams, even if they don't occur frequently, can happen spontaneously. I recall once having a nightmare, and becoming aware -- within the dream itself -- that it was a dream. With that awareness, I made a conscious decision to wake myself up in order to put an end to the nightmare. And it worked -- I woke up.


Teaching Dreams

Another kind of dream that many Buddhists regard as potentially significant is when one dreams of being visited by, or receiving a message from, teachers or gurus or other enlightened spiritual beings. These kinds of dreams usually take place at the end of the sleep cycle, shortly before the dreamer wakes up. Tibetan Buddhism is full of legends about advanced meditation practitioners being visited in their dreams by great masters, and receiving significant teachings or guidance. The nagging (and probably unanswerable) scientific question of whether these dream experiences originate from beyond the dreamer's individual consciousness is somewhat beside the point; in either case, such dreams can be surprising, provoking, and enlightening. Jungian analysts would say such dreams reflect an encounter with the esoteric archetype of the Magus, the guru or wisdom principle that is embedded within the collective and individual unconscious.

Again, even ordinary people sometimes experience this phenomenon. Long before she became a Buddhist, my friend Susan says she repeatedly encountered in her lucid dreams -- often accompanying her grandmother -- a mysterious, large, shirtless Asian man with a kind face, wearing the dark red skirt that forms the lower half of a Tibetan monk's robes. She says it was only years later when she saw a photograph of the Tibetan master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche that she recognized him as the man in her dreams. Dilgo Khyentse often appeared in public -- in real life, not only in Susan's dreams -- shirtless. Susan says she found his recurrent presence in her dreams annoying, for he was one of the few dream figures that she was unable to manipulate -- and whenever he was around, her grandmother seemed too busy with him to pay any attention to her.

The first time I ever gave meditation instruction was at a weekend spiritual retreat in the Catskill mountains. I had been invited to lead a meditation workshop -- or I had volunteered to do so -- because it was a much-needed part of the retreat, and I seemed to be the person in that particular group who knew the most about meditation. Still, I had never actually given meditation instruction before, and had no formal training in how to do so. Suddenly I was about to lead not one but two full-blown meditation workshops -- of one hour and fifteen minutes each -- for a group of about 75 people.

We arrived at the retreat center on Friday afternoon and settled in. I was to lead the first workshop the next morning. As I went to bed that night, I was petrified -- not only with the usual fear of public speaking, but with disbelief at my own audacity. Who did I think I was, leading these workshops with no formal training or experience? I feared the weekend would be a disaster. I slept restlessly that night. But right before I woke up, I had a dream that radically transformed the entire situation.

In the dream (as in waking life) I was at a retreat center with a group of people. But this was a retreat being led by Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan teacher and meditation master who died in 1987, and who founded the Shambhala Center where I had been studying meditation at that time. Chogyam Trungpa sent us all off to bed, and he stayed up late into the night preparing a huge, elaborate Mexican feast. When the feast was ready and he had laid it out on picnic tables on the front lawn, he began to beat a drum to wake us up and call us outside, in the middle of the night, to enjoy the feast.

I emerged -- easily and pleasantly -- directly from that dream into the waking state, seemingly with no interval of unconsciousness in-between. As I lay there in bed with the dream still washing over me, I realized I had a huge smile on my face. And I realized, too, that something in me had fundamentally changed: with that dream, my massive anxiety over the workshops had mysteriously vanished, blown away like dust, and in its place was a quiet but very tangible feeling of complete confidence and joy. I felt empowered, and totally -- unbelievably -- relaxed. I went into the workshops with that relaxed, confident and joyful mind, and I never questioned it. And those workshops turned out to be quite beneficial. A few people made their first genuine connection to meditation that Saturday morning, and continued to practice what they learned there in the years that followed.

It would be grandiose to say, and impossible to defend in a rational debate, that I was actually visited in my dream by Chogyam Trungpa, or affected in some way by some energy outside myself. And yet I cannot deny that my unusual dream that night took me utterly by surprise and caused a dramatic shift of energy inside me. Where did that inexplicable charge of confidence and relaxation come from, when I had gone to bed the previous night almost trembling with anxiety and neurotic worry? Call it Chogyam Trungpa, or call it my own deepest self, or call it Jung's Magus archetype -- it makes no difference in the end. It was, for me, a significant teaching dream, one that directly and profoundly altered my experience and indirectly touched the lives of 75 other people who were there that morning.

That is the power of our dreams, or at least some of them. Through dreams, we can -- if the conditions are right, and if we are open -- receive guidance and inspiration; we can connect with a part of ourselves that is deeper and wiser than our rational, neurotic little conscious minds. But dreams, like intuition, creativity and everything else that springs from the unconscious, speak obliquely, and mysteriously, in ways that defy logic. To comprehend their communications, we must look and listen with an open mind, and learn to sense when something significant is being communicated. Not every dream is worth dwelling upon, but every now and then a dream can change our lives.

Stinking Thinking

The Trance of Negativity

“The power of positive thinking” is one of those phrases that probably makes you cringe when you hear it. It sounds Pollyannaish and naïve -- like one of those well-meaning clichés one sees printed on motivational posters hanging in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, beneath a heartwarming photo of kittens or rainbows or some small, delicate flower triumphantly asserting its existence in spite of great obstacles and hardship. A greeting-card sentiment.

Chances are, you don’t have the same trouble relating to it if we substitute the word “negative” for “positive.” One doesn’t have to look far to find evidence of the power of negative thinking. Its proof is all around us, sometimes to such an extent that we have trouble seeing how completely negativity dominates our minds. Simply open a newspaper or turn on the news on television and you will be bombarded by negative stories, negative images, negative thinking: you will see tragedies both large and small, an endless litany of angry faces and people doing horrible things to one another. As you absorb these messages, you will slowly, almost imperceptibly, begin to worry and experience fear. At a somatic level that you are perhaps not aware of, you will experience physiological changes as you sit there: an elevated heart rate, and the release of stress hormones.

One might argue that the media is simply showing us how things are these days, and if negativity is their stock and trade, well, it’s because the world really is full of suffering and tragedy and they’re just telling it like it is. But the media have made negativity their stock and trade because they’ve discovered that it sells more papers, and draws in more viewers. People want to know what they should be afraid of, what they should worry about. In fact, most of us these days are addicted to negative thinking, and the more bad news and foreboding information is shoveled into our minds, the more deeply ingrained and natural our tendency towards negative thinking becomes. It has finally come to seem that a negative frame of mind is simply a realistic one, the only view to be held by mature people who know the ways of the world. Positive thinking, in the face of so much tragedy and degradation and so many ominous trends, seems more and more like a pitiful anachronism, one of those misplaced and outdated motivational slogans that makes us cringe when we hear it.

The problem with this view is that it lacks a basic awareness of how our thoughts shape our reality -- of the cause-and-effect relationship between the two. If the world appears to be going to hell in a hand-basket these days, well, perhaps that has something to do with the collective trance of negativity and fear in which we’re all caught. As we think, so we become. The mind, once it’s rolling in a particular direction, accumulates more and more evidence to support its basic outlook: the snowball effect. Eventually, as the mind’s tendencies towards negative thinking become more and more deeply ingrained, that outlook hardens into a pair of dark glasses that one forgets one is even wearing, coloring and distorting every experience.

In the Dhammapada, one of the earliest and best-known Buddhist scriptures from the Pali Canon, the Buddha taught that both positive and negative thinking have equal power to shape our reality:

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.”

Our human experience is shot through with a curious paradox: our thoughts and emotions have no form or substance that we can point to or isolate (though they have correlates in the brain and body that science is edging closer to identifying). And yet our thoughts and emotions have, in many cases, overwhelming control over our experience and our actions. When a sequence of similar thoughts occurs in a chain, those thoughts become habits of thinking; they acquire a momentum whose force is difficult to resist or steer. Habitual ways of thinking solidify and define how we see and interact with the world; they become what Chogyam Trungpa called “styles of imprisonment” -- prisons whose walls exist entirely in our minds. Thoughts create emotional ripples as well as storms that disturb our whole mental and physical ecosystem; they shape both how we speak and the things we choose to speak about; they color our dreams and what we dream about; they influence our relationships and the people with whom we have them. It is possible for us to fall, without much effort or awareness, utterly under the spell of what people in Twelve Step groups call “stinking thinking.”

Yet how is it that something so ephemeral and ethereal as thought can have such a controlling impact on us? How can we be so thoroughly under the power of something so ghostly and insubstantial? And if thinking is by nature so insubstantial, why do we find it so difficult, once we are under its spell, to change course?


What Damns a Marriage

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell describes the work of a scientist named John Gottman, who has spent nearly three decades studying married couples and trying to understand what their interactions reveal about the couple’s chances of staying together or getting divorced. Gottman gradually developed a sophisticated method of analyzing a typical conversation between spouses and looking for certain cues and trends that reveal the underlying emotional dynamics and habits of thinking. Gottman’s method allows him to listen to an hour of conversation and predict, with 95% accuracy, whether the couple will still be married in 15 years.

Gottman discovered that for a marriage to survive, there must be at least a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative emotion in the couple’s interactions. He also discovered that the presence of certain key emotional indicators is a sure sign that a marriage is in trouble and unlikely to survive. The most damning of these indicators is contempt: if either partner in the marriage expresses contempt towards the other, the couple’s chances are extremely slim.

Gottman’s work demonstrates that there is an underlying pattern in any marriage that can be very quickly identified and analyzed, and that by correctly discerning that pattern one can foresee with tremendous accuracy the future outcome of that marriage.

The patterns that Gottman identifies in a couple’s interactions consist of the emotional dynamics and the habits of thinking that define the two individuals’ ways of relating to each other. The couples that aren’t likely to make it are the ones who’ve become trapped in unhealthy patterns, where the amount of negative emotion in a given interaction crosses the magic threshold of 16.5% and moves into a style of imprisonment that carries the couple inexorably towards increasing conflict and eventual divorce. Once that river is flowing, it becomes almost impossible to resist being swept along by its current; it is difficult for the couple to see their own patterns in operation or to step back and correct the course of their marriage by steering it in a more positive direction.

The dynamics that Gottman identified have implications that reach far beyond marriage counseling. Patterns of negative thinking and negative emotional habits can adversely impact every area of our lives. Negative thinking can destroy not only marriages but careers, families, friendships, and one’s own mental health – it can even corrupt and pervert the spiritual path.

During my first six months at the Abbey, there was a fellow monk (I’ll call him Chodzin) who experienced many difficulties in relating to other residents of the Abbey. Chodzin was a very clever person, with the kind of sharp, critical intelligence that allowed him, among other things, to identify and describe problems that he saw in the social structures around him. He was forever pointing out issues with the way the Abbey was managed or the way various people or groups interacted, and often his criticisms were very on-point and perceptive; it was often difficult to disagree with what he was saying. But he also exuded a great deal of negativity and had a pattern of expressing himself with a tone of anger, verbal aggression, and, occasionally, outright contempt. This pattern led others at the Abbey -- myself included -- to withdraw from Chodzin, since our own emotional resistance and underlying issues were often triggered by his displays of anger, aggression and contempt. This group dynamic repeated itself many times, and escalated to the point where Chodzin obviously felt isolated and withdrawn, and many people hardened in their mistrustful reactions toward him and developed dysfunctional patterns of avoiding contact with him as much as possible. The situation gradually built toward a series of increasingly hostile confrontations that culminated in Chodzin being asked to leave the community quite abruptly -- an outcome that was all the more tragic since Chodzin had expressed a desire, early in his stay, to remain at the Abbey for life.

Gottman’s work with married couples helped me understand some of the reasons for what had happened with Chodzin, and why I had intuitively -- from my very first encounters with him -- doubted that he would last very long at the Abbey. The ratio of positive to negative emotion that was observable in Chodzin’s interactions with others was tipped too far into negative territory, well past the 16.5% threshold that signaled trouble ahead. But even more ominous was his occasional way of speaking to others with a tone of contempt, which is Gottman’s strongest indicator of a doomed marriage. Early on, I had sensed these things, but I lacked the vocabulary to articulate them; yet I knew, without knowing how I knew, that Chodzin’s marriage to the Abbey would be short-lived. The storm of negativity under which Chodzin finally departed -- the bitter divorce that it represented -- left many people feeling raw and wounded; despite whatever resistance they had felt towards him, they were also saddened by his departure and by what was clearly a lost opportunity to transform a pattern of negativity (on both sides) into something more positive.

In The Myth of Freedom, Chogyam Trungpa said that negativity by itself is not particularly a problem. In its basic energy, it can be a sharp, discerning faculty that sees the flaws in things and wants to find remedies. The problem, rather, is what Trungpa called “negative negativity,” which is (among other things) our tendency to spin out our negative thoughts and feed them so that they snowball into neurotic patterns that take control of our lives in subtle or gross ways.

In perhaps less dramatic ways, each of us has the same potential as Chodzin to cloud our own experience and poison our lives and relationships with habits of negative thinking and expression. Sometimes, at the Abbey, when we get together in groups we have a tendency to complain and harp on the little things that bother us about Abbey life -- living in such a small container, like a submarine, and rubbing elbows all the time, we are bound to find many things that challenge our egos. Sometimes even monks and nuns slip into a pattern of complaining about such things, in much the same way as co-workers at most companies get together in the break room and complain about their bosses or their work. When this happens, one can almost watch the neurotic snowball effect rolling through the group as we sink deeper and deeper into a mindset of complaining and criticism and identifying with the problem. Sometimes a threshold is crossed and a hardened sense of negativity, what Trungpa would call negative negativity, begins to emerge in the group.

Once, I was at a meeting where one of the other monks saw this happening and suddenly cut through it with a sharply worded rebuke. He reminded us, in no uncertain terms, how fortunate we are to be in a place like the Abbey, what a rich opportunity it is, and how positive and beneficial the circumstances at the Abbey actually are for our spiritual paths. The effect of his rebuke was to pop the bubble of negativity that had begun to swell in the group, and to show us how our own thought patterns had been coloring and clouding our experience in that very moment. With the bubble popped, fresh air was suddenly able to flow into our minds, and with that relaxation we realized how we’d been trapped in our own negative thoughts. We’d backed ourselves into a corner, and suddenly someone came along and informed us, bluntly, that it was an ugly corner -- dark, smelly, and full of trash -- and there was absolutely no reason why we should stay there. Sometimes a gentle and friendly slap in the face is precisely what we need to snap us out of the trance of negativity and allow us to see ourselves and our world with sudden clarity.

Though it may sound Pollyannaish to our modern ears, there is tremendous wisdom in an old song by the Carter Family (who are credited as being the first recorded “country” music band):

There's a dark and a troubled side of life.
There's a bright and a sunny side, too.
Though we meet with the darkness and strife,
Yet the sunny side we also may view.

Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,
Keep on the sunny side of life.
It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way
If we'll keep on the sunny side of life.

-- The Carter Family

What the Carter family said in those lyrics is not very different from what the Buddha said in the opening verses of the Dhammapada. Our thoughts and our attitudes determine our destiny.


The Wolves Within

There is an old Cherokee tale about a young boy who receives spiritual advice from his grandfather. The boy comes to him, troubled by some conflict he has experienced, and the old man explains to the boy that within every person there are two wolves. The first wolf, the grandfather says, represents love, serenity, faith, kindness, truth, compassion, and so on; the first wolf lives in harmony with those around him, and only fights when it is right to do so. The second wolf represents anger, lies, envy, greed, self-pity, pride, and so on; the second wolf is constantly picking fights, at the slightest provocation. Inside every person, these two wolves are locked in an epic battle, with each wolf trying to dominate one’s mind.

The boy thinks about this for a moment and asks his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

“The one you feed,” replies the old man.

To the extent that we feed our negative thought patterns, they grow stronger and stronger, and eventually they can overpower us and destroy our happiness. But we are seldom lucky enough to have a perceptive monk around who will catch us in the act of descending into a negative loop; more often than not, we are the only ones who can perceive it and stop it before it gains enough momentum to begin eroding the foundations of our happiness. It is up to each of us to be that monk and to compassionately (which sometimes means fiercely, with enough force to puncture the bubble) call ourselves, and others, on our stinking thinking when we see it. As the Buddha taught, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” If we want happiness to follow us, like a shadow that never leaves us, we must take hold of our inverted thought patterns and turn them right-side-up.