Preventing Unhappiness from Arising?

I'd like to share a recent event that helped me to wipe some of the soot from my eyes for a moment, and notice how my mind keeps weaving stories that I all too easily fall in love with.

A few weeks back, I took a few days off to work on some organizational tasks and just relax.

As a part of this time, I attended a meeting of the Hudson Valley Kadampas, a Gelugpa Buddhist organization in Nyack. The meeting took place in an elegant mansion overlooking the Hudson, that is currently owned by the Fellowship of Reconcilliation. It was a peaceful and gracefully beautiful setting for a quiet teaching on a very old Mahayana text, specifically, The Bodhisattva's Way of Life, by Shantideva. The teacher was Achok Rinpoche.

My uncle, Steve Lonegan, was with me. Steve is a highly conservative politician, who has a deep interest in Tibetan Buddhism and human rights. We are very far apart on the political spectrum when it comes to policy, but we share some core values, a curiosity about the nature of mind, and a similar sense of humor.

I was pretty excited to have brought Steve to this training. Looking back on this now, I can feel how much my ego and my pride was involved.

As much as this training was about compassion and wisdom, if I sit in this moment, and breathe into my emotional memory of the evening, I was very motivated to impress Steve with my understanding of Buddhism, and my access to some cool esoteric teachings.

Perhaps even more than this, I had been waiting to talk with Steve more about mindfulness, Compassion Focused Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for some time, and our conversations had been building in these areas.  I assumed that when Steve would hear this dharma teaching, he would have an "aha" moment and realize how much ancient wisdom had in common with ACT and CFT.  My mind spun a fantasy that Steve would then be ready to dive in and learn more about how 3rd Wave Behavior Therapies can be helpful to people and organizations.  We would be off and running to create new projects and collaborations.  Thank you, mind, for that.

It is actually embarrassing to write about the kind of grandiose head trip my mind can just wander into.  Yet I know how very human this kind of thinking is.  In my egotistical daydreams about spreading the good word about egolessness, I was again swimming in a typical, self-focused head trip - the kind that pops up, sometimes barely noticeably.  In fact, at the time, none of  this was really in my awareness.

Still, I can look back and notice how my mind was being driven by all sorts of motivations, some compassionate and some about competition.

Several years ago, Steve and I planned a trip to Tibet to explore and learn about Buddhism. I gave in to the objections of my girlfriend at the time, my financial limitations, and my own avoidance, and stayed home. Steve did go to Tibet and studied for a few days at monasteries there.  So, inevitably, some competitive motivation was acting upon me when we went to the training with Achok Rinpoche. I think I wanted to show that even though I hadn't sat beside the butter lamps in the actual monasteries of the Himalayas, the last 13 or so years of dharma and psychotherapy study and practice had meant something.

Some part of me was eagerly craving appreciation and grasping for approval. I'm inclined to judge that part of me, but, really, it just is an inevitable part of being human, after all. We all want to be appreciated, we all want to be impressive, and we all want to feel important, don't we? It is funny to me how such a small and seemingly well-intentioned evening's itinerary, dropping in on a dharma talk, could fire up the ego and the grasping mind so clearly and strongly.

The talk began with solemnity and reverence, with a brief informal period of mindful sitting, and it then moved to Achok Rinpoche's commentary upon The Bodhisattva's Way of Life.  I appreciated the wisdom and incisive wit that he brought to the talk and then a few words popped up that struck me sideways.  This Tibetan teacher told us to "Prevent unhappiness from arising."  What?  I didn't understand this.

So much of how Western psychologists have discussed concepts from Buddhism has involved allowing emotions to arise with a nonjudgmental attitude.  A great deal of what I've learned about ACT and the costs of experiential avoidance has been all about making space, willingly, for whatever experiences emerged in our awareness.  What Achok Rinpoche was saying didn't make sense.  Turning my observations inward, I could feel my own unhappiness arising.  My monkey mind was critical of the teaching, the teacher, of myself and a petulant side of me kept whirling thoughts and emotions about the situation.  I was thinking that surely, by "preventing unhappiness from arising" I would get stuck in a loop of entanglement.  What was going on here?

I wasn't alone in this opinion, as it turns out.  At the end of the talk, when there was time for questions, a series of other audience members (who wore suitably therapist-looking clothes, and spoke in 21st century psychology-speak) all raised questions about this point.  "Don't you mean to change your relationship with unhappiness, Rinpoche?" asked the first.  "No, I mean to prevent unhappiness from arising."  was the response.  Such questions continued.  "So, Rinpoche, I suppose what you are saying is that when we experience unhappiness, we should meet it with mindfulness so that it doesn't grow?"  was another questioner's tentative attempt to solve this problem.  Again, Achok Rinpoche continued, "No, Shantideva is quite clear, the text calls for us to prevent unhappiness from arising."  The resolute and calm, smiling repetition of this response began to make me quite curious and there was a discernible, growing energy in the group as the questions continued.

I don't recall the exact words that Achok Rinpoche used, but his response challenged and expanded my awareness of what becomes possible in practicing acceptance.  Often, in psychotherapy sessions and in personal meditative practice, speaking about "acceptance" refers to cultivating a willingness to experience difficult emotions as they arise, and to accept experiences without judgment.  Something more than that was now on the table.

In this context, this relaxed Tibetan teacher, half-smiling through a discussion of the difficulties in life, had a much broader vision of what acceptance can mean.

As I don't recall the exact quotes, word for word, from that evening - please consider the passage below, written from memory, to be a quote of the imaginary Tibetan teacher that my mind carries, just as we all carry mental representations of people from our past.  This is basically what was said:

"Yes, it is very hard to prevent unhappiness from arising, but little by little, day after day, this is what we practice.  You ask if it is possible to prevent unhappiness from arising.  Well, do you believe that enlightenment is possible?  Do you believe you can wake up?  If you do, then you must believe that preventing unhappiness from arising is possible.  After all, if a problem can be fixed, we have no need to be unhappy about this.  And if a problem has no solution, also, becoming unhappy does not really help us, does it?  Let's imagine that I am in my study and I spill water all over the floor.  I may become very angry.  Does that clean the water up?  Does my anger dry the floor, dry my papers?  No.  Of course it is very natural to become angry, to struggle, to become very unhappy.  This is the way we are born.  Yet, with the dharma, we train our minds to fully accept the reality that we encounter, every moment.  So, maybe at first we practice to be with one small thing that makes us unhappy.  We train ourselves to just accept, to relax, and to allow reality to be what it is with just this one small thing.  I do really dislike when I spill things.  So, maybe when I begin I practice watching my reaction to this.  I watch how I struggle for reality to be something different than what it is.  I practice preventing my unhappiness in reality from arising.  I allow myself to grow happy in the reality that exists, in what is.  Of course you will sometimes, you know, get angry.  You will sometimes be unhappy.  But Shantideva says that our aim, the direction we go, can be towards practicing to prevent unhappiness from arising.  We can practice compassion when we see what we don't like, what we don't want.  We can practice kindness.  This kindness is very important.  We practice happiness."

Silence entered the room then, and it remained for some time.  There were no more questions, and the evening concluded with smiles and farewells.

As Steve and I left the hall, my sense of competition, my sense of self-importance, and all of the inner arguments and commentary had fallen away.  I watched how even concepts like mindfulness, acceptance and compassion could be seized by my grasping mind, pulling me into ever greater attachment and fusion, even with the foundational ideas in spiritual liberation.  What a miracle of delusion our minds can be.  Beyond this, a moment of encountering real acceptance, of being in the presence of Achok Rinpoche's very real, palpable desire to alleviate the suffering he felt around him, all around us, provided a warmth and a spirit of liberation, that left all of us just a little bit transformed that evening.

This leads me to the conclusion that I really do need to get out more often.

Namaste,

DT