Surviving the Storms

I’ve got a couple of good, and related, quotes/links for the day. The first is just a short quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen monk who has written such wonderful books about meditation and mindfulness.

• As a human being, you have the right to get angry; but as a practitioner, you do not have the right to stop practicing.

What Thich Nhat Hanh is saying, of course, is that no matter how much we practice meditation, mindfulness, and compassion, we will probably never become totally serene human beings in all circumstances. It tends to be disappointing when we find, again and again, that we get angry, that we become despondent, that we become blinded by the distortions produced, willy-nilly, by our thoughts and our desires/aversions. But the practice is simply to take note of that disappointment, and continue to practice: to return, every time, to clarity and compassion. To sit on the cushion, especially when we don’t feel like it.

These ideas are explored, in the specially painful context of divorce, by a writer named Gabriel Cohen. The link to the NY Times review of his recent books is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/books/06cohen.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

One of his books is called “Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce,” an account of the end of his marriage. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he writes. “What I learned astonished me: that change and loss are inevitable, but that the suffering we derive from them is not.”

This is the crucial lesson that I continue to work with, and sometimes help others to work with, every day. We are all acquainted with injustice, anger, impulses to retaliate, and doubt. These are all starting points for practice. Watch them! No need to believe in them, as if they represent some ultimate truths about the world, ourselves, and others… Just observe them, and slowly bring clarity and compassion to each of these phenomena. The tightness in the throat, the tears, the lethargy, whatever they might be. Sit on the cushion. Move out of the stories and fantasies constructed by your mind, and back into the present moment.