Carolyn Rose Gimian suggests a slogan to inspire our meditation-in-action.
Photo by Mihail Ribkin
It is well and good to feel blissfully at ease while practicing in the serene atmosphere of the meditation hall. It is quite another thing to confront the goutweed in the garden in the spring. If you are not familiar with this scourge, suffice it to say that if someone asked me to use the words “garden” and “devil” in a sentence, I would immediately say: “Goutweed is the devil of the garden.”
As I scowl at the goutweed flourishing in my backyard, I contemplate a saying that keeps me company these days: Be grateful to everyone. This teaching is one of the fifty-nine ancient lojong slogans or aphorisms, which can help us cultivate compassion. These instructions for training the mind, popularized in the West by Chögyam Trungpa and Pema Chödrön, are powerful tools for meditation in action—how we practice as we go about our daily lives.
Be grateful to everyone. Why? Because the irritation, confusion, negativity, and general difficulties that they provide us are helpful. They point out that we need to work on ourselves. If we weren’t irritated or confused or hurt by situations in life, we might not discover meditation at all. When we begin to practice mindfulness, we recognize the confusion and neurosis in our own minds, as well as recognizing our own sanity. So we should be thankful for the difficulties, which encourage us to meditate and to look more deeply into ourselves.
Although it’s helpful to contemplate problems on the cushion, we also have to work with them as they come up in daily life. Atisha, an eleventh-century Indian Buddhist master who taught this system of mind training, took an irritating servant, a Bengali tea boy, with him when he visited Tibet. He had heard that the Tibetans were very kind and gentle people and so he thought they wouldn’t provide him with enough hassles. Later, however, he realized it hadn’t been necessary to bring the tea boy along. The Tibetans, like all people, provided plenty of annoyances—plenty of opportunities to express his gratitude.
We should be especially grateful to those people and things that present the biggest obstacles, because they also present the greatest opportunities to let go. This approach may sound promising, but do we really embrace it?
People frequently begin the practice of sitting meditation with the attitude that they are going to solve a problem. We approach problems in our everyday lives like this as well. We—or it—are going to get better. We are going to change the things we don’t like about ourselves or change what we don’t like in the world outside. We diet, we exercise, we study. We buy clothes, houses, cars, get makeovers, and go on vacations to make ourselves feel better and more alive. We also use a lot of magic bullets, or prescription drugs, to deal with problems. We take pills not just to treat problems in our bodies but also to address problems in our minds. We begin to think that meditation and the attendant awareness it brings are just another panacea.
In a sense, this is a natural beginner’s approach and it can be helpful, but it doesn’t work for the long haul. Eventually, whether it’s in the next moment, the next year, or the next decade, we all encounter the challenges of old age, sickness, and death, both in those around us and in ourselves. We may think that these things are an intrusion onto what we call “life,” rather than seeing them as the stuff of life itself. But these are parts of life that we have to befriend. The basic dissatisfaction of not getting what we want is always there and it is a great friend, a great teacher. In part, it is for this reason that the toughest challenges—the things and the people that we feel we can’t appreciate and the problems we can’t seem to solve—are the most important for us to work with. Those moments and events that bring us the deepest sadness and hurt may be the most precious of all. They have the most potential to awaken us.
We learn from disappointment. Many of us, for example, have attended a meditation program or group retreat that we feel has had a life-changing effect on us. We feel terrific, transformed by the program—open, good, awake, inspired, insightful, etc. Then we go home. Do your children fall gratefully at your feet or circle around like cherubim? I don’t think so. More likely, one of them throws a tantrum and one of them throws up on you. Does your partner serve you a fabulous dinner, give you flowers, and invite you for a night of wild passion? Not as often as we wish. If you live alone, the feedback may be the unpaid bills in the mailbox, the pet that pees on the floor, or other unexpected greetings. Sometimes the revelations are much more painful than this: illnesses revealed, infidelities confessed, jobs lost.
Of course this doesn’t always happen, but it’s not uncommon. In other contexts, people experience a similar painful contrast between their professional and personal lives. My reaction to this jarring contrast is often: “Why me? I don’t deserve this. Why doesn’t my life appreciate me? Poor me.”
It’s not just beginning meditators who encounter the seeming ingratitude of the world. Great teachers also are presented with obstacles that seem beyond their control, often when they are on the verge of a spiritual breakthrough. The Tibetan yogi Milarepa had been meditating alone in a cave for a number of years. Tired, hungry, and worn down by practice, he went out to gather firewood near his cave. A cold wind whipped off his loin cloth, which was all he was wearing, and caused him to drop the wood. He fell unconscious for a time and when he awoke, he sang a song of loneliness and longing for his teacher, Marpa. At that point, he had a vision of Marpa riding up on a cloud, scolding him for losing heart and not realizing that he and the teacher were never separate. Filled with devotion, Milarepa went back into his cave to practice, and there he found—not flowers and a nice hot meal—but demons with huge saucer eyes. Milarepa tried to make them go away by making offerings to them. They didn’t budge. Milarepa sang a song of realization for them. They stayed. Then, contemplating that ultimately these demons were the product of his own mind and were empty of reality, he roused his courage and rushed at them. Finally, they vanished.
I think about this as I contemplate the goutweed. I’ve tried every way I know to get rid of it. I have used natural remedies and unnatural pesticides, which undoubtedly have affected birds and insects, but not the goutweed. I have dug it up and covered it with black plastic, so that no air or light can get through, but to no avail. Sometimes, in warring with the goutweed, I feel like I’m Bill Murray in Caddyshack, battling the gopher on the golf course. If I manage to eradicate the weed from one part of my garden, it sneaks under the fence and reappears somewhere else. I have named a plot in my yard “Goutweed Hill,” in hopes that the foul plant will accept my generous offer to reside there and stay out of the rest of the garden. Regardless, it continues to invade at every opportunity. No strategy seems to succeed.
In an occasional moment of clarity, I realize that my relationship to the goutweed is like my relationship to a lot of things in life. I try to humor them; I try to seduce them; I try to eradicate them. But as long as I’m trying to hold on to my territory, something fundamental is lacking. Perhaps I need to stay engaged with the goutweed. It has something to say to me.
In fact, in a very odd way, I do appreciate it. Its obstinacy, along with the general chaos of my life, helps keep me honest. The older I get, the more I realize that self-deception is the greatest obstacle of all. So I try to be grateful when my life brings me down to earth. The benefits of meditation are not illusory, not at all, but meditating is not the only work to be done. The point of meditation and the Buddhist path is to uncover our inherent sanity and to help others, not to prop ourselves up. Occasionally, we seem to need reminders in the form of failure and disappointment.
In the midst of a chaotic scene at home or in the office, you spill a hot cup of coffee on your brand new tie. You find a black widow spider on your shoulder while doing the laundry. You stub your toe going out the door. Those little things can wake you up, if you welcome the moment of awareness they bring. Be grateful to everyone. Drop your trip on the spot, at least for a moment.
Wake-up calls can be a source of humor and relief. In daily life, there is room for chaos and color; there is room to care for others. There is room for loss, for joy, and gentle pride. The stuff of every day is the source of endless irritation and endless celebration. It provides constant opportunities to embrace life rather than to shun it. So here’s to the everyday reminders to truly be grateful to everyone.