Buddhist Belief Blog

The author of this article doesn’t know it, but he wrote this for me in order to get my attention! It certainly does talk to me about where I am in my life at this time. I need to read this carefully many times over, so I’m putting it in my blog where it won’t get lost.

I hope it will be of help to you as well.

Be well — be in peace,

Ron Rink
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No Gain — Relationships won’t solve our problems, but they can help us grow.

by: Barry Magid

My teacher Charlotte Joko Beck pretty much sums up her attitude toward relationships when she says, “Relationships don’t work.”

Rather than talk about everything we normally think that we gain from relationships, like love, companionship, security, and family life, she looks at relationships from the perspective of no gain. She focuses on all the ways relationships go awry when people enter into them with particular sorts of gaining ideas and expect relationships to function as an antidote to their problems. Antidotes are all versions of “If only…” If only she were more understanding; if only he were more interested in sex; if only she would stop drinking. For Joko, that kind of thinking about relationships means always externalizing the problem, always assuming that the one thing that’s going to change your life is outside yourself and in the other person. If only the other person would get his or her act together, then my life would go the way I want it to.

Joko tries to bring people back to their own fears and insecurities. These problems are ours to practice with, and we can’t ask anyone else, including a teacher, to do that work for us. To be in a real relationship, a loving relationship, is simply to be willing to respond and be there for the other person without always calculating what we are going to get out of it.

Many people come to me and say, “I’ve been in lots of relationships where I give and give and give.” But for them it wasn’t enlightenment; it was masochism! What they are missing from Joko’s original account is a description of what relationships are actually for—what the good part is. In addition to being aware of the pitfalls that Joko warns us about, we should also look at all the ways in which relationships provide the enabling conditions for our growth and development. That’s particularly obvious with children. We would all agree that children need a certain kind of care and love in order to grow and develop. Nobody would say to a five-year-old, “What do you need Mommy for? Deal with your fear on your own!” The thing is that most of us are still struggling with remnants of that child’s neediness and fear in the midst of a seemingly adult life. Relationships aren’t just crutches that allow us to avoid those fears; they also provide conditions that enable us to develop our capacities so we can handle them in a more mature way.

It’s not just a parent-child relationship or a relationship with a partner that does that. The relationship of a student with a teacher, between members of a sangha, between friends, and among community members—all help us to develop in ways we couldn’t on our own. Some aspects of ourselves don’t develop except under the right circumstances.

Aristotle stressed the importance of community and friendship as necessary ingredients for character development and happiness. He is the real origin of the idea that “it takes a village” to raise a child. However, you don’t find much in Aristotle about the necessity of romantic love in order to develop. His emphasis was on friendship.

Aristotle said that in order for people to become virtuous, we need role models—others who have developed their capacities for courage, self-control, wisdom, and justice. We may emphasize different sets of virtues or ideas about what makes a proper role model, but Buddhism also asserts that, as we are all connected and interdependent, none of us can do it all on our own.

Acknowledging this dependency is the first step of real emotional work within relationships. Our ambivalence about our own needs and dependency gets stirred up in all kinds of relationships. We cannot escape our feelings and needs and desires if we are going to be in relationships with others. To be in relationships is to feel our vulnerability in relation to other people who are unpredictable, and in circumstances that are intrinsically uncontrollable and unreliable.

We bump up against the fact of change and impermanence as soon as we acknowledge our feelings or needs for others. Basically, we all tend to go in one of two directions as a strategy for coping with that vulnerability. We either go in the direction of control or of autonomy. If we go for control, we may be saying: “If only I can get the other person or my friends or family to treat me the way I want, then I’ll be able to feel safe and secure. If only I had a guarantee that they’ll give me what I need, then I wouldn’t have to face uncertainty.” With this strategy, we get invested in the control and manipulation of others and in trying to use people as antidotes to our own anxiety.

With the strategy (or curative fantasy) of autonomy, we go in the opposite direction and try to imagine that we don’t need anyone. But that strategy inevitably entails repression or dissociation, a denial of feeling. We may imagine that through spiritual practice we will get to a place where we won’t feel need, sexuality, anger, or dependency. Then, we imagine, we won’t be so tied into the vicissitudes of relationships. We try to squelch our feelings in order not to be vulnerable anymore, and we rationalize that dissociation under the lofty and spiritual-sounding word “detachment,” which ends up carrying a great deal of unacknowledged emotional baggage alongside its original, simpler meaning as the acceptance of impermanence.

We have to get to know and be honest about our particular strategies for dealing with vulnerability, and learn to use our practice to allow ourselves to experience more of that vulnerability rather than less of it. To open yourself up to need, longing, dependency, and reliance on others means opening yourself to the truth that none of us can do this on our own. We really do need each other, just as we need parents and teachers. We need all those people in our lives who make us feel so uncertain. Our practice is not about finally getting to a place where we are going to escape all that but about creating a container that allows us to be more and more human, to feel more and more.

If we let ourselves feel more and more, paradoxically, we get less controlling and less reactive. As long as we think we shouldn’t feel something, as long as we are afraid of feeling vulnerable, our defenses will kick in to try to get life under control, to manipulate ourselves or other people. But instead of either controlling or sequestering our feelings, we can learn to both contain and feel them fully. That containment allows us to feel vulnerable or hurt without immediately erupting into anger; it allows us to feel neediness without clinging to the other person. We acknowledge our dependency.

We learn to keep our relationships and support systems in good repair because we admit to ourselves how much we need them. We take care of others for our own sake as well as theirs. We begin to see that all our relationships are part of a broad spectrum of interconnectedness, and we respect not only the most intimate or most longed-for of our relationships but also all the relationships we have—from the most personal to the most public—which together are always defining who we are and what we need in order to become fully ourselves.

Relationships work to open us up to ourselves. But first we have to admit how much we don’t want that to happen, because that means opening ourselves to vulnerability. Only then will we begin the true practice of letting ourselves experience all those feelings of vulnerability that we first came to practice to escape.

From Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide, © Barry Magid 2008.

Technorati Tags: Buddhist Belief, mindfulness

Since I am in the process of aging and also a practitioner of Buddhist Belief, I have to ask myself, and hopefully you who are reading this blog, how are we dealing with the inevitability of aging? It doesn’t matter whether you’re in your 20s or 30s or whether you’re in your 70s or 80s, or somewhere in between or older, the question is still there. Nothing is permanent. We may think we’ll live forever, but the fact is, we won’t. Our time will come. So, how do we prepare?

Where does our practice and way of life fit into this picture of impermanence? Let’s face it, our culture is in denial and is phobic about death. How do we find a path through this getting old stage of life while we live in this culture? Buddha taught there were three characteristics central to Buddhism – dukkha (suffering), anatta (nonself) and anicca (impermanence). All three of these characteristics are vital to all of us as we move through our lives. For those of us in our older years, it’s time to start paying attention.

In Buddha’s time, the culture had the tradition of ashramas, the four stages of life. First we are students – followed by a period of providing for our family. Once your children were grown and your career had run its course (sort of like retirement age in our culture), it was time to focus on your inner life – a time when you would go on retreat and get more involved in your practice. Our culture isn’t much different, except for the last stage.

Here in our modern-day western culture, we find the idea of focusing on our inner life to be a huge challenge. How do we make the leap from a fast-paced, “work your butt off” lifestyle, to one that is calmer and contemplative – one where we give more of ourselves to meditation and inner discovery? Our lives, up until this “getting older stage”, have been driven to doing rather than being. This has become a form of addiction for all of us, and there’s nothing more difficult than trying to rehab ourselves out of an addiction. I know I still get up every morning and “go to work”. No, I don’t get paid any more, and no,I don’t climb in a car and drive to an office any longer, but I do have an office in my home and I do go there every day – most every day of the week. It’s where I do my work – the writing for this blog and two others. It’s where I do my political activism and other forms of rabble-rousing. Yes, I do meditate and it is an important part of my day, but it’s on a schedule just like the rest of my life.

This is not how I should be living now with my health the way it is and at my age. Perhaps it is time for me to call up another of Buddha’s teachings – the Five Remembrances. Buddha recommended we bring this almost into the mantra category as a reminder of life’s ephemeral nature. (1) We will grow old. (2) Our bodies will deteriorate. (3) Death is inevitable. (4) Everything changes. (5) We must part from our loved ones, and our actions or karma are our true belongings, the ground upon which we stand. If this is true, then what becomes truly important, especially in our culture of television, tweeting, and Facebook?

I’m slowly becoming more and more convinced there is a sacred dimension to the process of aging because we begin to see how precious time can be. This is the time to call upon our practice to sustain us – to inspire us. I do clearly see this, but putting it into my own way of life is proving to be an enormous challenge. I need to summon up some new, inner strength to carry this off. This is when I’m dealing with declining energy levels and a life-threatening illness. To now make this leap into a more contemplative life is a huge task, especially in my current environment.

I was speaking to some friends yesterday when I brought up the fact that my wish for this time of my life was to be able to be more contemplative and to be able to devote my quiet moments to preparing myself for my final days. However, now with two teenagers and a 2-year old living in my home, their very ill mother where my wife has to devote so much energy and care, plus all the related drama that goes along with all that, it is near impossible. One of my friends, (a person I hold in the highest regard for their wisdom) commented, “You probably need to just let that idea go!”

Was that comment right? Is that the way to go now? Do I need to find a different direction than the one I had hoped for?

I’m curious and would love to hear your thoughts over the coming days. Please comment here and let me know what you think. Thanks!!

Metta ….May I be well and happy. My I live in safety. May I be healthy and strong. May I live with ease. May all beings be well and happy. May all beings live in safety. May all beings be healthy and strong. May all beings live with ease.

Namaste — Be in Peace.

Ron Rink
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Just click the links that are sort of Grey in color to take you to where you can learn more about each book and how you can purchase a copy for your own library.

Stephanie Kaza — Hooked!: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume

Stephanie Kaza, an amazing writer and Buddhist teacher I knew from my 36 years living in Vermont, gathers key Buddhist thinkers to reflect upon aspects of consumerism, greed and economics. Certainly, many other authors have examined consumerism from the lens of their religious traditions, but this book’s Buddhist perspective is unusual, and its pairing of consumerist critiques with core Buddhist concepts is generally fruitful. Check this one out! Hooked!

Stephanie Kaza — Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking

Another one from my Vermont friend — Stephanie Kaza, a biologist and professor of Environmental Studies at University of Vermont, combines Zen Buddhist practices and teachings with her 40 years as an environmentalist for this guide to enlightened environmentalism, proposing a belief in the interdependence of people and nature as the genuine way to “go green”: “When we come to see ourselves as part of the green web of life… we are naturally drawn to respond with compassion.” A good read for Buddhists or anyone from any religion. Mindfully Green

Anam Thubten — No Self – No Problem

No Self – No Problem
shows how to realize the ultimate meaning of life in each moment by dissolving all notions of ego-identity. It asks that spiritual seekers wake up to their true nature, which is already enlightened. Based on Buddhist wisdom traditions, this easy-to-read book discusses in simple, but profound and inspiring language, how we can live a life full of love, satisfaction, and happiness. No Self – No Problem

Sharon Salzberg — The Kindness Handbook

“It takes boldness, even audacity, to step out of our habitual patterns and experiment with a quality like kindness–to work with it and see just how it might shift and open up our lives. This book is an invitation to do just that. — From The Kindness Handbook