Keep
your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through
them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of
grit.’~Taisen Deshimaru
In many ways, I close
myself off to life in all its fullness. I close myself off to
others, as a form of self defense.
It happens to all of
us. When you left yourself open in the early part of your life, you
likely would get hurt from time to time. That pain taught us to
close ourselves off in different ways: don’t let others in, use
humor to keep some distance, hurt others before they hurt you, back
away from anything new, and so on.
I close myself off, and
miss the world. I miss out on life when I do that.
And so I’m learning to
become more open. It’s a slow process, but in many small ways I’ve
learned a lot, and am much more open now than I’ve ever
been.
What does it mean to be
open? It means that I accept more of life without judgment, and am
happier no matter what comes. It means I judge others less,
criticize less, accept others more, and learn more about their
wonderful particularity.
It means more than ever
before I am fully experiencing life.
I’ll share a little
about becoming open to life, and to others, in hopes that you’ll
find it useful.
1. Judge less,
accept more. It seems natural to judge others, but in
doing so we close ourselves the truth about these people. The same
is true when we judge all the things around us — we close ourselves
to finding out more. If judgment is automatic, we should get off
autopilot and be more conscious. When we notice ourselves judging,
instead, pause, seek to understand, and then to accept. And then to
love, and to ease suffering. We should let go of our expectations
of everyone around us, and of the world around us, and accept
people as they are, and see them as they really are. Does accepting
mean we never change things? No, it means we don’t get upset,
irritated, frustrated when things aren’t as we’d like them to be,
but instead seek to ease suffering.
2. Let go of
goals. Many of you know I’ve been experimenting with
having no goals, but not everyone
understands why. One of the biggest reasons is that when we set a
goal, we limit the range of possibilities, because we are setting a
fixed destination (the goal). For example, if you say, “I want to
run a marathon in six months”, then you will focus your actions on
the things it takes to get to that destination (marathon training).
But what if someone asks you to go surfing when you’re supposed to
do marathon training? Or a new race opens up that you didn’t
realize would be there when you set your marathon goal — and it’s
even better? If you remain fixated on your goal, then you’ll close
yourself off to the surfing, or the new race. This is only one
example — it becomes much more subtle (and less clear) when the
goals are work goals, because the possibilities are so much broader
and wide-ranging. I’m not saying you should never set goals (though
that’s a possibility), but you should develop the flexibility to
let them go depending on the changing circumstances of each day,
each moment.
3. Recognize
defense mechanisms. The defense mechanisms we build up
over the years in response to painful experiences are many and
varied. More importantly, we don’t realize they’re there most of
the time, so they are automatic and thus powerful and hard to beat.
So learn to recognize them. When you find yourself not doing
certain things, ask why. Maybe it’s because you’ve had a bad
experience in the past. When you find yourself hurting people, ask
why. When you find yourself shutting people or experiences out, ask
why.
4. Be like the
sky. Suzuki Roshi had a great
metaphor … the sky has substance (gases, dust, water), but
it is open to accepting everything. This “empty sky” allows other
things, like plants, to grow into it. Our mind should be like the
sky — accept things as they are, not discriminating. By saying,
“this is beautiful, this is not beautiful”, we reject some things.
Instead, we can be empty. We can treat everything like it’s part of
our big family. We can treat anything as if they were our hands and
feet.
5. Watch your
fears. Fears are the basis for our automatic defense
mechanisms, and similarly, they have power when we don’t know
they’re working, when they lurk in the backs of our minds in the
dark. Fears close us off to others, to the world, to experiences.
Watch your fears, by learning to be quiet, by listening to yourself
talk in that quiet. Pay attention to the fears, shine a light on
them, and they begin to lose their power. Then you’ll be freed to
be open to new things, to anything.
6. Let go of
control. We constantly strive for control — of others, of
ourselves, of the world around us. Goals, planning, measuring our
work, expectations and more — we try to control things in so many
ways. Of course, we know that control is an illusion. It’s
also a way of shutting out most of the world: if we can control the
world, and the future, we are fixing the course of events … and
shutting out other possible courses. What happens if we let go of
that control? The possibilities open up.
7. Open
hands. Walk about in the world with open hands. It’s a
simple practice. Your hands are open, and they are empty, ready to
receive the world and all that comes, as it is.