http://www.thebuddhadharma.com/issues/2009/spring/takecharge.php
Years ago, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche realized that if he didn’t
take charge of his schedule, it would take charge of him. His
advice? Organize your schedule, let go of distractions, and make a
clear aspiration to practice.
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Nowadays, even older people in their seventies feel they have a
lot of time to fool around. I don’t know where this comes from.
Maybe it’s because in modern cultures people stay healthier,
active, and mobile longer due to a better diet, more vitamins, and
the latest medicines. Elderly people also have more things to
distract themselves with: packaged holiday cruises, workshops, and
different kinds of physical activities. You hear people say, “The
forties are the new thirties, and the fifties are the new forties…”
People put a lot of effort into staying and looking young. This
kind of thinking changes our concept of aging and how we relate to
growing old.
When I first came to the West, most of my students were quite
young, except for a dedicated group of women who were forty and
older. They started a dharma study group, which they affectionately
called the old ladies’ group. I asked one of my older students in
her seventies if she attended the old ladies’ group, and she got
offended. People are a little eternalistic in this way.
In more traditional cultures, seventy is considered old, and
people have no problem saying so. These cultures recognize old age
as a time to prepare for death. People who in their youth engaged
in naughty, unwholesome behavior often start to soften and go in
the direction of practice as they get older. Instead of being
diligently naughty, they diligently dedicate their remaining years
to saying mantras and doing prostrations and prayers. I see this
happen all the time, even in myself.
In Tibet, as people age their children will say, “Mom, you’re
getting old, go do some mantras and circumambulations!” This has a
dual function: the children know this will get their parents out of
their hair, but it is also a cultural push—a push to prepare for
death. People expect this; it helps them get ready.
It’s good to look at life pragmatically, rather than as how we
might want it to be. Taking care of our bodies is intelligent
enough; we certainly don’t want to get old and infirm prematurely.
We don’t want to lose our sense of curiosity and interest in life,
our spark. But the focus on prolonging life rather than accepting
death is futile. Youth goes by in a flash, and then we enter
adulthood and old age. That’s about it. Patrul Rinpoche suggests we
look at our life cycle as the length of a day: infancy at dawn,
childhood and adolescence in the morning hours, adulthood at noon,
and old age with the setting of the sun. If you want to prepare the
mind for death, putting time into perspective is a realistic thing
to do.
I’m not a planner by nature, but some years back I realized that
if I didn’t take charge of my schedule, it would take charge of me.
So now I fill my schedule with as much dharma practice and activity
as I can. I fill the pages of my calendar—one year in advance—with
my mind’s intention, then I follow and meet it. I know how many
hours of practice I want to do each day, and I organize my time to
complete that. I figure, this is my life, and if I don’t take
charge no one else will. I find myself thinking a lot about time,
how much I have, and what I want to do with it.
Practically speaking, there are only twenty-four hours in a day.
How do we want to spend them? Some of that time we need to sleep.
But how much sleep do we actually need? More than seven or eight
hours usually doesn’t support us, unless of course we are a
teenager. Most of us have jobs. We may work nine hours a day—that
seems standard. This still leaves us with seven or eight hours of
spare time. Then there are family obligations, and we need to tend
to those with care. With our remaining hours, how can we fit
practice time into our lives?
I am a night person, so I practice late at night. Some people
prefer to start before dawn. These are quiet hours—guaranteed
practice periods—because everyone else is asleep, or maybe
practicing too. Sometimes at night I get sleepy, but when I stay
with it for a bit, I find a whole new reserve of energy that
sustains me throughout my session. Anything that brings our actions
together with our intentions energizes us and brings deep meaning
to our lives. I used to have trouble sleeping, but now that I have
a regular practice schedule, I have a restful unbroken sleep.
If we have an aspiration to practice, we should make a clear
decision to do so. It won’t help to have a “split mind.” In Tibetan
there is a term: yi nyi te tsom. Yi nyi means
that we have two minds, or in other words, conflicting interests.
Te tsom means that we have doubts concerning which way we
want to go. We may want to practice, yet somehow we fail to bring
our aspirations together with our actions.
I see a lot of people wanting to practice yet not finding the
time. It affects their self-esteem. We need to ask ourselves what
prevents us from meeting our aspirations in life. Are we using our
life well, or are we simply working to maintain it? How are we
using our time? Are we considering what’s at stake? Are we tending
to our desire for a meaningful life, or are we simply avoiding it?
If so, why?
How we spend our time depends on how we organize our time, and
how we organize our time depends on how we envision our lives. Once
we have sorted out these questions and have made a clear decision
to make room in our lives for practice, we have to exert ourselves
rather than let the mind become too loose and unorganized, and just
wait for something to happen.
Distractions come in all sorts of disguises. Sometimes we feel
we need to manage everyone else’s problems. If we have this
tendency, there will always be someone who wants to pull us in, in
some way. They want to consult, but they don’t necessarily
want to hear what we have to say. They just want to vent. They feel
stressed, and then we get stressed and no one profits in the end.
Or, if in our work we are too meticulous and fixate on perfecting
everything, we may never get anything done and run out of time for
practice. We may also feel that we are the only ones who know how
to do anything, so we end up doing everything.
Some people can never say no. These kinds of distractions don’t
even include the constant need for entertainment and fun, and all
the foreign, high-maintenance elements we invite into our lives,
such as puppies, personal-entertainment systems, and fancy
computers.
Even in retreat, people can find all kinds of ways to occupy
themselves and avoid practice, like spending hours each day
pondering over their shopping lists. In India they say, “All you
need are two chapattis a day.” I don’t think this means we
need to subsist on two pieces of Indian bread a day, become a
sadhu [an ascetic who renounces his body and all worldly
things], or rough it. I think this is a metaphor for doing without.
How much do we actually need? How often do we get distracted by
what we want and figuring out how we can get it? Can we free
ourselves from this kind of distraction through simply doing
without? Whatever our tendency, it won’t do much good to blame
anyone else for our distractions. Kunchyen Longchenpa said,
“Distractions are limitless; only when you quit them will they
leave.”
If we don’t have a focus, we meander around like a restless
tiger, not finding any pleasure in anything. We find ourselves
laying on the bed, then turning on the TV and flipping through the
channels, eating when we’re not hungry, then picking up the phone.
What are we trying to do? We are trying to connect with the
phenomenal world. But how can we when we are not connected
inwardly?
The times we don’t feel connected inwardly are the best times to
practice. When our minds are restless, this might sound about as
appealing as dental work. We are tormented and distracted by our
thoughts, emotions, and fears. We come up with all kinds of
physical sensations too. We have a pain in our neck, then it moves
to our back, then our foot. All of a sudden we hear a ringing in
our ears, or our eyes start to itch. It’s a little suspicious,
don’t you think?
We need to give ourselves time to allow the nervous and restless
energy to settle in our bodies. When the body rests, the mind
rests. When the mind rests, the emotions rest, and we feel a
profound sense of contentment and relaxation, or shenjong.
When the mind relaxes in a state of shenjong, it is available to
us, to serve us or at least help us understand what’s up. The space
of shenjong means less vulnerability, so our thoughts and emotions
cannot simply shove us around and rough us up as they usually do.
All our fatigue falls away. The heart clears. The body lightens and
feels as weightless as feather.
We need a little strength to resist the habit of grasping at
distractions, even if we are halfway in. We don’t want to be like a
freshwater salmon that swims all the way upstream, and just when it
is halfway into a bear’s mouth, rather than trying to wiggle out,
thinks, “Oh well, I’m halfway in anyway.” Wiggling out of
distraction takes some might and clarity.
I’ve heard people say, “I’m too lazy and love my ego too much to
dedicate my time to practice.” That kind of laziness and lack of
intention will never support realization. The Buddha said that if
flies, grubs, and bacteria had a capacity to aspire for
enlightenment, they would attain it. That would be embarrassing,
wouldn’t it? A grub attaining enlightenment before we did. In the
sutra it says, “All things are circumstantial.” The circumstances
we need are created by the might and clarity of our intention and
how we carry it out in our lives.
It’s not as if we have no diligence. The alarm rings, it’s 4
a.m. The temperature has dropped into the single digits. We don’t
want to get out of bed, but it’s Monday and there will be
consequences. We get up. We scrape the snow off the windshield,
heat up the car, and head to work for nine hours, maybe more. To do
this every morning takes a little vision, a little might and
clarity. Surely if we can do this, we can find a little time to
practice.
If we can put time into perspective, organize our schedules,
wiggle out of distraction with might and clarity, and think about
what makes life meaningful, we will surely find time to practice,
to relax the mind. Ordinarily, relaxing means taking our minds off
our daily routine, laying on the couch, and watching a movie or
going to sleep. Usually relaxing means distracting ourselves from
the stresses of daily life. But we have spent half our lives
sleeping without ever feeling rested. This is because we haven’t
focused on relaxing the mind itself.
What could be more relaxing than letting go of preferences and
worries? What better way is there to reduce our self-clinging than
by contemplating bodhichitta? What can liberate our hopes and fears
other than letting them arise and disassemble themselves naturally
in the space of an open mind? Meditation leaves plenty of room for
everything: all of our hopes, fears, and anxieties as well as our
joys and aspirations. There is no need to control our thoughts,
because when we practice we have committed ourselves to letting
them be—not judging them as good or bad, spiritual or not
spiritual, helpful or harmful. Is there any other activity that can
accommodate the mind and its various arisings in this way?
The only thing we need to practice is a quiet place to sit: a
room, a park bench, or our own bed. The sutras describe a peaceful
mango grove as an ideal place to practice. The Buddha and his
disciples practiced meditation in such a place. If you think about
it, in the midst of our busy lives, any quiet place to sit can be
our modern-day mango grove.
DZIGAR KONGTRUL RINPOCHE is a lama in the
Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Born in Northern India, he
was recognized as a reincarnation of the Rimé master Jamgon
Kongtrul Lodro Thaye and raised in a monastic environment. In 1989
he moved to the United States with his family, where he founded his
own teaching organization, Mangala Shri Bhuti. He is the author of
Light Comes Through and It’s Up to You.