This episode is the second half of the seventh chapter of my book-in-progress, The Ten Fields of Zen: A Primer for Practitioners. Listen to/read the previous episode (288) first, where I talk about the importance of Opening Your Heart and how that effort is viewed in the Buddhist tradition. In that episode I also discussed the four Brahmaviharas – goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. I finish the chapter in this episode by covering self-acceptance, practicing with the real, human relationships in your life, and Opening Your Heart in Sangha.
Read/listen to Part 1
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Quicklinks to Article Content:
The First Step to an Open Heart: Self-Acceptance
Real Human Relationships: Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Sangha as Refuge and Testing Ground
The First Step to an Open Heart: Self-Acceptance
In your efforts to extend goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity to all beings, you’re likely to run into a significant obstacle: A lack of ability to extend those attitudes toward yourself. Traditional instructions for cultivating Metta usually start with extending Metta to yourself, and then expanding outwards to other people. This is great practice, because if you can’t extend goodwill to yourself, the attitude you have toward others will be compromised. However, most people I know find sincere Metta for themselves is one of the hardest feelings to arouse. It’s fascinating to speculate about the reasons for the lack of self-acceptance in people today (or at least people in modern, industrialized societies), but you don’t have to understand those reasons to start cultivating your own self-acceptance.
In fact, self-doubt and self-loathing may not be universally prevalent in human beings, but they clearly go back at least 2,000 years. One of the most widely revered Mahayana Buddhist texts, the Lotus Sutra, was compiled somewhere between the first century BCE and the first century CE. In it, there’s a parable in which a young man leaves home at an early age and wanders for many years, falling on hard times. Eventually, beaten down by life, he arrives back home in such a state he doesn’t recognize his family or where he is.
Overjoyed to see his only son and heir, his father sends messengers to bring his son to him, but the son reacts with fear. At first, the only help the son will accept is a dirty, menial job. Over the course of years, without revealing their true relationship, the father gradually promotes and encourages the son. Eventually the son is the father’s most trusted assistant. Only then does the father reveal to everyone that this is his son and heir. Earlier, the son would not have been able to accept his inheritance because of his limited view of himself. The Lotus Sutra explains that we are like the son had been, ready to embrace lesser teachings but unable to imagine ourselves as children of Buddha, of being capable of Buddhahood.[i]
Just as the lost son had to build confidence in himself before he was able to accept his inheritance, so you have to shed limiting narratives about yourself before you can open up to your true nature and perceive Reality-with-a-Capital-R. You may believe, at least to some extent, that you lack sufficient self-discipline, intelligence, generosity, understanding, concentration, or equanimity to awaken. You may believe you are unlovable, unlikeable, ugly, too fat, traumatized, or attached to pleasure. You may believe you are defined by your past.
When you try to extend unconditional goodwill toward yourself, you’re likely to encounter resistance based on whatever negative narratives about yourself you are carrying. You may encounter visceral self-loathing. You may encounter dismissiveness, disgust, judgment, and stinginess. As you try to sincerely say, “May I be free from fear and anxiety, may I be at ease, may I be happy,” there’s a good chance another voice inside you starts listing conditions: Once I achieve such-and-such a thing, or once I stop doing such-and-such a thing…
It’s absolutely essential that you accept yourself and become able to extend the four Brahmaviharas toward yourself sincerely and without conditions. At some level, you may be convinced that the only way to improve yourself is to relate to yourself with ill-will, hard-heartedness, and judgment, or to engage in harsh and upsetting self-criticism, self-denial, or self-punishment. Treating yourself this way is every bit as spiritually damaging and morally bankrupt as treating others this way. Not only that, it’s not effective at producing change, as I discussed earlier.
Your true nature – your Buddha-Nature – is eternal, joyous, selfless, and pure. It’s your birthright and isn’t defiled or limited by any of your shortcomings or past mistakes. As long as you cling to a narrative about your limited potential, you will be unable to perceive it. All being is Buddha-Nature, and your individual imperfections are irrelevant to it – except that, once you perceive your true nature, all aspects of your quirky human manifestation become tools for the Dharma.
For most of us, true self-acceptance (as opposed to clinging to a shallow and brittle narrative about our sufficiency) can be challenging and only happens after many years of hard work. Your path toward self-acceptance can include counseling, other psychological work, and your practice in the other nine Fields of Zen. To work on self-acceptance using the Brahmaviharas, you start by extending the attitude toward a being for whom it is easy and uncomplicated and expand from there. Where you fall in the lineup between an easy-and-uncomplicated subject and a nearly-impossible subject depends on your relationship to yourself, but the practice is exactly the same. It’s immensely healing to be able to extend the Brahmaviharas to yourself unconditionally, joining the human race and giving yourself the same kindness and acceptance you aspire to give to others.
Real Human Relationships: Where the Rubber Meets the Road
You might conclude from Brahmavihara practice that Opening Your Heart is a largely internal affair, but most of the effort in this Field of Zen practice involves the real human relationships in your life. It could be said that “people bring out the worst in you” – and from the Zen point of view, that’s great! It may not be easy or pleasant at times, but you can count on other people to challenge you in ways no amount of meditation, study, Brahmavihara work, or any other kind of formal Zen practice can do.
It is commonly said in Zen that “It’s easy to be enlightened off on a remote mountaintop” but that the true state of your practice is quickly revealed when you return to life among others. Individual people and groups of people – from your family to your Sangha to your nation – can trigger self-doubt, judgment, anger, fear, anxiety, and jealousy. Human relationships often arouse longing, lust, competitiveness, defensiveness, attachment, aversion, and a desire to control. Generally speaking, the closer someone is to you, the easier it is for them to upset you.
Of course, your human relationships are also incredibly important to your wellbeing. They can be your greatest sources of joy, and provide opportunities for practicing generosity, patience, and kindness. No matter how much you value your relationships, though, the fact remains that social interactions are easily the most challenging sphere of practice. Try not to be too hard on yourself if the clarity, goodwill, and equanimity you manage to feel during zazen, retreat, or Dharma study seems to evaporate when you have a disagreement with an intimate partner, or your teenage child seems distant and disrespectful, or when you get unfairly accused of wrongdoing at work. Try to have faith that your practice is making a difference in your life and understand that it will take time for your deeper insights and aspirations to manifest in the day-to-day of your personal relationships. When your practice does improve your relationships, it is powerful evidence that your practice is going well!
The key to Opening Your Heart in your real, human relationships is the radical shift in attitude Zen practice demands of you. Previously, you are likely to have viewed the way you feel about someone as being based on two things. First, you look to the influence of external factors, such as the other person’s character and actions, the way they feel about you, and the dynamic between you. When you try to nurture or improve relationships while focusing on external factors, you concentrate on improving communication or understanding, or trying to bring about behavior change in yourself or the other person. There’s definitely a time and place for this kind of relationship work, but you’ve also probably realized the limitations of this approach. Sometimes it seems like mutual understanding, goodwill, and harmony are forever beyond your grasp when it comes to certain relationships.
Second, when navigating human relationships, you are likely to focus on internal factors you believe are mostly beyond your control – feelings and emotional reactions that arise due to karma. When someone wrongs or disrespects you, it seems natural to be angry. When you feel strong aversion for – or attraction to – someone, it seems like the feeling is a force of nature that you can’t do anything about. When certain circumstances trigger negative emotions in you, it seems imperative that you change the circumstances or avoid them entirely. Decades of resentment toward a person who has hurt you may seem impossible to shed. Without practice, you are likely to navigate your relationships – avoiding or conflicting with some people while acting with love and goodwill toward others – based on your emotions, as if those emotions are unchangeable laws according to which you need to live your life if you want to be happy.
To open the heart in real human relationships – the true testing ground of our practice – you turn your focus inwards and aspire to manifest goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity toward everyone, unconditionally. It’s not at all easy, but it is simple. In practice you seek to simultaneously manifest and realize that, ultimately, self and other are not separate. When dealing with real relationships, this can be very challenging – it can be hard enough to accept this truth in theory! Fortunately, it doesn’t matter whether you attain perfect sainthood in this lifetime; any progress you can make toward your aspirations reduces the conflict in your life, helps you feel more connected, and opens your heart. This progress improves your relationships and creates the conditions for deeper practice and insight.
Practice is something you add to your usual approach to relationships; you still pay attention to external factors and do your best to have harmonious interactions with people, and you still acknowledge the attitudes and reactions that arise within you due to karma. Then, to practice with relationship, you carefully discern what choices you have available to you for nurturing or improving a relationship regardless of external circumstances or your emotional karmic responses. What choices can you make no matter what the other person does?
The place to start practicing with a relationship is to carefully examine your attitude toward the other person. What thoughts, beliefs, emotions, fears, or hopes do you have that seem to be resulting in unmet needs or conflict? Try not to judge or censor yourself as you contemplate this question; your responses don’t have to be rational or noble for them to be sincere and painful. Chances are you will find that, at some level, you are expecting the other person to meet your needs for things like security, affection, affirmation, respect, fairness, companionship, or intimacy. You may feel justified in your expectations, but the truth is that even our best relationships will never satisfy all our needs all the time. Can you transform your expectation into a lightly held hope? “I expect you to treat me with respect,” becomes, “It would bring me joy if you treated me with respect.” This shifts your attention from insufficiency to the possibility of gratitude.
If you can manage to cultivate the Brahmaviharas toward the people in your life, it helps you recognize that they are on their own path and their life doesn’t center around you. As you practice sending them sincere, unconditional goodwill, compassion, and sympathetic joy, you become better able to perceive how often their less-than-ideal behavior arises because of their own struggles, not because they don’t care about or respect you. You develop some degree of equanimity in a relationship when you are able to view it from a larger perspective; you don’t have to win every argument, and every relationship goes through rough patches. The greatest equanimity comes from recognizing your own Buddha-Nature, because then you no longer have to rely on other people affirm your worthiness or security. Practice in Fields of Zen helps bring you closer to Realization, while Opening Your Heart makes you receptive to it.
As important as it is to practice with your relationships, be careful not to misinterpret the instruction to “Open Your Heart” in an unhelpful and even harmful way! Always include yourself in the equation, with the same degree of goodwill, compassion, kindness, and patience you aspire to extend to others. Opening Your Heart does not mean blaming yourself for all the problems in a relationship and letting your behavior be determined by what will please the other person and prevent conflict. Sometimes people will do this for years, thinking that if they just try hard enough, their relationship will become healthy and harmonious. Including yourself in the equation may mean recognizing your own limited ability to change or admitting that a relationship isn’t good for you and may need to end. All of this can be done with an Open Heart. Embracing yourself within your Open Heart will also allow you to, when necessary, set boundaries, say “no,” and even take action to stop someone from causing harm.
Aspiring to have an Open Heart in your real, human relationships doesn’t mean you’ll always know how to respond to the people in your life. It doesn’t solve all relationship problems or make you immune to disappointment, emotional stress, or even heartbreak. It does mean you’ll always know you’re doing your best, and you can learn to trust that an Open Heart maximizes your ability to respond appropriately and compassionately.
Sangha as Refuge and Testing Ground
Sangha – our community of fellow practitioners – is the social aspect of our practice and participating with a Sangha is essential if you want to experience Zen fully. Sangha is the vessel by which you encounter the rich, multi-faceted Buddhist tradition. Even if you prefer simply to study and practice on your own, you’re still partly dependent on past Sanghas for the ideas and practices you enjoy. Then there are countless other aspects of the Buddhist tradition which can’t be adequately conveyed simply through words, especially if you don’t encounter the speaker or writer in person or absorb those words in the context of a community of people practicing together.
Sangha also provides us with social support. We are social creatures, and most of us are much better able to apply discipline to our lives and engage with challenging teachings and practices when we’re doing so with others. You are profoundly affected by the attitudes and actions of those around you. This is why the Buddha admonished his disciple Ananda, who exclaimed that “admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie” was “half of the holy life.” The idea that such relationships are even half of the holy life is a bold statement, but the Buddha replied:
Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path.[ii]
Some people in Sangha may serve as your teachers, others as peers with whom you can share your spiritual life, and others as dear Dharma friends. It’s amazing how nourishing it can be to discuss your practice with other people who are trying to follow a similar path. In addition, simply through your presence in the Sangha you support others, giving you an opportunity to practice generosity and compassion.
Sangha offers one of your best opportunities for Opening Your Heart. Even to visit a Sangha with the thought that you might join it involves some opening of your heart. To join a community and let yourself begin to rely on it continues this process, and opening up to teachers and teachings can be a further challenge to a closed heart.
You might have a nice honeymoon period where it seems that Sangha members can do no wrong, but eventually at least some of the relationships you experience within Sangha will challenge you in ways that can require personal and spiritual growth on your part. No human being is perfect, and no community of human beings is perfect. You don’t get to choose who is part of your Sangha; as long as people are behaving with basic respectfulness, they get to be part of the community. This means, inevitably, some Sangha members are going to rub you the wrong way. Sooner or later, you get to work with your typical karmic reactions to other human beings, whether that’s judgmentalism, social anxiety, disappointment, anger, impatience, or fear of betrayal or abandonment. Especially once you’ve come to rely on a Sangha, it may feel like certain people are threatening that refuge for you.
In some ways, practicing with real, human relationships within Sangha is no different than outside of Sangha – you aim to cultivate unconditional goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity toward everyone. In Sangha, however, you have a special chance to work on tolerance, acceptance, trust, and openness. Sangha relationships are like family ones in that they last many years and are not necessarily with people you would have chosen to spend time with, but they are unlike family relationships in that everyone involved is – at least in theory – actively trying to follow the precepts, take responsibility for their own karma, and work toward harmonious relationships. We all aspire to relate to one another with an Open Heart.
As long as you remain engaged with Sangha and at least tolerate those with whom you have difficulty, you have a precious opportunity to resolve long-standing karmic patterns that inhibit your Open Heart. Sangha practice is sometimes called “potato practice,” because if you want to clean a bunch of potatoes, you can dump them in a big bucket of water and swish them around. As they knock into one another, they clean each other off! Another useful analogy is a rock tumbler, where we are the jagged rocks that get tumbled together until we smooth down one another’s rough edges. This can be an uncomfortable practice.
A resolution of the tension in a relationship with someone may take many years, and it may or may not involve any conscious change on the part of the other person. It is immensely rewarding, though, when you become able to discern what choices you have available to you for improving the relationship regardless of external circumstances, your emotional karmic response, or what the other person does. What you learn is usually something you can apply to other relationships in your life.
Sometimes it is a Sangha as a whole which challenges your Open Heart. Group dynamics can get tricky, especially if you’re involved in a community for many years. You may disagree with the way the Sangha is being run, or there may be people in it you think are unskillful. There certainly may come a time when it’s best for you to leave a Sangha, but unless ethical violations are occurring within the community, profound lessons can be learned from sticking it out. Your dissatisfaction with your Sangha is likely to be – at least in part – a form of Dukkha. This gives you a chance to uncover the false view(s) that are giving rise to Dukkha – probably in the form of expectations about how people should behave, or ideals about a perfect community that meets all your needs and makes you feel loved and appreciated at all times. It’s not that you should pretend your Sangha is perfect or stop trying to improve your community, but sadness and frustration can give way to gratitude if you can see your Sangha’s limitations but love and accept it anyway.
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Endnotes
[i] Reeves, Gene (translator). The Lotus Sutra: A Contemporary Translation of a Buddhist Classic. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2008.
[ii] “Upaddha Sutta: Half (of the Holy Life)” (SN 45.2), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn45/sn45.002.than.html . The noble eightfold path is a comprehensive description of practice laid out by the Buddha.
