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IN TIMES OF CRISIS

For all of us, there are times when it becomes particularly difficult to maintain the view. We can get caught up in our own patterns and lose sight of reality. Sometimes life is hard. We have financial problems, family problems, personal problems. It’s easy to say that everything is an illusion, but when it’s your child who is crying, your parent who is ill, or your lover who is leaving, this can be almost too much to handle. Maintaining one’s perspective, one’s overarching view of reality, under difficult conditions can be a challenge even for meditation masters.

In Tibet, there are ancient tantric training practices specifically designed to help practitioners keep their perspective and stay in the view. Some of the ancient practices may seem fairly outlandish to our Western way of thinking. For example, in Asia of old, people would meditate in terrifying graveyards, which were often filled with pieces of bone or even bodies being eaten by wild animals. In Tibet, we still find the custom of sky burial. When I visited a mountaintop sky burial site there, I expected to find windswept bones among an ancient circle of stones, perhaps watched over by a half-crazed old caretaker. What I found instead was an eighteen-year-old kid with a hatchet, whose job it was to cut up the corpses. He was proud to show me one of his treasured possessions, a postcard some tourist had given him of the Empire State Building.

I don’t mean to suggest that anyone seeking enlightenment ought to take up the practice of graveyard meditation. However, let’s understand that graveyard practice and others like it are simply trainings in facing one’s fears while maintaining mindfulness, balance, and overview. Often in the process of facing our fears, we discover that what we fear often isn’t really so very frightening. Each day we all have our own demons to face. These demons can take many forms—demands from a tyrannical employer; rejection from a hurtful mate; unconscious wounds and compulsions; stress caused by a pressing deadline. Learning to maintain mindfulness and perspective when we are facing personal upheaval is extraordinarily relevant to these modern times.

The more we can train ourselves and learn how to maintain mindfulness and “hang in there” even for the briefest of moments, the more we mature and grow in breadth and depth. We don’t need to hang out in ghostly cemeteries at night to find things that frighten us. We face such situations every day. Sometimes it is a particularly disturbing person whom we are afraid to touch or reach out to. Sometimes it’s something as simple as not wanting to make an unpleasant phone call because we fear what we will hear. At other times it’s facing the challenge of a genuine life-and-death problem.

We train in maintaining the view in times of crisis so we learn not to shut our eyes and avoid reality or responsibility. It’s too easy to rely on fears, denial, and other defense mechanisms to shield us from life’s painful moments. Maintaining the view helps us open our constricted minds and tender hearts, allowing the world in rather than walling it out.

We can train ourselves by intentionally facing some of the things we fear. We can duplicate some of the benefits of tantric graveyard meditations by visiting or volunteering in places that make us nervous—such as hospitals, emergency wards, nursing homes, homeless shelters—and maintaining meditative mindfulness and self-awareness as we face what we fear. This is another application of the tonglen practice of breathing in unwanted circumstances and difficulties, rather than always pushing them away. Facing our fears and anxieties is a way of using painful emotions to work any and all situations. In this meditation training, we use passions, illness, crisis, and conflict to cultivate wisdom, compassion, understanding, and fearless courage. In this way we can actually purify our habitual, unsatisfying cravings and aversions (I like, I don’t like; I want, I don’t want). Thus we loosen the grip of our negative patterns and karmic propensities,