The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [77]
Another way to reorient yourself with your thoughts and feelings is to share them with others. If you are feeling fear or despair these days, you can be sure that you are not alone in this. No doubt many of your friends and family members are feeling this as well. Rather than ignoring your anxieties—which tend to proliferate like mushrooms in the dark room of your closeted mind—or complaining obsessively about them to everyone you meet, which also increases the misery, you can undertake the spiritual discipline of speaking to others.
Taking a topic or a prompt from your notebook, or cueing off something you’ve read or written, or simply distilling what you have been thinking or feeling into a coherent thought, you can speak to one or more people in a structured way. Bring a few friends together. Divide yourselves into groups of three or four. After five minutes of silence to collect your thoughts, have each person speak as spontaneously as possible for five to seven minutes on the chosen topic. The others just listen, no questions, no comments. If it seems useful, one person can give feedback to the speaker. Not advice (it is a much better practice if advice and commentary are outlawed), but simply reviewing for the speaker, in your own words, what you have heard him or her say. Listening to what you have said repeated back to you in another’s voice can be extremely illuminating. And forgetting about your own trouble long enough to actually listen to another is a great relief. It is likely to cause you to feel sympathy, even love. There is no better medicine than thinking of others, even if for only five minutes.
Working with these practices, you’ll get a grip on the kinds of thinking and feeling that arise when conditions are difficult. The goal is not to make the thoughts and feelings go away: when there is loss or trouble, it is normal to feel sorrow, fear, despair, confusion, discouragement, and so on. These feelings connect us to others, who feel them as we do, so we don’t want to eliminate them. But it would be good to have some perspective—and occasional relief—so these thoughts don’t get the best of us and become full-blown demons pushing us around.
Having considered some extensions of meditation practice, let’s return to the basic practice. When you sit, noticing the breath and the body on the chair or cushion, noticing the thoughts and feelings in the mind and heart and perhaps also the sounds in the room and the stillness, something else also begins to come into view. You notice the most fundamental of all facts: you are alive. You are a living, breathing, embodied, human being. You can actually feel this—feel the feeling of being alive. You can rest in this basic feeling, the nature of life, of consciousness, the underlying basis of everything you will ever experience—even the negativity. Sitting there with this basic feeling of being alive, you will feel gratitude. After all, you didn’t ask for this; you didn’t earn it. It is just there, a gift to you. It won’t last forever, but for now, in this moment, here it is, perfect, complete. And you are sharing it with everything else that exists in this stark, basic, and beautiful way. Whatever your problems and challenges, you are, you exist in this bright world with others, with trees, sky, water, stars, sun, and moon. If you sit there long enough and regularly enough you will feel this, even in your darkest moments.
And based on this experience, you will reflect differently on your life. What is really important? How much do your expectations and social constructs really matter? What really counts? What is the bottom line for a human life?
To be alive. Well, you are alive.
To love others and be loved by others. Well, you do love, and it is within your power to love more deeply. And if you do, it is guaranteed that others will respond to you with more love.
To be kind to others and to receive kindness is also within your power, regardless of expectations, losses, and circumstances.
You need to eat every day, it is true. You need a good place