Click here to view the embedded video.

That one day, we will live in a world where we recognize all beings as one family.

I have a dream that on that day, when any one of my brothers or sisters, be they known to me or unknown, seen or unseen, animal or human, finds themselves in sorrow for any reason, a dark blossom will flower in my own heart and in yours and yours, until all of creation sways in the darkness of night, together, and together we sing the song of love.

I have a dream that when a brother or sister knows joy for any reason, I find myself also standing under that cascading waterfall and so do you and you and we are each refreshed, nourished, and cleansed by it together, and together we sing the song of love.

I dream that all beings of all the times in all realms have utterly open hearts and are thus capable of living in the great equanimity free from delusion, free from grasping, and free from hatred.

You have a dream.

What is it?

In the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, we say that meditation trains us to be warriors in our lives—fearless, open hearted, and genuine. Today I want to talk about fearlessness and its connection to meditation practice and I’ll start out by relating a story I heard Pema Chodron tell in one of her books. It is about her teacher, the founder of Shambhala Buddhism, which is the lineage I practice in: the Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Trungpa Rinpoche and some attendants were approaching a monastery on foot and for some reason no one was there to greet them. A large guard dog, a mastiff, protected the entrance to the monastery and apparently he was snapping and fierce, frothing at the mouth, straining to get at them. At some point, the dog actually broke free and began to run toward them. Understandably, the attendants began to run the other way. Chogyam Trungpa started to run, too—right at the dog. At this point, the dog became afraid. He stopped. He looked at Trungpa Rinpoche. He turned and went the other direction.

So this is a great lesson in how we train in fearlessness. We all have such giant mastiffs in our lives—whether they take the shape of financial fears, relationship woes, basic survival concerns, or simpler things like being afraid to ask for a raise or worrying that we will fail a test or just have too many emails to answer and people might be mad at us. (OK, I’ll claim that last one, but I’m sure I’m not alone.) What would our version of running at the dog look like?

It’s tempting to think that this means we need to DO something and, well, perhaps we do. But this is not necessarily the warrior’s approach. The way we face our fears is by first and foremost feeling them without trying to banish them or crank them up. Allow them. Open to them. Not to embrace or coddle them, but because we are not afraid to be afraid. A warrior is one who is not afraid of himself. We don’t hide from ourselves and there is a continuous commitment to giving up all our hiding places, even—especially—spirituality. Chogyam Trungpa writes in his wonderful book, Smile at Fear:

If you are afraid of seeing yourself, you may use spirituality or religion as way of looking at yourself without seeing anything about yourself at all. When people are embarrassed by themselves, there is no fearlessness involved. However, if someone is willing to look at himself or herself, to explore and practice wakefulness on the spot, he or she is a warrior.

Of course our meditation practice IS exactly this practice—of seeing ourselves. So don’t think it has to involve grand gestures or the breaking down of barriers or any kind of giant leap. It is simply what we are about to do: sit, turn toward our experience, and allow ourselves to be exactly who we are. We don’t know what we’re going to see. We may be delighted. We may be terrified. Most likely, we will simply be bored. It’s all OK. It’s the willingness to face ourselves that is the ultra-important starting point.

When we are not afraid of our capacity to love, we discover the depth of our compassion. When we are not afraid of our fear, we discover our unending capacity for warriorship. You can do this. If you’ve meditated, in fact, you already have. As we go forward in our practice today, know that on one hand we are simply sitting on the earth and breathing. But on the other, we are cultivating a kind of bravery that has no end.

Sign up for The Open Heart Project to receive meditation instruction!

As we move into a new year, I want to offer you a few personal reflections, some suggestions for your own process of reflecting, and opportunities to practice together into 2012.

For me, this week provides the perfect circumstances for turning within and asking myself honestly, how did I do in 2011? What do I hope for in 2012? How might I get there?

I’ve found that it doesn’t do to make lists of things I hope to accomplish but feel are lacking currently. This just makes me sad. Instead, I’ve found it more useful to begin training myself into the feeling state I know is most beneficial, which is to have an open heart and a sense of possibility. No matter how things are going in my life, if I know how to return to this state of receptivity and curiosity, then I have found the key to joy. And after all, this, a joyful life, is my objective, not making a gajillion dollars, weighing less pounds, or possessing a particular title. Not that there is anything wrong with those things but if my happiness is dependent on them, they are traps. Instead of requiring certain things to feel joyful, I could just feel joyful, on the spot. When I turn my attention to the truth of my experience rather than what I wish my experience was, this wakeful state is always what I find. And my favorite definition of joyful? Awake.

It is not easy, but it actually is that simple.

Joy comes with the cultivation of an inner life and an intimate knowledge of the way your own mind and heart work—not so that you can manipulate yourself, but as an expression of love itself. Joy comes from loving yourself. Not because you have been good or successful or beautiful or self-sacrificing or authentic or anything—but just because you are the only you who will ever be you and you are you, and you is good, period, full stop. You, exactly as you are right now, with all of your brilliance, confusion, sorrow, and f&*cked up-ness are good. You are cause for celebration.

Please do not take my word for any of this. Check it all out yourself, you must. No “wisdom” means anything unless you yourself know it to be true, based on personal experience. So as we move into a new year together, I have some suggestions for deepening this kind of relationship to yourself. Check them out. What is helpful to you, keep. What sounds crazy (or useless), feel free to blip right over. Here goes.

1. Together with the wonderful Patti Digh, I’ve assembled 7 questions from 7 teachers to help you contemplate your way across the finish line into 2012. In order to share these questions with you, you’ll be receiving an email a day from me through January 1, but thereafter we’ll go back to two emails per week.

We’re going to present a question a day between December 26 and January 1. Each question has a theme. You can answer the question in your journal, in the comments section below, and/or on our Facebook page. You can answer each question on its day or collect them all and answer them in a giant answer-orgy on December 31 or another day you choose. Make this process your own.

Today’s question is from Patti and the topic is On Living In Your Body (What Patti calls “Bendiness.”) She is a wonderful writer and teacher who offers and embodies kindness, creativity, humor, and all-around human decency.

Her question for us: Where have I learned and lived in 2011? In my head, in my body, or both? What would living more fully in my body in 2012 bring to me? How can I embody life and learning as I move through this liminal space between now and next? How can I more fully learn from the neck down in 2012?

In our hyper-intellectualized disembodied world, we sometimes allow technology to take the place of our bodies, don’t we? We sit, with only our arms moving as we type. We’ve even begun to distrust what our bodies say to us. Instead, we learn from the neck up, when learning from the neck down and fully embodying life will provide us with such greater riches. What do you allow yourself to really feel in your body, without the need to clarify, intellectualize, provide proof, capture with data, or block? What can you allow yourself to really feel in your body in 2012? –Patti Digh

Future questions are as follows:
Dec 27 Ken Robert On Shadows
Dec 28 Andrew Mellen On Becoming Organized
Dec 29 Jennifer Louden On Serving
Dec 30 Jonathan Fields On Creativity
Dec 31 Susan Piver On Spirituality
Jan 1 Seth Godin On Being an Artist

Stay tuned!

2. All this week, I’m going to be practicing and studying more. If you choose to open each of these emails, you may be too! (There will be a guided meditation to accompany each of the questions listed above. Our practice won’t change particularly but will be “flavored” by each question.) It would be great to practice together each day before the new year begins.

Before I practice each day, I’m going to read from a dharma book and make note of my reactions and questions in my journal. I will be reading this and this. If you’re looking for reading suggestions this week, I joyfully and wholeheartedly recommend any or all of the following:

Our book of the month, Turning the Mind Into an Ally by Sakyong Mipham
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa
And, if you’re interested in taking a dive into an important, scholarly, and profound foundational dharma text, please try
The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa (Don’t be overly afraid or proud of reading such texts. Just soak in their wisdom. It is real and completely indestructible, as well as practical and fascinating.)

3. Member of The Open Heart Project? Consider stopping by on New Year’s Eve to meditate together. You party animal! I know that what you really want to do on New Year’s Eve is practice meditation!! Anyway, I do. I’ll be meditating from 11p on December 31, 2011 until 12:30a on Jan 1, 2012. You may join me for any or all of that as I’ll be live-streaming my practice. Times are EST.

To learn meditation and receive support via guided meditation instruction sent right to your inbox, sign up for The Open Heart Project.

Wishing you each and all a fully awake transition into a beautiful new year, hearts wide open.

I’m sure you have felt gentleness time and again for those you love or admire: your child, lover, a hero of music or politics, even your pet. You think of this creature and your heart melts. You feel how deeply you wish for their ease, and not because they “deserve” it. There actually is no reason at all for this feeling, beyond love. Your heart is simply open.

When have you ever felt this toward yourself? It is very, very important that you look at yourself in just this way. Please, starting today: soften toward this precious and irreplaceable being: YOU. All you have to do is notice her. She is like no other and has gifts to give that cannot be sourced elsewhere.

From here, you are able to feel this way for everyone, not just those you already love. In this way, by opening your heart, first to yourself and then to all beings, you open up to your own life.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We sit there minute after minute, day after day, month after month and it is totally natural to wonder: Am I really doing anything? Is there a right way to meditate? Could I be doing it wrong?

There are several possible answers to consider.

1. The simplest one is this: if at any point during your practice, you notice that attention has strayed away from breath and you remember to return to it, you are doing it “right.” Case closed.

2. Another way to approach this question is with another question, best posed some weeks or months after having begun to practice: Have I noticed any differences in my life since beginning a meditation practice? Perhaps you feel a tad more cheerful or patient or equanimous. Or maybe you are becoming a bit more sensitive. If you are noticing any qualitative changes in your daily experience, you could imagine that your meditation practice is going pretty well, even if you think you’re a “bad” meditator, i.e. find it impossible to follow two consecutive breaths. I think it’s the commitment to practice itself that effects change as musch as anything and remember, the aim of meditation (if there even is one) isn’t to become a great meditator. It’s to become a great person—one who is kind, wise, and brave.

3. The final possible answer is this. Who knows?! Meditation is a spiritual practice and as such is an object of mystery. If we really understood exactly how meditation “worked,” I’d say we had failed to understand it at all.

So the best bet is to keep on practicing. Stay with it. Do the best you can. And when you look back over your life, don’t spend too much time on the question, “was I meditating right” and focus instead on “how well did I live?”

Please sign up for The Open Heart Project to receive meditation instruction twice weekly via email.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The feeling I woke up with this morning was very familiar. A kind of heaviness in my body and a sense of being weighted down. A kind of mental activity I know quite well—that no matter where I looked in my life: my work, my relationship, my bank account, my home, my body, my future—it all looked bleak. Very bleak. Whenever this happens I dive into stories about how it got to be this way. True stories, I might add. I missed this opportunity. I made that wrong choice. My abilities are limited. Yes, true—on one hand. And utterly meaningless on the other.

Fortunately, I am old enough and practiced enough to recognize (at some point…) that my mind is playing a very unpleasant trick on me. I catch myself. At this point, a number of options are possible.

There are schools of thought that suggest that the negative stories we tell ourselves are basically made up in the first place and we should make up positive ones to replace them.

I’ve tried this. It doesn’t work.

What seems to work much better is to let go of stories of all kinds and take a fresh start, moment to moment.

There are two ways of liberating ourselves from negative thought patterns. The first is to find whatever therapy or therapies work for you and attempt to figure it out that way. This is very wonderful. The second way is to liberate each negative thought on the spot and with this second choice, meditation is very, very helpful. It trains you to observe your thoughts as they arise and make a choice about where to place your attention.

For me, one of the most deceptively simple pieces of advice for working with strong emotion was given by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan meditation master who transmitted the Shambhala teachings. It was this: “You could always just cheer up.”

When I first heard that, I was kind of offended. What do you mean, “cheer up?” It sounded like what people used to tell me when I was little, some variation of “why are you always so serious?” or “You’re too sensitive. Get over yourself.” Stuff that used to make me really mad. But CTR did not mean this. He meant you could always simply let go of what is plaguing you—no matter how heavy and sorrowful—and take a breath of fresh air.

You could try it. I’ve tried it countless times. When I catch myself falling into a pit of despair over loved ones who are suffering from illness, for example, or my finances, also suffering from illness I might add, or my ability to make my dreams manifest—I say to myself as I plummet, “you could always just cheer up” and, amazingly, even if it’s only for a moment, I do. It has nothing to do with talking myself out of what is bothering me by convincing myself that it will all be ok for this reason or that. It has nothing to do with fake-deleting negative thoughts and fake-inserting wishful thinking, aka positive thoughts. It has to do with letting it all, all, all go and reconnecting with—well, what would you call it? The present moment. Nowness. Space.

You could do it too. It’s really, really simple to get the sense of how. Have you ever been in a fitness class, for example, where they tell you to tense up your shoulders…hold…hold…hold…and then release? When you do this, there is a sudden rush of clean energy. You can also do this with your mind. When you feel really drepressed—or grief-stricken or angry or disappointed or what have you—you could tune into it. Intensify it. Locate it in your physical or emotional body, or in the environment—and then intensify, intensify, intensify—LET GO. Try it. See what happens. What happens for me is there is a sudden rush, even a tiny one, of life force and renewed energy.

The therapy path for working with depression meets depressive patterns as wave forms. Which is awesome. In this way, we can work with the ongoing and pervasive presence of negativity. The cheer-up path for working with depression meets such patterns as particles. We can work with each one in the moment it appears. Together, these two approaches, wave and particle, can create quantum change in our relationship to depression.  Check it out.

And know this: it all begins with catching yourself, with the ability, no matter how momentary, to know what is happening in your own mind–as if a lightning strike suddenly lit up a dark valley and you see exactly what is going on. Then you can step outside of your heavy, believable, painful, oppressive thought patterns. With this step away, you introduce a moment of possibility…of change…of a fresh start…you cheer up.  And everything is possible.

This ability, of course, is the fruit of meditation practice. Your practice teaches you how to do this.  Please sign up for The Open Heart Project to receive meditation instruction videos 2x weekly via email.

PS After making this video, I saw that my reason for depression was my hairdo. Dude, I need a haircut.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“How can you let go of fear of uncertainty?”

Of course we all fear uncertainty–and these days there is much to be uncertain about, whether our concerns are financial, romantic, health-related, planetary, and on and on. Of course I’m no exception.

I wish I had some magic Buddhist secret for how to stop feeling afraid and uncertain. if I did, you would be the first to know it.

Well, come to think of it, i DO know a magic Buddhist secret, sort of.

The story* in the video above will illustrate one option for working with fear and uncertainty. Hint: it doesn’t involve positive thought. It involves reconnecting with the reality that exists beyond negative and positive thought. This reality is far more spacious and relaxed than trying to crank up a reality where we always feel or think certain things and do not feel and think certain other things. That is a nerve wracking state of affairs.

Of course your meditation practice is the gateway to this unconditional state.

For today’s 10-minute guided meditation, please sign up for The Open Heart Project.

*I told this story in my book, the wisdom of a broken heart, so if you’ve heard it once, i hope you will enjoy it twice.

Sometimes we are just too agitated to meditate. It’s not even that we can’t find 10 minutes–it’s that when we do, it just feels too uncomfortable to sit. All the things on our to do list come up. The heart starts racing. The mind flips out. The more we sit, the more we freak ourselves out.

Sound familiar? This happens to me all the time. Here is what I do to get over the agitation that prevents me from meditating.

1. Remember the technique
2. Sit longer
3. Make an offering

The first video goes into detail on these suggestions.

To practice meditation together, sign up for The Open Heart Project. You’ll receive two guided meditations per week from me so that all you have to do to meditate is press “play.” It’s free.

Questions? Comments? Bring. Them. On. It may take me a little bit, but I answer all emails.

Q: “How can I increase my mindfulness when all the stressors of my life come into play at once?”

A: I really appreciate your question about becoming more mindful when you are experiencing moments of particular stress. This is totally doable. However–if by becoming more mindful, you mean ceasing to feel stress, it’s not going to work. When you are stressed (or happy or sad or bored or frustrated, and so on) the way to become more mindful is by simply placing your attention on your experience.

Your meditation practice teaches you exactly how to do this. When you meditate, the breath is the object of mindfulness. You place attention on it over and over and, when it strays, bring it back. You can make stress (or any feeling) the object of your mindfulness by doing the same thing: placing attention ON what you are experiencing, rather than trying to draw it away. I think you will find that turning toward your experience is the most direct way to liberate it. But don’t take my word for it. Let me know what you experience.

Today’s video (the one below on the left) is a little riff on why we meditate to begin with. Is it to become all spiritual? Unflappable? Is it to become more human? More genuine? Hmmm…. Check the video for the answer…

The second video (on the right) is today’s 10 minute guided meditation practice. Please give it a try.

Here is the audio version of video #1.

Here is the audio version of video #2.

Questions? Comments? Bring. Them. On. It make take me a little bit, but I answer all emails.

If you’d like to send a link this post and/or wish to comment on it, it lives on my blog here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.