True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (3 page)

Now I could more easily give myself to the waves of fear and sorrow, and simply notice the drifting thoughts and physical sensations—squeezing and soreness—that were coming and going. Whenever the worries that had been snagging me appeared, I sensed that they too were waves, tenacious ones that pressed uncomfortably on my chest. By not resisting, by letting the waves wash through me, I began to relax. Rather than fighting the stormy surges, I rested in an ocean of awareness that embraced all the moving waves. I had arrived in a sanctuary that felt large enough to hold whatever was going on in my life.

Natural Presence: Wakeful, Open, and Tender

Presence is not some exotic state that we need to search for or manufacture. In the simplest terms,
it is the felt sense of wakefulness, openness, and tenderness that arises when we are fully here and now with our experience.
You've surely tasted presence, even if you didn't call it that. Perhaps you've felt it lying awake in bed and listening to crickets on a hot summer night. You might have sensed presence while walking alone in the woods. You might have arrived in full presence as you witnessed someone dying or being born.

Presence is the awareness that is intrinsic to our nature. It is immediate and embodied, perceived through our senses. If you look closely at any experience of presence, you'll find the three qualities I mentioned above:

Our
wakefulness
is the basic consciousness that is aware of what is happening, the intelligence that recognizes the changing flow of moment-by-moment experience—the sounds that are here around us, the sensations of our body, our thoughts. It is the “knowing” quality of awareness.

Our
openness
is the space of awareness in which life takes place. This awareness does not oppose our experience, or evaluate it in any way. Even when our feelings and thoughts are painfully stirred up, it simply recognizes what's happening and allows our emotional life to be as it is. Like the sky when weather systems come and go, the open space of awareness is unstained by the changing expressions of life moving through us. And yet awareness has a natural sensitivity and the capacity to express warmth. This responsiveness is what I call
tenderness.
Our tenderness allows us to respond with compassion, love, and awe to whatever arises, in all its beauty and sorrow.

We can refer to these as the three qualities of presence, but in fact they're inseparable. Think of a sunlit sky. There is no way to separate the light of the sky from the space it illuminates; there is no way to separate the warmth we feel from the space and light around us. Light, space, and warmth are all inextricable expressions of a whole.

Our longing to live fully—from our beingness—calls us home to this natural presence. Our realization of truth arises from the lucidity of presence. Love flows from the receptivity of presence. Aliveness and creativity flower when we inhabit the openness of presence. All that we cherish is already here, sourced in presence. Each time we cry out for help our longing can remind us to turn toward our true refuge, toward the healing and freedom of natural presence.

Coming Back to Presence

After my retreat, I returned home with the intention of taking refuge in presence whenever I was irritated, anxious, and tight. I was alert when the first flare-up occurred, a week after I got back. My ex-husband called to say he couldn't take care of Narayan that evening, leaving me scrambling to find a baby-sitter so I could see my therapy clients. “I'm the breadwinner, and I can't even count on him for
this
!” my mind sputtered. “Once again he's not doing his share, once again he's letting me down!” But when I was done for the day I took some time to pause and touch into the judgment and blame lingering in my body, and my righteous stance softened. I sat still as the blaming thoughts and swells of irritation came and went. Underneath the resentment was an anxious question: “How will I manage?” As I let the subterranean waves of anxiety move through me, I found a quiet inner space that had more breathing room—and more perspective. Of course I couldn't figure out how the future would play out. The only time I had was right now, and this moment was okay. From this space I could sense my ex-husband's stress about finding a new place to live, working out our schedules, and more deeply, adapting to a different future than he had imagined. This helped me feel more tolerant and kind.

At other times I was much more resistant to entrusting myself to the waves, especially when my ex and I disagreed on finances or on the particulars of our custody arrangement. Any kind of entrusting felt like a setup for getting taken advantage of. I found that I first needed to hold myself with compassion, really honoring my need to take care of myself. Then I could regard even my most angry, mean-spirited thoughts with forgiveness. Gradually my heart would unclench some and I'd allow myself to simply feel the painful currents of anger and fear moving through me. Then, as I'd experienced at the retreat, I'd reconnect with a spacious presence that included whatever was happening, and allowed me to regard my life with more wisdom. Resting in this presence, I could begin to more clearly distinguish my own healthy needs—for separating out our finances fairly, for having our own living spaces—from my anxious and distrustful impulses. I felt at home in myself when I stood up for what I needed, but not when I tried to exert a tightfisted control. And, as I discovered, the more my ex-husband sensed me trying to be respectful and flexible, the more he responded in kind.

Taking refuge in presence made it possible for me and my ex-husband to continue to be dear friends and to still consider each other family. But it wasn't easy. Both of us were dedicated to spiritual practice, so we entered the separation process naively, believing that we could navigate it in an honorable, mature way. Neither of us anticipated that when we were really stressed, we'd purposefully act in hurtful ways. Yet at times we did—we misled each other, we said things we regretted, we sometimes exuded anger or disdain. What carried us through this emotionally painful season was a commitment to keep our son's best interests in the foreground, and not to give up on loving each other. The practice of taking refuge in presence allowed me to forgive both of us for our humanness and helped to keep our caring alive.

When we are suffering, our call of “Help!” can arise from a deep place within us. As Pam found at Jerry's side, and as I experienced at the end of my first marriage, our sincere longing awakens us. It guides us to the wholeness and freedom that can be found in the present moment. And yet, when we're in trouble, here and now is often the last place we want to be. What stops us from coming home to the true refuge of presence? What stops us from choosing to be here? My name for this challenge to presence is “the trance of small self,” and we will explore it in the following chapter.

Guided Meditation: A Pause for Presence

A natural entry into presence is through your body. You can do this short meditation anytime you have a bit of quiet and privacy.

Find a place to sit comfortably and close your eyes. Begin with three conscious breaths: Inhale long and deep, filling the lungs, then exhale slowly, sensing a letting go of any tensions in your body and mind.

Invite your awareness to fill your whole body. Can you imagine your physical form as a field of sensations? Can you feel the movement and quality of the sensations—tingling, vibrating, heat or cool, hard or soft, tight or flowing? Take a few moments to bring your full attention to this dance of sensations.

Now let your awareness open out into the space around you. Can you imagine receiving the symphony of sounds, letting it wash through you? Can you listen to the changing play of sounds, not just with your ears but with your whole awareness? Take a few moments to bring an open attention to listening to sounds.

Keeping your eyes closed, let your awareness receive the play of images and light at the eyelids. You might notice a flickering of light and dark or certain shapes, shadows or figures of light. Take a few moments to attend to seeing.

Feeling your breath and sensing the space around you, be receptive to any scents that might be in the air. Discover what it is like to smell and receive the odors present in the surrounding area.

Now let all your senses be wide open, your body and mind relaxed and receptive. Allow life to flow freely through you. Take as long as you'd like, listening to and feeling your moment-to-moment experience. Notice the changing flow of sensations, sounds, aliveness, and also the background of presence that is here. Let yourself appreciate this awake, inner space of presence. When you are finished, sense the possibility of bringing an alert, open awareness to whatever you are doing next.

As you move through the day, pause periodically and briefly reawaken your senses, primarily by feeling bodily sensations and listening to sounds. With practice, you will become increasingly at home in natural presence.

We are born with a beautiful open spirit, alive with innocence and resilience. But we bring this goodness into a difficult world.

Imagine that at the moment of birth we begin to develop a space suit to help us navigate our strange new environment. The purpose of this space suit is to protect us from violence and greed and to win nurturance from caretakers who, to varying degrees, are bound by their own self-absorption and insecurities. When our needs aren't met, our space suit creates the best defensive and proactive strategies it can. These include tensions in the body and emotions such as anger, anxiety, and shame; mental activity such as judging, obsessing, and fantasizing; and a whole array of behavioral tactics for going after whatever is missing—security, food, sex, love.

Our space suit is essential for survival, and some of its strategies do help us become productive, stable, and responsible adults. And yet the same space suit that protects us can also prevent us from moving spontaneously, joyfully, and freely through our lives.

This is when our space suit becomes our prison. Our sense of who we are becomes defined by the space suit's “doings,” its strengths and weaknesses. We become identified with our skill in problem-solving or communicating; identified with our judgments and obsessions; identified with our anxiety and anger. “Identified” means that we think we
are
the space suit! It appears to us that we actually
are
the self who possesses the anxiety and anger; we
are
the self who judges; we
are
the self whom others admire; we
are
the self who is special or imperfect and alone.

When we become fused with the space suit, we begin living in what I call trance, and our sense of who we are is radically contracted. We have forgotten who is gazing through the space-suit mask; we have forgotten our vast heart and awareness. We have forgotten the mysterious presence that is always here, behind any passing emotion, thought, or action.

Living in trance is like being caught in a dream, and while we are in it we are cut off from our own moment-to-moment experience, disconnected from this living world. We have left home—our awareness and aliveness—and become unknowingly confined in a distorted fragment of reality.

We each have our own styles of leaving home—our space-suit strategies to cope with the pain of unmet needs. Yet waking up is a universal process. Slowly or quickly, we come to see that we've been living in a contracted and often painful reality. We want to reconnect with our innocence, our basic goodness. We want to know the truth of who we are. Our sincere longing turns us toward a path of true refuge.

This awakening began in my own life eight years before my first Buddhist retreat, and I'd like to share its beginnings with you. As you already know from chapter 1, it certainly wasn't achieved all at once. Yet when the trance dissolves, even for a short time, we can see the potential for freedom and a path out of suffering.

The Perfection Project

For as long as I can remember I have yearned to know truth, to be aware and kind. When I discovered yoga in college, I was convinced I had found the fast track to becoming the person I wanted to be. Immediately after graduation, I entered an ashram—a dedicated yoga community—near Boston. I was sure that if I gave it my all, this path would lead to spiritual freedom.

Our community followed a rigorous regime, rising before dawn for a cold shower, followed by several hours of yoga, meditation, chanting, and prayer. We also worked long hours running a yoga center, vegetarian restaurant, and retail store in Harvard Square. I was devoted and zealous, often getting up even earlier or staying up even later than my fellow yogis for additional spiritual practice.

My sincere spiritual longing was intertwined with a belief—one held by this and many similar spiritual and religious communities—that if we are to be happy and free, we must purify our egos of all selfishness, aggression, and insecurity. The highs of an athletic style of yoga and the sometimes rapturous feelings that emerged in meditation often reassured me that I was progressing. And yet at other times I'd become acutely aware of my “impurities,” and throw myself at my spiritual practices with added vigor.

Such striving to be perfect is an outward sign of living in trance. My trance was fueled and sustained by the belief that I was a limited, not-okay self. Without being fully aware of it, I carried around many ideals about how a spiritual person should feel and look and behave. I also had ideals about how a “together” worldly person should be. I regularly scrutinized myself to see how I was doing compared to my current notion of that perfect self. Of course, I almost always fell short—right below the surface lurked my selfishness and mixed motives, my ambition and judgment. Looking back, I can see how the combination of genuine spiritual aspiration with unconscious perfectionism became so confusing and combustible. I can see how, as poet Danna Faulds puts it, “Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain.”

The Perfection Project Collapses

The morning practices at the ashram energized me and freed me temporarily from the tension of a self-centered focus. I enjoyed the sweetness of meditating and chanting with my friends, and that camaraderie of breakfast and carpooling to work together. While this sense of well-being often lasted for hours, on one morning I had a distinctive crash.

At that time, I was director of our yoga center, and we were behind in promoting our major event of the year, which featured a number of well-known teachers. When the head of our local community arrived late to our weekly staff meeting, visibly upset, I asked him what was wrong.

“What's wrong?” he said in a barely controlled voice. “Just take a look at this.” He thrust in front of me the flier I had created for the event, and I immediately saw the typo in bold print—it was the wrong date. My heart sank, and I felt my face heat up with embarrassment. We had just printed three thousand of these fliers. I had screwed up big time.

We talked about producing a new flier, rescheduling the mailing, and pursuing other ways of getting the word out. Although my mind scrambled to solve the problem, the weight of failure sat like a big stone in my chest. At the end of our meeting I began an apology: “This was my responsibility,” I said in a low monotone, “and I'm really sorry for messing up …” Then as I felt the others' eyes on me, I felt a flash of anger and the words tumbled out: “But, you know, this has been a huge amount of work and I've been totally on my own.” I could feel my eyes burning, but I blinked back the tears. “It would have been nice if someone had been available to proofread … maybe this kind of thing wouldn't have happened.”

For the rest of the week I was trapped in self-disgust. Hour after hour, my mind replayed every recent incident that highlighted my flaws. I saw myself lying to get out of a social obligation, exaggerating the size of my yoga classes to another teacher, gossiping with a friend to feel more like an insider. Instead of generosity and selfless service, my focus was on my own spiritual progress and striving to shine as a yoga teacher. Once again I found myself facing what I most disliked about myself: insecurity and self-centeredness. I felt disconnected from everyone around me, and stuck inside a self I didn't want to be.

As I struggled through those difficult days, it came to me that for as long as I could remember I had been trying to prove that I was okay, trying to reassure myself that I was making progress. I had a checklist of accomplishments—as a student and social activist, yogi and teacher. In all of these roles I'd tried to embody the definition of a “good person”—helpful, good listener, constructive confidant, “positive” in all situations. I was ardent about doing my yoga and meditations. Yet now, my sense of competency had been undone by a single mistake, my sense of being a good, spiritual person erased by a moment of angry reactivity.

Despite all of my self-improvement strategies, I was left face to face with the feeling of being a fundamentally flawed self.

Space-Suit Self Is Small Self

When I teach about trance, students sometimes assume that any experience of self is bad or nonspiritual, that it is something they should try to eliminate or transcend. This certainly was my view in the ashram—my sense of self was inseparable from imperfection! Now I think of space-suit self as
a small self,
or, as it's more commonly known, “ego.”

“Ego” usually comes with negative connotations, but in actuality, the small self (or ego) is a natural part of our conditioning and is essential for navigating life. In all humans, it arises from the sense of “I” and includes all the mental activities that promote and defend our functioning. It includes the fearful, protective self that some traditions refer to as the body of fear. It includes the wanting self that seeks to satisfy its needs for food and sex, security and respect.

Yet this small self is not our
true self
—it does not encompass the fullness of who we are. To put it another way, when we identify with a small self, we are perceiving ourselves as a cluster of ocean waves, not recognizing that we are made of ocean. When we realize our true self is ocean, the familiar pattern of waves—our fears and defensiveness, our wants and busyness—remains a part of us, but it does not define us.

Our mistaken identity is at the heart of the Buddha's teachings. He saw that we are all conditioned to hold on to pleasant or familiar experiences (which he called grasping or clinging), and to resist unpleasant experiences (which he called aversion). Both grasping and aversion narrow our sense of who we are—making us cling to an identity as a limited, individual, isolated existence.

This mistaken identity is sustained by the stories we tell ourselves. We believe that we are the voice in our head, we believe that we are the self-character in our story, and we believe that our view of the world “out there” is reality. You might have a crowded and stressful life, with more demands from work, family, and friends than you feel you can meet. Perhaps this summons up stories and feelings of how overwhelmed you are—of how you always have too much to do, how others expect too much from you, how you wish you had more free time but don't want to be irresponsible. Such stories easily lead to false refuges such as overwork, lying to protect your time, and overconsuming to numb anxiety. By continually replaying your stories, you strengthen your identification with a beleaguered, overly accommodating self. This becomes the dominant sense of who you are. You become trapped inside the space suit.

Or consider what happens if you believe that everyone is really out for their own welfare and that if you don't take advantage of a situation, someone else will. You might feel angry, even violated, whenever other people try to have their way. This might lead to false refuges such as controlling other people and focusing on accumulating power and possessions. By generating stories that sustain your worldview, your identity becomes consolidated as an aggressive, controlling self.

The more our stories are driven by fear, the more imprisoned we become in our confined sense of self. Not only does our mind believe, as I did, that “something is wrong with me,” but our body is gripped by the emotions correlated with this belief—depression, shame, and even more fear. Then “something is wrong with me” is not just an idea we can easily release, it's a gut-level conviction. It
feels
real. When we've been hurt by someone, the belief that something is wrong with them also feels real. We are caught in a trance that divides us both from our inner life and from others.

Our identification with a small self is always generated and sustained outside the light of awareness. And it continues as long as we are unaware that our stories are simply stories (not reality), unaware of the raw feelings in our body, unaware of the fear or wanting that drives our behaviors. This is the nature of trance: It is incompatible with awareness and dissolves when we take refuge in presence.

Awakening from Trance

My week of self-aversion, triggered by a typo, began a lifelong process of recognizing and releasing my identification with a small self. Because my self-doubts seemed so “unspiritual,” I didn't talk about them with anyone. At work I was all business. I withdrew from the casual banter and playfulness at group meals, and when I did try to be sociable, I felt like an imposter.

Several weeks later, the women in our ashram decided to form a sensitivity group where we could talk about personal challenges. I wondered whether this might be an opportunity for me to get more real.

Our opening meeting took place one summer evening. For the first hour, as the other women talked about their stress at work, about children and health problems, I felt my anxiety build. Finally, when there was a pause in the conversation, my confession came pouring out. “I know I do a lot of yoga and teach a lot of classes, that it looks like I'm a helpful, caring person … That may be true in some ways, but it's also a front. What I'm covering up, what I don't want anyone to see, is how self-centered I am, how selfish and judgmental.” After pausing and glancing around at the solemn faces, I took the real plunge. “This is hard to say, but … I don't trust that I'm a good person, and that makes it hard to really feel close with anyone.”

I have no recollection of how the other women responded to my attempt at honesty. They might have felt empathetic or recognized similar feelings in themselves, but I was too caught up in my own shame to notice. I left the meeting as quickly as I could. Retreating to my room, I curled up in fetal position on my futon and cried.

By naming my experience out loud to the group, I had stripped away a layer of the small self's protection. Feeling raw and exposed, I started mentally berating myself for having said anything. How could I face anyone the next day? I told myself I should get up right that moment and do some yoga. But instead I began trying to figure out what really had gone wrong, what was making me feel so bad about myself.