True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (31 page)

When we understand that this mysterious awareness is creating and shining through everything, including ourselves, we become a “child of wonder.” We remain wholeheartedly engaged in life. We give ourselves to work and play, to creativity and passion, to our family and friends. We feel emotions, pleasure, and pain. And throughout it all, we remember our timeless nature. This allows us to move through the world with receptivity, awe, and unconditional love.

Until a few years ago, being “a child of wonder” was a beautiful idea, something I aspired to, but had not lived in any ongoing way. Then, in the midst of my illness something shifted, bringing fresh air into my life. In the brief final chapter that follows, I'll try to share this experience of true refuge.

Guided Reflection: Exploring Inner Space

As we move through life we need a flexible attention, one that is capable of a narrow focus on objects or experiences (like images, sensations, or sounds), as well as an open focus that perceives the presence of space. Learning to attend to inner space cultivates this flexibility: We become familiar with the formless, impersonal ground of all experience. Even at times when the lens narrows, we are less inclined to fixate and react with grasping or resisting.

Because most people find it less effective to follow a written meditation, the full audio version of this meditation can be found on my website (see page 000). To get a simple taste you might read the following questions, and after each, close your eyes and reflect for about fifteen seconds. Notice whatever spontaneously arises. There's no need to make an effort—simply be receptive to your experience.

Guided Reflection: Who Am I?

The fundamental question in most spiritual traditions is “Who am I?” The formal practice of self-inquiry is a powerful way of seeing beyond our stories of self and revealing the mystery of our true nature.

Before exploring the following meditation, take some time relaxing and quieting the mind. You might practice “A Pause for Presence” (see page 000) or “Exploring Inner Space,” above. While thoughts and emotions will naturally continue to arise during this meditation, it is best initiated when emotions are not intense.

If you would like to explore practicing with your eyes open, try to find a setting where you can look directly at the open sky or at a view that is not distracting. It is also fine to look out a window, at a blank wall, or at the open space of a room.

Sit comfortably in a way that allows you to feel both alert and relaxed. If your eyes are open, rest your gaze on a point slightly above your line of sight. Soften your eyes so that your gaze is unfocused and you are also receiving images on the periphery of your vision. Relax the flesh around your eyes and let your brow be smooth.

Looking at the sky or imagining a clear blue sky, let your awareness mingle with that boundless space. Allow your mind to be wide open—relaxed and spacious. Take some moments to listen to sounds, noticing how they are happening on their own. Rest in the awareness that includes even the most distant sounds.

In the same way that sounds are appearing and disappearing, allow sensations and emotions to arise and dissolve. Let your breath move easily, like a gentle breeze. Be aware of thoughts drifting through like passing clouds. Rest in an open and undistracted awareness, and with a receptive attention, notice the changing display of sounds, sensations, feelings, thoughts.

As the mind rests in this listening attention, inquire “Who is aware right now?” or “Who is listening?” You might instead inquire “What is aware right now?” or “What is listening?” Glance back into awareness with interest and a light touch—simply taking a look to see what is true.

What do you notice? Is there any “thing” or “self” you perceive that is static, solid, or enduring? Is there an entity that exists apart from the changing stream of feelings, sensations, or thoughts? What actually do you see when you look into awareness? Is there any boundary or center to your experience? Are you aware of being aware?

After you have looked back into awareness, let go and relax fully into the sea of wakefulness. Let go and let be, allowing life to unfold naturally in awareness. Rest in nondoing, in undistracted awareness.

Continue to rest in awareness until the mind again focuses on a sound or sensation or some other experience. When you realize your mind has fixated on a particular thought—on a judgment or mental comment, an image or story—gently look into awareness to recognize the source of thinking. Inquire: “Who is thinking?” Or you might ask “What is thinking?” or “Who is aware right now?” Glance back into awareness with a light touch, simply taking a look to see who is thinking.

Then let go and relax fully into whatever you see. Let go and let be, allowing life to unfold naturally in awareness. Rest in nondoing, in undistracted awareness. With each instance of releasing the grip of thoughts, be sure to relax completely. Discover the freedom of wakefully relaxing, of letting life be as it is. Look and see, let go and be free.

If sensations or emotions call your attention, look back into awareness in the same way, asking who is feeling hot or tired or afraid. However, if they are in any way strong or compelling, instead of turning toward awareness, bring an accepting and kind attention directly to the experience. You might feel the grip of fear, for instance, and use the breath to reconnect with openness and tenderness. (See tonglen instructions on page 000.) When you are able to relate to your experience with equanimity and compassion again, resume the practice of resting in awareness and inquiry.

If at any point you find the mind has become distracted, reopen your attention to the senses—listening to sounds, feeling sensations. Then as you settle into mindful presence, continue to inquire into the awareness that is behind all experience.

As you choose, you might weave in a similar practice to active inquiry: Say or think “I am” and add nothing to it. Be aware of the silence and stillness that follows the words. Sense your presence, your pure uncontrived beingness. Let go and
be
that presence.

It is important that we practice self-inquiry in an easy and effortless way, not contracting the mind by striving to do it right. To avoid creating stress, it is best to limit practice to five- to ten-minute intervals. You might do short periods of formal practice a number of times a day.

As an informal practice take a few moments, whenever you remember, to look into awareness and see what is true. Then let go and let be. In time, the trance of a separate self will become increasingly apparent, and you'll begin to realize the empty radiance of awareness that is your true home.

Guided Reflection: Taking the Backward Step

Our natural awareness is revealed when we stop struggling to control or manipulate our attention. This meditation offers a seeming paradox: We intentionally let go of any purposeful doing. While this itself is a subtle kind of doing, with continued practice, letting go begins to occur spontaneously whenever we recognize the tension of controlling.

Before beginning, you might practice “Exploring Inner Space,” or some other meditation that helps you settle, quiet your mind, and relax.

Find a posture that is upright and comfortable and come into stillness. If possible, let go of any seeking, any struggle, any goals. Now allow yourself to enter the receptive state of listening. Listen in all directions, near and far, not fixing on any particular sound, taking everything in evenly. Explore listening not just with your ears, but with your whole awareness—listening to sounds, to sensations, to breathing.

In this receptive state, let life be, just as it is. Check in with your body, and if you find tension, recognize it as a sign of resistance to letting go. Simply note the tension, and allow it to be as it is. If there is restlessness, allow it to be as it is.

Awareness is fluid; it recognizes different experiences without directing or resisting. Imagine yourself as a passenger in a car, aware of experience as it arises and passes, like the view out your window. You are not in control. You have no idea of what should happen, of where you are going. You are just noticing and allowing. You are
being
awareness.

If thoughts arise, simply note “This is just a thought.” Let go, return to now, to presence. If you find the mind trying to interpret or direct the meditation, let go. Sometimes mentally whispering “drop” can help the mind release what it's holding onto. Once you have opened out of a thought, take some moments to notice the difference between any thought and the vividness and mystery of the here and now.

You may find that you've let go of thoughts and are focusing on the sounds, feelings, or sensations in the foreground of your experience. Explore what happens when you let go yet again, and sense the
background
of experience, your own presence. You can't see or hear or locate this presence, yet you can relax back into this formless dimension of being.

When you take the backward step and surrender into presence, a silent spaciousness enters awareness. The silence is listening to sounds, to thoughts. A great stillness receives the experience of aliveness. Everything is happening in wakeful openness. Simply rest in this open space of awareness, continuing to allow the sounds and feelings of life to flow through.

As your meditation practice deepens, it is valuable to spend at least part of your practice time letting go of all controlling, relaxing back and resting in an open, allowing awareness.

My teacher at the retreat was guiding us: “Send chi to the places that are in pain.” I visualized flowing streams of light bathing my hurting knees. He continued: “Imagine what these parts of you would be like if they were totally vital and strong, energetically flowing with the rest of your body.”

This was not a Buddhist practice. I was doing a ten-day qigong healing retreat, based on a Chinese system of still and moving meditation. At the heart of qigong is the understanding that this world is made of
chi
, an invisible field of energy, the dynamic expression of pure awareness.

For years I had heard that qigong was an ideal meditation for physical healing. When I first experimented with the practices, I found they helped me feel more embodied and energetically attuned. Then, after my health took a downturn I decided to explore qigong more deeply. But by the third day of the retreat, I'd run into doubts. Some of the instructions seemed distinctly “un-Buddhist!” Here I was trying to manipulate my experience and create a happy, healthy body. Whatever happened to letting go of control and accepting life as it is? Wouldn't all this directing of energy and visualization just make me more attached to being healthy? Given the realities of my illness, this seemed like a losing proposition.

Still, I had paid my tuition and I kept on following the teachers' instructions. The next morning I got up before dawn and did the practice on my own—connecting to the ocean of chi, bringing attention and energy to various parts of my body. After about half an hour, I went outside and started walking along a winding path through the Northern California countryside. Each step hurt. My knees ached, and there was stabbing in one of my hips.

“Now what?” I muttered grimly. “Am I supposed to send more chi to my body?”

Then I paused—the resentment toward my body caught my attention. As I looked more closely, the resentment quickly gave way to a familiar grief. Why couldn't I just walk on this earth without feeling pain? Tears started flowing as I contacted the enormity of my frustration and longing. “I want to feel alive. I want to feel alive. Please. Please. May I feel fully alive.” Naming it opened me to what was behind the longing. “I love life.” Embedded in the grief, as always, was love. A voice inside me was repeating the words over and over, as a delicate, tingling warmth filled my heart.

Permission to Love Life

I had been holding back this love, holding back from fully engaging with life. It was a reaction to feeling betrayed by my body, a defense against more loss. But in my fear of being attached to health, I had not allowed myself to feel the truth—I love life. Qigong wasn't about fueling attachment, it was about fully embracing aliveness. At that moment I decided to stop holding back my love.

As I allowed the “I love life” feeling to be as full as it wanted to be, the “I” fell away. Even the notion of life fell away. What was left was an open radiant heart—as wide as the world.

This tender presence was loving everything: the soft streaks of pinks and grays in the sky, the smell of eucalyptus, the soaring vultures, the songbirds. It was loving the woman who was standing silently about two hundred feet away, also gazing at the colors of dawn. It was loving the changing painful and pleasurable sensations in this body. Now, sending chi to my knees made intuitive sense. It was awareness's natural and caring response to its creation. “I” wasn't loving life—awareness was loving life.

This experience led me to see and release a limiting unconscious belief that I had held for some time—a belief that the realm of formless awareness was more spiritual and valuable than the living forms of this world. This bias against the living world can be seen in many religious traditions. It emerges in some interpretations of the Buddha's teachings as an insistence on guarding ourselves against the pleasures of the senses—beauty, lovemaking, music, play. It emerges in the superior status of monks over nuns, in valuing monastic life over family and lay life and in the warnings against attachment in close personal relationships. I now believe this bias comes from fear and mistrust of life itself. For me, recognizing this in my own psyche was a gift.

We do not need to transcend the real world to realize our true nature and to live in freedom. In fact, we can't. We are aliveness
and
we are the formless presence that is its source; we are embodied emptiness. The more we love the world of form, the more we discover an undivided presence, empty of any sense of self or other. And the more we realize the open, formless space of awareness, the more unconditionally we love the changing shapes of creation. Refuge in awareness and refuge in aliveness (the truth of present moment) are ultimately inseparable. For me, the three refuges become one when I sense that I am awareness, loving its expression as aliveness.

The Heart Sutra from the Buddhist Mahayana texts tells us: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is also form. Emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness.” We can't separate the ocean from the waves. Our path is to realize the vast oceanness of our being, and to cherish the waves that appear on the surface.

Happy for No Reason

During the final days of the retreat, my willingness to love life unfolded into a very deep, stable happiness. The happiness wasn't reliant on things being a certain way—my moods and physical comfort went up and down. I was happy for no reason. This unconditioned happiness or well-being is a flavor of awakening. It arises when we trust our essence as awareness, and know that this entire living world is part of our heart. Being happy for no reason gave me a kind of confidence or faith that no matter what happened, everything would be fine.

I returned home and jumped into a delicious daily ritual of meditation and qigong. During those first weeks I'd go to the river and scramble down through rocks and bushes to a secluded beach. Nourished by the sounds of rushing water, the firm sand and early morning air, I practiced presence in movement and stillness. You can probably imagine what came next. After I hurt my knee on the small incline down to the beach, I moved my practice to our deck. Some of the arm movements strained my neck so I had to minimize them. Then standing up started to strain my legs, so I began to practice in a chair. Then it rained for a week straight.

And yet it was all really okay. More than okay. One of those wet mornings as I was sitting, my mind became very quiet. My attention opened gently and fully to the changing flow of experience—aching, waves of tiredness, fleeting thoughts, sounds of rain. Continuing to pay attention, I felt the subtle sense of aliveness (chi energy) that pervades my whole body. This aliveness was not solid, it was spacious, a dance of light. The more I opened to this aliveness, the more I could sense an alert inner stillness, the background inner space of pure being. And the more I rested in that stillness, the more vividly alive the world became.

After about thirty minutes I opened my eyes and looked at the lush fern that hangs in our bedroom, at its delicacy and grace. I was in love with the fern, with the particularity of its form (how did this universe come up with ferns?), and with the vibrancy and light of its being. In that moment, the fern was as wondrous as any glorious scene by the river. I was awareness loving my creation. And I was happy for no reason. I didn't need to have things go my way. I was grateful for the capacity to enjoy life, just as it is.

When I guide meditations on saying yes to life, I sometimes invite students to sense just how deep this yes can go. We can decide to love life. We can consciously intend to love without holding back. Although we will continue to shut down, we can always start with exactly what we are experiencing and bring kindness to our resistance. We can say yes to our no. As we intentionally deepen our yes, we discover an unconditional acceptance—an open allowing awareness—that frees us. We are not dependent on life being a certain way; the openness of our presence itself gives rise to deep contentment.

Our habit is to think there is a particular cause for our happiness—the new green in early spring, the sound of a child's laugh, or the sensations of playing in the ocean waves. But what actually allows us to be happy is the background space of silent, allowing presence. Each time we meet aliveness with presence, presence intensifies, and
awareness senses itself.
The living green awakens us to this inner space of presence, the laugh to presence, the sparkle and splash to presence. We are inhabiting our wholeness and are happy being who we are.

The next time you are aware of well-being—of feeling happy or peaceful—see if you can sense the space of presence that has made room for the experience. As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote,

Emptiness Dancing

This world of form is empty awareness in its dynamic display. Trees, worms, buildings, computers, rockets, humans. Forms have no inherent abiding self. Like waves arising from the ocean, forms are a temporary constellation, and they are inherently connected to all other forms. We are each the activity of awareness—emptiness dancing.

I love this Zen phrase because it recognizes the inseparability of formlessness and form, of the emptiness of awareness and its expression in aliveness. Remembering that moods and actions all arise from empty awareness—that they are not owned by a self—frees us from reactivity. This makes us more responsible and better able to respond to our inner weather. As we become aware of awareness and awake in our senses, we enter the flow of life and can respond to whatever happens with care and grace.

When I talk about the selflessness and freedom of emptiness dancing, students sometimes wonder if this means turning away from personal growth and service. Is this just another way to devalue the life we are living here and now? If we find inner freedom, will we still be interested in healing ourselves and our world?

If this question comes up, I usually recall Mari, who started coming to meditation classes when she realized she was burning out. For more than a decade, Mari had worked as a fund-raiser for a large human rights group. But the political environment was increasingly nasty, rival factions were vying for control of the organization, donors were scarce, and she questioned the ethics of some of her colleagues. Mari had given notice and wanted nothing to do with politics or activism. She was done.

Over the next four years, Mari worked at a sporting-goods store, attended meditation classes and retreats, and found the time to reconnect with a former passion—bird-watching. After a meditation class she told me, “It's during those walks, during the early morning hours of watching and listening, that I come home to silence, to my own presence.” In that attentive silence, Mari's love affair with birds deepened. “They are not something outside of me,” she told me, “they are part of my inner landscape.” As she grew more alarmed about habitat loss, Mari realized her activist life was not over.

We explored this together in a counseling session, and Mari began to trust that this time around things would be different. She agreed to fund-raise for an environmental group, knowing that there would be conflicting egos within this organization too. She would inevitably have bouts of discouragement, but Mari had found refuge. She could reconnect with the awareness that gives rise to birds and trees, to egos and discouragement, to the entire play of life. She could remember the wisdom of emptiness dancing and serve this imperfect world.

Spiritual teacher Adyashanti, who wrote a book called
Emptiness Dancing
, suggests that as we move through the day, we ask: “How is emptiness or awareness experiencing this (eating, walking outside, showering, talking)?” I also like to ask myself, “How is this empty, awake heart experiencing what's happening?” It is illuminating to step out of our story of self and receive sensations and feelings and sounds from the perspective of heart and awareness. We are not in opposition to anything, not resisting or evaluating anything. Life flows through us.

When I pay attention like this, I'm not at all removed from life. Rather, without the self-focus I become part of the flow of aliveness. Just as the river knows how to flow around rocks, I can respond intuitively to life's unfolding. I'm more spontaneous in the moment, more naturally clear and caring in my response to what's around me. I've seen this with others too. Whether we are serving or savoring, when there's an awareness of emptiness dancing, we become wholehearted in how we live. This is true even in the face of inevitable loss.

A few years ago, I read a memorable story about violinist Itzhak Perlman. Perlman had polio when he was a young child, and at each of his performances he makes a slow entrance on crutches, sits down, unclasps the braces on his legs, and then prepares to play. He did this as usual at a 1995 performance at Lincoln Center in New York. On this occasion, however, he'd only played the first few bars when one of the strings on his violin broke. The whole audience could hear the crack when it snapped. What will happen next, they wondered. Will he have to put on his braces, make his way across the stage, find another violin?

He sat still, closed his eyes, and paused. Then he signaled for the conductor to begin again. Perlman reentered the concerto, playing with an unimaginable passion, power, and purity. Perhaps some of those watching could sense him modulating, changing, reconfiguring the piece in his head, so deep was his immersion in creating. When he finished there was an awed silence. Then came the outburst of applause, as people rose and cheered from every corner of the hall.