My heart has softened; my mind has quieted down. These days, I rarely want to bash anyone’s head in.

NOAH LEVINE

4

BREATHE IN THE FIRE

Keeping our hearts open and vulnerable is one of the scariest and yet most transformative things we can do in our lives. While this may sound counterintuitive, when we keep our hearts open, touching the center of our pain and feeling it in a completely raw way, it helps us become clearer on the areas where we still have aversions and attachments—the real places where we still have work to do.

We spend so much unnecessary time suffering because we’re not in touch with our hearts’ emotional energy, intelligence, and guidance. Yes, I know it may sound corny, but it’s very real. There’s been some wonderful work done around this by the folks at HeartMath, and on the topic of heart intelligence they’ve said:

Heart intelligence is the flow of awareness, understanding and intuition we experience when the mind and emotions are brought into coherent alignment with the heart. It can be activated through self-initiated practice, and the more we pay attention when we sense the heart is speaking to us or guiding us, the greater our ability to access this intelligence and guidance more frequently. Heart intelligence underlies cellular organization and guides and evolves organisms toward increased order, awareness and coherence of their bodies’ systems.1

The thing is, rather than paying attention to our hearts, the majority of us focus our attention on what our minds are telling us—which typically only reinforces the idea of our small, isolated, and separate self. We rely on this self, its direction, and all its interests and desires to find peace, happiness, and fulfillment. But as artist and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche said, “If self-centeredness produced happiness, we would all be enlightened by now.”² Goddamn, was he right.

I spent so many years of my life terrified (albeit unknowingly) of becoming intimate with my heart. I’m not talking about the watered-down, sentimental “heart” associated with things like Valentine’s Day or romantic-comedy movies. No, I’m talking about the spiritual heart that is the absolute core of our being, the chakra or energy center that connects all our lower and higher energies, the place that houses our deepest wisdom.

During my early years of meditation, I was a mess, and not just the times when I was actively addicted, because at least then I felt I was in control of something (though of course that was the farthest thing from the truth). It was during my times of sobriety that I was the most scared. I didn’t know a single thing about who I really was, and I’m not even talking about the deeper, esoteric “me,” but the train wreck of a face I’d see staring back at me in the mirror every time I looked.

I was trying to better myself (whoever that self was), but was still skeptical about the effectiveness of meditation and had plenty of reservations about the whole “spirituality” thing. Through this fear and uncertainty, I kept my heart at bay. I was still under the impression that meditation was supposed to make me feel awesome and somehow make everything in my life better. While I sat on my cushion and painful thoughts and emotions arose, I mistakenly believed I was “failing at being spiritual” because that’s not what I’d associated with meditation and spirituality. I had a naïve picture that being spiritual was about always feeling blissed-out and filled with light and love, so I would unskillfully use various breathing techniques and mantras (phrases or sounds repeated verbally or mentally) to suppress the negativity and hurt when they arose rather than acknowledging them and breathing in the pain, the fire of my experience.

Breathing techniques and mantras are wonderful tools, but not when they are a means of aversion. By using these practices to suppress my painful thoughts, emotions, and memories, I kept myself locked in a cycle of unnecessary pain and suffering for many years. In retrospect, I also came to see that the numerous relapses with drugs and alcohol I experienced during my struggles with sobriety were a direct result of this avoidance—an avoidance that perpetuated my unwillingness to face and deal with my life as it was falling apart around me.

Even after having learned this lesson the hard way, there are still times when I fall back into my old patterns (though thankfully not drugs and alcohol). For example, I recently relocated from Connecticut to Ottawa, Ontario, in Canada, where my wife, Jenn, is from. A few months before moving to Ottawa, I had the opportunity to spend a week there to get familiar with my new surroundings. I still had a bunch of engagements to fulfill in Connecticut before making the full-on move, but this was a great opportunity to check things out in the place I’d soon be calling home. I loved everything about it. There was no shortage of eclectic folks, things to do, and even a beautiful river with a running path along it directly across the street from our place. Plus, Jenn’s family was really great and very welcoming, so I found myself comfortable, as if it were almost home—except, it wasn’t, at least not yet.

While I was there, I thought about how excited I was to be finally moving in with my wife and stepdaughter. (We’d had a nightmare of a time with our sponsorship application that lasted fifteen months.) That’s when it really hit me that I’d be leaving behind everything I knew: family, friends, local music venues, spiritual community—all of it. Everything in my life was about to change in the biggest way possible, and I began freaking out.

Over the course of that week, I watched myself eat super-unhealthy foods in the same exact way I used to drink and do drugs. No matter how much I’d already eaten, I went back for more: more cookies, more pizza, more candy, more whatever, in a futile attempt to mask the arising anxiety and fear within me. I was scared to be vulnerable and to touch my experience of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty directly, and this was how I handled it. I even took things a step further by running between seven and ten miles a day, not for health reasons, like normal, but to offset my feeling like shit because of how I was eating. What a cycle. I ended up running sixty-four miles that week and still managed to put on a few pounds. That’s how out of control I was.

The whole ordeal—from the eating to running to consciously being aware of it all going down while keeping my heart completely closed to the situation—was fucking disgusting. As with anything in life, though, you live, you learn, and you move on (or you don’t, and just keep yourself stuck in an ongoing cycle of shit).

As human beings, I believe we all share the desire to be free of pain and suffering. For many of us, as we progress on our spiritual paths, this desire matures from a personal wish and aspiration to one that is global, meaning that we wish for all beings to be free from pain and suffering. This maturation of our desire—from personal to global—is a result of our awakening heart-mind. Bodhichitta is a word frequently used in Buddhism to describe this state of awakened heart-mind. It is a Sanskrit word, with bodhi meaning “awake” or “enlightened,” and chitta meaning “mind” or “heart.”

And so bodhichitta—our awakened (or awakening) heart-mind—becomes our compassionate desire to realize our true Self (or nonself in Buddhist terms) for the benefit of all beings, a most noble desire and undertaking, for sure. In order for us to fully develop bodhichitta, we must get raw and intimate with ourselves first, laying our hearts’ armor aside to look at and touch the place of pain and suffering that resides in our innermost selves.

Regarding bodhichitta, Pema Chödrön wrote in her book The Places That Scare You:

Bodhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion—our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance, and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta.3

The thought of getting raw with ourselves in this way can certainly be some scary shit and curb people’s motivation for cultivating bodhichitta. The good news is that by facing our pain and touching our hearts directly, we begin breaking the monotonous cycle of pain. As we break this cycle, we make ourselves more available to the totality of life. The hurt will be there regardless of whether we chose to acknowledge and work with it or not, so why not just get on getting on with it?

Sometimes this work can get really heavy, and so the guidance of spiritual communities, psychotherapists, teachers, or any other supportive means that feels right for you is highly recommended. Hell, I’d recommend it even during the times that aren’t so heavy. Remember, tune in to your heart, feel what’s right for you, and roll with that.

Accepting ourselves fully in all of our perfect imperfections while taking an honest and fearless look at our naked selves, acknowledging both our frailty and the glory in the same glance, is not easy. It can be jarring to realize just how far we’ve actually gone to avoid feeling our feelings, which for many of us includes creating “protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt,” as Pema said.

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke shared some encouragement that may help us through our difficult times when he wrote, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”4 How I wish I’d remembered those words while I was binging-out in Ottawa. It’s so important to remember that no feeling is final while we’re working through life’s shitstorms (big and small) because it’s in this remembrance that we muster the courage to carry on—recognizing that our current experience of dis-ease is, in fact, only temporary.

As we intimately touch our pain and relate directly to life, we’re no longer living in fear. Instead, we’re reclaiming responsibility for our own well-being, not only for ourselves but also so that we can share it with others. We’re developing the heart of a warrior, not in the traditional sense of warfare but rather in the way Chögyam Trungpa defined it, which was with qualities such as fearlessness and gentleness.

It’s through our fearlessness and gentleness that we’re able to see that Everything Mind not only includes spiritual platitudes (like the love-and-light I mistakenly believed was all there was to it back in my early days on the path), but pain and brokenness as well. In the following chapters, I’ll explore ways to work with our pain, our brokenness, and the associated negative energies when we make ourselves available to the healing and compassionate force of bodhichitta.