9

Hopelessness

Disappointment

It’s tempting to think that the spiritual path is a linear journey. What a surprise when you see your old neurotic patterns resurfacing again, just like an old dysfunctional relationship you thought you had outgrown. Sometimes it can be painful to look in the mirror and not see growth.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche put this nicely:

There is a problem in thinking that you are supposed to be advancing in your practice all the time. You don’t have to constantly be on the road. If you have a flat tire, that is also part of the journey. Ambition makes you feel that you are not doing anything. There seems to be a hypnotic quality to ambition and speed, so that you feel that you are standing still just because you want to go so fast. You might actually be getting close to your goal.

Often what looks like a disaster or setback is just energy freeing itself up to be available. Haven’t you ever had the experience of being devastated by a breakup, only to be grateful, years later, that you moved on?

One of the turning points on my own journey occurred at a lunch in Sarnath—where the Buddha gave his first teaching—with my Swedish–American friend Tara. Strong, poised, and serene, with an ironic smile never far from her lips, Tara was getting ready to be ordained as a nun. We met up one day after the morning teachings we were attending with Thrangu Rinpoche.

I was feeling like a failure because I had not married or settled into a long-term relationship. I kept stubbornly trying to make it work with a man who was wildly unsuitable, because I felt like I needed to have a man in my life. After an animated discussion, I sat glumly playing with my chappati.

She said, “For us independent women on a spiritual path, it often feels like in order to be in relationship with a man, it means giving up the path, or at least toning it down. Most men want a woman at home in the kitchen, or the bedroom, rather than on a prostration board in North India [we had met in Bodhgaya under the bodhi tree when she came to use the prostration board next to mine]. Especially if you have kids, it seems like we have to choose between dedication to family or devotion to a spiritual path. Sure, you can do both, but not with equal intensity. Someone will have to give, and it’s not going to be him. If you are devoted to the path, you are going to have to do the giving up.”

I felt frustrated and constantly thwarted, like I had a shadow over my head—like a bad luck curse. Yet I had the freedom to devote my time to practice and study. I was in Sarnath studying with realized masters. I could never have done this if I had a husband. And yet I was still complaining.

“I get it,” she said. “Why do you think I am taking vows? I told myself that if I had not met my man by age forty that I would start wearing robes. I turn forty this year.”

“But the Dalai Lama always says, ‘never give up.’ Isn’t that giving up?” I asked.

“It is giving up on samsara. It’s not giving up on life,” she said.

I considered this. I didn’t want to take vows. I didn’t want to shave my head. And I didn’t want to wear red robes. Not an option. Good for her, but not for me. This was clear.

But what about acting like it? What about taking that vow internally, to totally dedicate my life to the spiritual path, to waking up? That made sense.

I had found happiness in a life dedicated to spiritual practice, but I still kept looking for a relationship to make me happy. I keep striving for something that had not proven to make me happy, when I had already found something that did. It didn’t make sense.

A good gauge of spiritual health is to write down

The three things you most want.

If they in any way differ,

You are in trouble.

—Rumi

I had two longings that were apparently at odds with each other. On the one hand I wanted samsara to go well, I wanted a partner, a comfortable relationship and home. On the other hand, I wanted enlightenment, the total dissolving of ego. There seemed to be a little problem. That problem was this: I wanted.

I think that’s the secret. If we want enlightenment we have to give up our most prized hope. Because isn’t enlightenment letting go of everything? A death before you die?

Disappointment is a refusal to be with or participate in your life exactly as it is. You create a story that something is missing: you didn’t get what you wanted, or you got what you didn’t want. Or you had it all, but then it got taken away. Then you interpret this as a lack in your life.

But the “missing element” never existed anywhere but your mind, so is it really missing? Your circumstances are just as they are. Anything that seems missing is simply your interpretation, based on an idea you’ve come up with.

“Disappointment is the best chariot to use on the path of the dharma,” according to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Disappointment is a necessary stage of the journey. Evolution is not linear. It’s more often one step forward, ten steps back. There is no solution to the disappointments you will face in life, except this: your ability to stay with the situation and grow from it. There is no fixing samsara.

Disillusionment

If disappointment is a necessary stage of the path, then disillusionment is really good news. Let me explain.

You have to wear down the mechanism of ego in order for something deeper to arise. It’s like you have to get to the end of your rope before you finally leave that bad relationship or job and stop hoping things will change. When you suddenly see the futility of sticking around to work with the situation, you are ready to fly.

Illusion is not reliable. Disillusionment is when you understand this.

Before you can open your mind to new possibilities, you have to be willing to let go of preconceived ideas and history. After all, isn’t it illusion that creates confusion? When you hold on to a wishful version of reality that is not corroborated by experience, you perpetuate a false understanding of your world. That’s when suffering sets in: your expectations don’t align with what’s true. Disillusionment gives you the kick in the pants to do something different.

As I write this, the head of the Shambhala lineage—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s son and heir—is being accused of sexual misconduct and has stepped down. The community is in chaos and at least two prominent members committed violent suicide days after the announcement. Many lives were devastated by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s actions.

I have nothing personal against the Sakyong—he was always very kind to me. I know he inherited a fantastically difficult situation and he served an important role on my own path. But I want to point out how this whole system of planting a sparkly exotic Eastern religion in the West in the twenty-first century can run amok.

Anytime you systematize something, you take away its life force. It loses its freshness and humanity.

How many times have we heard variations of this story in the past few years?

There seems to be a message here. The paradigm of hierarchical systems ruled by men can be traced back to the crusaders, who outlawed and abolished anything that threatened the authority of the church. Women suspected of secretly accessing spiritual power were burned at the stake. The #metoo movement highlights that things feel out of balance and that society is ready for a change. My sense is that we need to evolve and adapt to the times. Patriarchy might have outlived its days of glory.

In one sense I understand being disillusioned by the disintegration of a community that you call home. It’s like losing your family—and I experienced this in the Ashtanga community. I also experienced it early on in Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s sangha when the Sakyong created guidelines for his students to follow. It left me very clear: that he was not my teacher, and I moved on to find other teachers to study with. It was heartbreaking to leave my community.

But then I woke up one day and realized that I had to take responsibility for myself and choose my next steps. It’s a part of growing and accepting the realities of the world.

I asked Thrangu Rinpoche once what to do since I had connections with two different teachers on each side of a lineage split. I loved his response: just do your practice.

For me this is the main point. I have received teachings and learned practices that I can do for the rest of my life. If the person who taught me does something I question, I still have access to the teaching. I can choose not to learn with that teacher anymore. But if I get caught in a drama as a result of their misconduct, then I am not putting their teachings into practice.

Let me be clear: I have been victim to abuses of power, and I definitely got caught up in the drama! I don’t mean to point fingers at those who choose to speak up and incite change. But a useful question might be: How can you learn, let go, and grow from the experience? How can your actions serve to alert, inform, and protect others? What will you become as a result?

Disillusionment is a wake-up call to bring everything back to your practice, back to the path. Onward.

Hopelessness is egolessness.

—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Mess

As a wind in the mountains

assaults an oak,

Love shook my breast.

—Sappho

In order to reorder around a new theme or organizing principle, you have to completely disintegrate. So, at times, your pilgrimage might look and feel like a complete mess. And there is the tiny detail that there is nowhere to get to. No end goal. What, then, is the point?

The point is that when you finally see this, you can stop living life on a roller coaster, getting so excited when things are going well, and then dropping into depression when they stop going well. You start to experience a sense of equilibrium.

You may imagine this would feel like a letdown. Equilibrium sounds flat.

“What’s wrong with getting excited when things go well?” you may ask.

There’s nothing wrong with being happy—but if you are dependent on external sources for your happiness, then you are going to be in for a wild ride. That ride gets exhausting.

When you are emptied out of all the striving and struggling, you have room to grow. You can start to live in the flow, allowing the rise and fall, the calm and the chaos to come and go without fixating on any of it.

Disintegrating allows for reintegrating in a whole new way.

Why Bother?

Why should you start a yoga and meditation practice? I mean really, why bother? You’ll probably alienate your loved ones, invite all the difficult emotions you’ve spent your life trying to avoid, add one more thing to your already hectic daily to-do list, and probably start analyzing the hell out of everything in your life to see if it aligns with your dharmic path. It’s totally inconvenient.

So what is the point?

It’s this: When you are able to be aware of and tolerate whatever is going on in the present, you delete an entire layer of suffering in your already stacked layer cake of life. Let’s face it: life is hard sometimes.

It’s hard enough to handle our own dramas, and now with the Internet we have access to everyone else’s as well. It is beyond overwhelming. It’s easier to go out and laugh with friends, have a few drinks, smoke, watch a funny movie. Go shopping. Find a new lover.

But what if, instead, you were to take your emotional drama to the yoga mat or the meditation cushion and watch the whole show, start to finish. Sit there in the audience of your own mind. Without popcorn. It doesn’t sound so fun, does it? But it is so much better than fun. It is the key to releasing attachment to your storyline—the one that causes you to relive your harrowing drama over and over again.

By sitting still and observing the flow of that story—seeing how it develops according to your expectations, whether you want it to or not—allows you to see your part in the drama. It lets you see how you take part in your own downfall, so you can take responsibility for your character’s actions. Then perhaps next time, you can avert the crisis and direct a more peaceful ending to the scene. Eventually, with practice, your perspective shifts to include a wider range of possible outcomes.

A pilgrimage is a self-secret affair. You can’t convey that experience fully to another person, even if that person is with you, because it is your experience. The more you talk about your experience, the more you dissipate the energy of it. So there is the wisdom of not talking about it, but there is also the complete inability to share it with another being. Any experience, but especially practice experiences, will always remain your secret. You can share the facts and the feelings, but the whole experience is yours and can never be conveyed in exactly the same way that YOU experienced it.

Depending on how you hold this secret, it either becomes poison or fuel for the path.

No Goal

On one level, this thing we call the spiritual path is simply a structure we give ourselves to stay out of trouble. As in: we’re here on the planet and have to do something with ourselves, so it’s better to do something helpful rather than harmful. Inevitably, harmful actions will cause suffering. So we train ourselves to be kind.

This then becomes a significant stage of the journey. We get some benefit from our kindness and start to see the workings of cause and effect. The discipline becomes a sort of mirror so that we can witness our development. The danger at this stage is that we start to see some results for our practice, so we start to expect more of the same.

But then somewhere along the way we start to realize that there is no path. Spiritual path is just a name for something we see after the fact. It’s just your life, moment by moment, lived with integrity. Take the spiritual thinking out of it. No nonsense: nuts and bolts.

The key is to let go of outcomes.

The Heart Sutra (the essence of Buddha’s teachings of the second turning, or Mahayana path) reminds us that there is “no eye, no ear, no nose, no body, no mind,” and also “no ignorance, no end of ignorance, no end of old age and death, no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment and no nonattainment …”

So what’s left?

Anything you can think of is a product of your conceptual mind. And conceptual mind is not the same as wisdom. When you sit down to meditate, you invite wisdom. But in order to do that, you have to give up the idea that there is a goal to attain.

There is no goal. The instruction is this: when you sit down to meditate, invite wisdom and practice dwelling in that wisdom.

In this light, the great Buddhist saint Tilopa left us this provocative reminder:

One should resist, or let go of the temptation, which at some point always arises in the experience of beginning meditators, to improve or make better one’s meditation by meditating on tranquility, or on the experience of emptiness, or on clarity, or on bliss, or by fabricating or contriving any other strategy to improve one’s meditation. All such attempts to improve one’s meditation by “meditating” are obstacles to meditation.

But this may not help ease your mind when you are feeling lost, alone, and discouraged.

I just want to reassure you that hopelessness, disappointment, and disillusionment are part of the path. Just because you feel hopeless does not mean you are doing anything wrong. It might mean you are doing something right, finally.

But it can be a tricky and demoralizing phase of the journey. Read on for an emergency guide on those occasions when you are feeling particularly lacking in motivation.

Three Steps to Get from Stuck to Unstuck

Hopelessness, disappointment, disillusionment, and disintegration are part of the path. When your motivation wanes, you get stuck at the halfway point, or when you lose your way, let this be your guide:

1.Commit or Recommit to Meditation Practice
When you practice training the mind to be present, you learn to focus on what matters to you. This can be taken in an absolute or a relative sense. Could we say the ultimate purpose of life is to be present, relaxed, and happy? Training your mind through meditation can help you to do that. But if you forget your intention, it’s easy to get distracted by the onslaught of thought that often terrorizes the mind and catapults us into fear.

These days, with so much information coming at us nonstop every day, it can be overwhelming to remember our intention. Take time every day—even five minutes—to reconnect with the storehouse of wisdom accessible through silent meditation. The answer is inside of you—not out there in some imagined future. Reestablishing a strong daily practice—through perseverance—reminds you of this.

Practice

Learn a simple meditation technique, set a schedule you can maintain, and stick to it. See the Resources section for an introduction to meditation and tips on how to maintain a regular meditation practice.

2.Set an Intention

Developing a mindfulness practice also helps you recognize what your worldly goals are—it allows you to check in with the body and mind to identify where you are in or out of alignment with what you know to be true. It allows you to recognize the path your life wants to take. The practice here is to identify what will make your heart truly happy, so learn to identify that feeling.

Get clear on what you want, even if you have no idea how you are going to get there. Reevaluate influences that may constrict your ability to thrive and consider alternatives. Persevering in practice helps you focus your energy to realize your goals once this secondary intention is identified. You start to see what (and who) is not supporting you, so you can let go of what is holding you back. Practice also has the benefit of refining your focus so you can stay on task as each step toward your goals is realized.

Practice

Set a new affirmation for yourself for one week, even a small one such as, “I’m content in this moment with whatever is going on” or an intention like, “I will practice being mindful and present throughout the day.” When you wake up in the morning, first thing, call to mind your intention or affirmation. Just before you go to bed each evening, reflect on your progress and feel good about that. If you lapsed in your efforts, forgive yourself and set the intention again for the following day. Repeat every day for one week. Simple tool, powerful results.

3.Show Up

Ninety-nine percent of success is simply showing up. When I first started practicing yoga and confronted difficult asanas, some days I had no idea where I was headed. I didn’t know how to start approaching it, what it should feel like. But I persevered, stayed open to the process and was willing to try new things. Eventually I would get a clue: a bodily sensation that told me I was on to something, or suddenly I would be able to move more deeply into a posture. Things would suddenly shift in a dramatic way.

Many days it felt like nothing was happening, like there was no progress at all. Through perseverance, one day, it happened, like the first day I was able to jump back (a challenging movement in the Ashtanga Yoga sequence). Those weeks, months, and sometimes years of prep time were necessary, even though they often felt frustratingly devoid of any signs of progress.

Commitment is key.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche talks about the gradual path to sudden enlightenment. The art of perseverance has to do with commitment. When you are committed to something or someone, it is like a laser that cuts through all the garbage. You pay less attention to the distractions that threaten to sway you off course (distractions like thoughts and judgments about the situation). You become more focused on the journey. It’s not a chore, but a choice. You can turn down the volume on the background noise and instead focus your attention upon whatever it is you choose.

Life is never a linear progression. It’s more like two steps forward, three steps back; one step forward eight steps back; twelve steps forward. And then you get a flat tire. We progress in increments, often far too slow for our lumbering or hyperactive mind to recognize as anything remotely satisfying.

Practice

Identify one concrete step forward to take you to the next stage of development, one step at a time toward your goal. Then commit!

When you get thrown to the ground, perseverance is developing the muscle to stand back up again. This not only builds strength and character but also trains you to remain humble. You develop that strength by repeatedly pushing yourself up off the floor.

The situations of fear that exist in our lives provide us with stepping stones to step over our fear. On the other side of cowardice is bravery. If we step over properly, we can cross the boundary from being cowardly to being brave.

—Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala:

The Sacred Path of the Warrior

When you confront fear head-on through remaining present with it, you invite light to shine through. Perseverance enables you to share your gifts with the world, in the form of love. Your love is your gift.

Writing Practice: Dealing with Disappointment

What is your biggest regret or disappointment?

What ineffective or harmful strategies have you developed to cope with that disappointment?

What is the hidden benefit of your participation in that disappointment?

Go back to your previous writing from chapter 8, “What I wish I could change.” With a different color, highlight what you can’t change.

Write (speaking to things that you can’t change): What I need to accept is...