12

Acceptance

Coming Home

What happens after you’ve gone through the journey and the transformation?

Nothing!

There are no bells and whistles, nothing to show what you’ve gone through. No trophy (unless you’ve picked up a statue of Manjushri along your travels.) No awards ceremony, no certificate, no diploma, no Doctorate of Pilgrimage. No high fives.

Nada. Zero. Zilch.

Goose eggs.

You’ll have nothing to show for yourself.

Ego hates that.

Your people at home will probably still be living the same old boring lives.

Chances are they will ask you very few questions—if any—about your journey and what you’ve gone through. They’re not that interested.

You might come home and, like Dorothy waking up with a bump on her head, wonder if it was all a dream.

After the ecstasy, the laundry, Jack Kornfield offered.

How do you reinhabit your world with a new perspective?

How do you justify your journey when you’ve come home empty-handed?

Now comes the real work.

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

—Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

No Prize

There is no prize at the end of the path (and no end to the path).

Or, you could widen your view to see what the real prize is: an absolutely unshakeable experience of the truth of this life, your life, that whatever comes together will fall apart. That you should never for an instant fall into the laziness of believing that what you have will last, or that what looks like a sure thing will turn out as you expect.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche put this nicely: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”

Perhaps we have to go through the whole game of pretending there is something to achieve or acquire, a goal to attain. But the life you planned for yourself is probably not the plan life has for you.

A friend told me a story.

“We think that when we enter the path of spiritual discipline, that it’s like getting on a lifeboat to row to the other side of the river. We think that enlightenment is on the other side, and all we have to do is get in the boat and row row row to the other side. But what happens is that we manage to find a boat, we get halfway across, and the boat sinks,” he said.

“And then what?” I asked, urgently.

“Exactly,” he said.

This idea that we call “me” is a farce—and one that we base our entire lives on. But it’s what we humans do. We conceptualize self as a solid, separate, permanent entity, when the only constant is the fact that things fall apart.

They say enlightenment is the total annihilation of ego, or rather seeing that it never existed in the first place. From the ego’s perspective, it doesn’t sound that appealing.

When asked how he stayed so even and content, Krishnamurti put it this way, “I don’t mind what happens.”

Sometimes I put it like this: “I don’t give a fuck.”

Twenty-First-Century Woman

The opportunities I’ve had to travel the world and pursue my spiritual practices were unheard of for women even a couple of decades ago. I’m blessed to have been born in an era that allowed me to follow my bliss.

Yet. There is still a pretty clear demarcation in how traditional teachings are disseminated. Men teach, women learn.

Padmasambhava told his consort Yeshe Tsogyal:

The gross bodies of men and women are equally suited, But if a woman has strong aspiration, she has higher potential.¹³

Yet all but a handful of the teachers I knew of were male. Why?

All the gurus I’d met said that women and men were equal, that women could attain enlightenment just as easily a man. “Everyone is same,” they said. But then why did the nuns have a few hundred more vows to take than the monks? And why did they always have to sit at the back of the room during practice? Why were there so many nunneries without funding in Bhutan? Why were there shrines in some of the Bhutanese gompas (monasteries) where women are not admitted?

The first Vajrayana teacher I ever met all those years ago at my first meditation retreat—Khandro Rinpoche—was a woman. She was one of my first inspirations to begin this path. And I have never met—or even heard of—another female rinpoche since. Where are all the women teachers?

I totally respect Khandro Rinpoche, but it feels like a consolatory concession to the Tibetan tradition that there is one recognized woman tulku. Whenever I bring up this subject in Buddhist circles, people are quick to point out, “There is a woman rinpoche, Khandro Rinpoche.”

Yes. But she is the only one!

WHY is there only ONE woman Rinpoche?

How do I fit into this whole scene as a woman? How do I make my way? Who said that men were in charge or that men know more than women? Who decided that men rule the world? I’d like to have a word with them.

The problem is that if I, as a woman, speak up about this imbalance then I’m labeled an angry feminist and my voice is discounted. I won’t be taken seriously. Because that angry activism doesn’t work—no one wants to hear it. There has to be dialogue—or better, action—that both sides can hear—the dissenters need to be able to at least hear your side before you can even hope for a dialogue. Who wants to listen to someone shouting insults in your face to get your attention?

Ultimately it’s not just females we need to bring into equality as much as it is feminine wisdom, which men and women both share. The Western world as we know it in the twenty-first century is dominated by the masculine—a paradigm that relies on structure, aggression, conquest, and intimidation. Traditional societies align more with feminine approach, harnessing power through communication, understanding, yielding, and collaboration.

So the implementation of legislation won’t help a damn thing in disrupting the patriarchy. Because legislation is a masculine approach to change. Change has to start—as UNESCO’s mission statement identifies—in the minds of men, or at least the patriarchal way of thinking. That change happens through listening.

When a problem is rooted in society’s habitual outlook and habitual thinking, then legislating change will have limited effect. After all, you cannot legislate a change in thinking.

—His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje

Acceptance versus Improvement

How do you practice acceptance without falling into laziness? Shouldn’t we try to improve things when possible?

It’s important to distinguish between state of mind and developmental stage. State of mind is what you work with in meditation practice—it is the quality of your awareness. A developmental stage defines your level of maturity.

A state of mind is temporary, but states are integrated into your stage of development. If your developmental stage is still immature, you risk incorporating high spiritual views into childish behavior. So you can accept your state of mind, while working to improve your developmental stage.

This means developing the capacity to stay in relationship to physical sensations whenever threat arises. It’s counterintuitive to stay with, for example, your panic or anxiety. It’s a discipline that takes practice. You don’t need to immediately react to perceived threats. You can learn to tolerate them in the body. This is the edge we walk when bringing practice to life circumstances.

If you want to improve your skills, you must first establish a friendly relationship with where you are. Start where you are. It’s like a map: unless you know your location on the map, it’s useless. Accept your experience while acknowledging the possibility of improvement.

So in order to effectuate change, we have to first accept the situation as is. It’s pointless to push against the norm—as egregious as it may be—without first doing your own work of tolerating what is. You can’t pass off your burdens to someone else.

Freedom

When you can accept whatever arises without struggle, you are approaching freedom. Freedom is an attitude—a way of experiencing things, not a fixed state of mind to achieve.

This is not to say that you won’t have preferences—I will always choose raspberries over durian—but that you are capable of being content whether your wishes are met or unmet.

Rather than working to improve your experience, you can practice accepting things exactly as they are. It doesn’t mean you will always like it. You may hate it.

Acceptance means acknowledging and allowing, at least for a moment, that things are just as they are, like it or not. Freedom is conscious participation in this experience of open awareness and acceptance.

THEN, and only then, you can discover the cracks in the system.

Writing Practice: Accepting What Is

Answer the following questions, using the free writing technique. Spend fifteen to thirty minutes with each question.

What situation or event in your life has been the most challenging to accept?

What would it take for you to unconditionally accept your situation as it is right now, without getting what you want, or getting rid of what you don’t want?

How could you give yourself permission to be who you are, just as you are, right now?

How can you accept the unacceptable?