Toward a secret sky : creating your own modern pilgrimage

You can find sacred in every moment of life if you are open to it. This is the practice—opening yourself to life. To others. To experience. To all that you might not want to confront.

This is where the transformation happens—not on a mountaintop in Nepal or Tibet, or a retreat cabin in the silent dark woods, but in your heart. You can go there anytime, free of charge, instantly. No ticket needed.

Teachers can help. They can point you in the right direction, give you practices to help you steer, show you when you’ve gone off-track. But a spiritual path is different from following a religion.

But if you are not willing to feel your pain, to open yourself to the experience of being alive, experiences that you may not always understand, or like, unless you are willing to open yourself to what you may have spent a lifetime trying to avoid, then nobody—not Buddha, not Jesus, not Mother Mary herself—can make you have that experience.

It’s up to you. Your life is a pilgrimage. Find the path quality as it makes sense to you.

The ongoing, daily practice is to recognize the nature of your mind, and then rest in the awareness of that.

Vajrayana Buddhism is sometimes called the secret mantra path. A mantra is a seed syllable or phrase that you chant either aloud or silently. Mantras are said to protect the mind from disturbing emotions and discursive thinking. It’s a tool to keep you in the present moment.

Thrangu Rinpoche writes: “Protecting mind from the disturbing emotions and discursive thought can be compared to protecting oneself from thieves. Thieves will know not to attack a strong, powerful, well-disciplined and attentive person. Rather they will attack someone who is sloppy and lazy and weak. Mindfulness and awareness make one strong, attentive, and well-disciplined. With these one cannot be robbed by disturbing emotions and discursive thought. Someone who lacks mindfulness and awareness is the one who will be plundered. What is stolen are the roots of beneficial factors that exist within one’s mind. With mindfulness and awareness, the disturbing emotions will have no hope of being able to rob you and will just give up.”

Next time you find yourself dwelling in negativity or fired up with anger, try silently reciting a mantra and notice what changes.

Both Hindu and Buddhist views recognize the Four Immeasurables, or Brahma Viharas, as foundational cornerstones of emotional stability. These are heart-centered practices that help you work with emotions, and are designed to help shift perspective from a “me”-centered reality into an open attitude of acceptance.

When you engage these practices to develop loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, you essentially train the heart and mind to be happy. Each of these qualities counteracts negative emotions that conspire to make us suffer from hatred, passion, jealousy, and arrogance.

Indian rickshaw drivers often decorate their vehicles in outrageous fashion—glitter tassels, sparkly OM decals, plastic statues of Hanuman and baby Krishna bouncing on the dashboard as the woofer (taking up the whole trunk) blares Bollywood favorites directly into the passenger’s eardrums.

More often than not (it seems) there is a life-size poster taped up in the back seat of a mother holding a newborn, gazing lovingly into its eyes. A mother’s love, in its purest form.

Unconditional love. It always reminds me of the first immeasurable: maitri, or loving-kindness.

Loving-kindness is the simple aspiration to be happy. This includes wishing for your own happiness as well as the happiness of all beings. True happiness—not temporary happiness.

But it’s more than a wish—it is the confidence that you can actually be happy—that you deserve to be happy—and it involves an active participation in that process.

True happiness is not dependent on outer circumstances; it comes from within. You must learn to recognize true happiness before you can aspire to it. That recognition of what makes you truly happy is called developing loving-kindness.

Of all the skills you will learn in life, perhaps the most important one is to develop loving-kindness. When you can extend loving-kindness to yourself then you can extend it to others.

I sometimes coteach a program for graduate psychology students with Naropa University. We head up into the mountains to meditate and go off-grid for two weeks. The theme of these retreats is Maitri Space Awareness practice, a unique approach to working with emotions developed by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

The practice is to evoke various emotional tones so that students get to experience their unique response to various emotions. How do you work with anger, or jealousy, or passion? What we inevitably discover is that the open space of loving-kindness can hold anything. Emotional challenges can be managed by offering loving-kindness and space to everything that arises.

What inhibits loving-kindness? Essentially, whenever you judge or compare yourself to others, you inhibit loving-kindness. When you solidify into a fixed point of view, you prevent the space that would otherwise hold a situation and allow it to breathe.

You have access to news feeds anytime you want. All this noise can wreak havoc on your state of mind. It induces fear, anger, hope, insecurity, jealousy, comparison, competition, and judgment.

Pressure to fit in, look a certain way, or accomplish goals can make you feel like you fall short. It takes heroic discipline to avoid getting hooked.

How do you avoid getting hooked? By recognizing that you are whole and complete just as you are, right here and right now. By developing loving-kindness.

Make a habit—a practice—of returning to awareness in the present moment without elaboration. When you can give yourself a break for not being perfect, you are on your way to the experience of loving-kindness.

When you are able to give space, you invite the possibility of acceptance, which is the ultimate act of love. The way to develop loving-kindness is to give space to situations and accept things exactly as they are, flaws and all.

You don’t have to immediately rush to fix a problem, or react to a strong emotion. When you notice that you are being hard on yourself, take a mental step back and let the situation or circumstances breathe. Let things be messy for a moment. Giving things space allows for new perspectives to arise. Then you realize that your happiness is not dependent on outside circumstances.

Sometimes it seems easier to be kind to others than it is to be kind to ourselves. If this is true for you, try looking at yourself through the eyes of someone who loves you, and see what they see.

Years ago while on a retreat at Wat Suon Mok in Thailand, I learned a wonderful mantra that helps remind me to return to loving-kindness when I start getting hard on myself.

I offer it here in case it might help you remember that you are perfect just as you are, and exactly where you are meant to be:

Try reciting this while sitting in traffic next to a homeless person, or standing in the queue at the pharmacy with sick people. Practice it for the sad-looking cashier at the 7-Eleven. You will be amazed at the difference it can make.

Watch how your attitude shifts when you keep loving-kindness in your heart as you go about your day.

As the Dalai Lama notes, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

Compassion means to suffer with. Passion from the past participle stem of Latin pati means “to suffer, endure,” and com means “with” or “together.”

When you put others’ well-being before your own, you bypass the egoic stance of holding on tightly to your own experience and trying to get what will benefit only you.

Because here’s the thing: impermanence is a fundamental truth. You can’t hold on to anything. Once you realize that your experience is constantly in flux, wishing for the well-being of others is the only true way to subvert the system.

Ordinary compassion is the simple wish for others to be free of suffering. You probably feel it when you see an animal hurt on the side of the road. It is natural to feel for any being who is suffering, if you are paying attention. Developing compassion is a practice of evoking this mental muscle on a regular basis, through wishing others well. Immeasurable compassion is extending this wish to all beings, regardless of your feelings toward them.

When I was at my most hopeless phase—right around the time I turned forty—I finally discovered a glimmer of compassion. For myself. It was the only thing that kept me going for a while.

The shame I felt for having been single my entire life was overwhelming. And I kept choosing very sexy men who would love me and leave me, often in brutally abrupt ways. They were not all like that, but there were enough of them to leave a mark.

I was on retreat somewhere—probably Vietnam, where I often went to find sanctuary from Hong Kong—and my heart was breaking. The man I loved was with another woman.

I had learned a compassion meditation early on while I was at Naropa, but had never really done it faithfully. But I was desperate for some relief, so I tried it. Breathe in the suffering of the world, breathe out goodness and light.

Suddenly all the heartache I felt was absorbed into the totality of the world’s suffering, and my heart broke open. I felt the pain that “the other woman” would soon enough feel (when he left her, too, which he did) and it was ironically this compassion for the other woman that broke my own spell. I stepped outside of myself long enough to see that my own suffering was just part of life; something we all experience. If I extend compassion to others, then I can also offer it to myself.

That was a big turning point for me. So I always recommend the sending and taking—tonglen—practice as a staple in your toolbox of practices.

Developing immeasurable compassion means making the aspiration that all beings may be free of suffering, not just the people in your small circle of loved ones. This means extending out your compassion to limitless beings throughout time and space, including Hitler, Osama bin Laden, the Shoe Bomber, and your ex-husband. Be thankful you have one.

This is no easy task at the beginning. It is easier to start developing immeasurable compassion with beings who you can relate to—and care about. Your cat, for example, or your favorite grandparent. Start with them and develop the practice slowly.

It can help to remember that everyone was a small child once, and had a mother who loved them, if even only for a moment. Every sentient being wants to be happy. Some just get more misguided about it than others.

True joy comes from wishing others well. Empathetic joy is a wholesome attitude of rejoicing in the happiness and virtues of all sentient beings. This type of joy is different from worldly happiness in that you may not feel especially cheerful. It’s more like a feeling of being content. It is the absence of struggle.

You know the feeling of joy when a close friend or family member encounters good fortune? This is the flavor of the third immeasurable. You learn to be happy because others are. But you don’t just stop at your friends and loved ones.

Practicing empathetic joy means you take delight in sharing it with others. You recognize that joy cannot be hoarded, divided up, or stolen. Joy gets bigger when you share it. This is what gives it the “immeasurable” quality.

When you extend empathetic joy to all sentient beings, you experience true joy as a sublime state of mind. It is the perfect antidote to jealousy and envy and comparison.

It means relishing the good you see in the world, both in yourself and others. You feel happy when good fortune is bestowed on others.

You see that this life is fleeting and ephemeral, and that you could actually appreciate your life more because of this. Eventually you will have to let go of everything. Why not focus on the simple joys of living in the present moment?

Equanimity is an attitude of radical acceptance. It is regarding all sentient beings as equals. It is viewing all apparent phenomena as dreamlike, illusory, and impermanent.

When you recognize all that arises as temporary, you can accept whatever arises, whether or not the situation conforms to your wishes. Everything changes, so it’s pointless to get worked up about something that will eventually evolve or dissolve.

Without an attitude of equanimity, failure is virtually synonymous with suffering. But with equanimity, failure is simply a big cosmic NO, directing you to something more suitable.

Mental steadiness and emotional balance in the face of change are your best defenses against suffering. You don’t let things get to you. You learn to tolerate experience. That’s called cultivating equanimity.

To become a sublime state of mind—an immeasurable—you extend this attitude of equanimity to all sentient beings. You recognize that all beings suffer. Equanimity allows you to be more tolerant of others when they act out of suffering.

You can see how easy it is for your relationships to transform: a friend becomes an enemy, a lover becomes a stranger, an enemy becomes a family member. These relationships may transform yet again.

When you develop immeasurable equanimity, you see that everyone—whether friend, lover, enemy, frenemy, or stranger—is, underneath it all, simply a sentient being struggling to find happiness.

My dear Acharya Shankaranarayana once gave an interesting teaching in Mysore on these four brahma viharas from a Hindu perspective. He often taught that one of the most important ways of strengthening your practice was to choose carefully who you spend time with. The theme of resonance works in the opposite direction as well—you adopt habits from people in your circles. So if all your friends are yoga practitioners, chances are you will start practicing yoga. If you mix with drug dealers, you will learn tricks of the trade—a well-known phenomenon in the prison industry.

When you encounter people in your life, according to this interpretation of the brahma viharas, you extend to them what is appropriate to the situation. To someone who is a good influence you extend loving-kindness. For people who are kind-hearted but destructive, you extend compassion. Extend empathetic joy to someone who has questionable motives, but is basically harmless—a corrupt businessperson, for example. And for someone who is most difficult, someone whose behavior causes harm, you extend equanimity.

Ideally, the hope is to extend all four of these qualities to all beings. But in reality, if you are not able to extend loving-kindness to someone, then try compassion. If that’s not possible, go for joyful empathy. If that doesn’t work, then at least try to be equanimous and let it go.

I’ve never heard this particular slant taught in Buddhist teachings, and I only heard it once from Acharya. But I found it helpful as a practical way to apply the four immeasurable qualities.

Bringing practice to daily life is about turning every day into a pilgrimage, and that requires a shift in attitude. We bring our practice into the world to be of benefit to our ailing planet and its inhabitants. Here’s the irony: the practice is simply learning to take care of yourself.

When you take care of yourself, you model for others how to live sanely, with simplicity.

The first step in knowing how to take care of yourself is to learn to identify when you start going off track. The body will tell you this information if you listen. But it’s like learning a new language for many of us who have spent years ignoring the messages our bodies are telling us.

1.Learn to listen to your body. This is much different than the idea of listening to your body. This is why yoga is such a powerful tool—it gets us in the body on a deep level so we can start to be aware of the messages our bodies give us. The body does not lie—and it will speak up in its own language when we need to pay attention to something. Place your hand too close to the fire and you will get an immediate—and loud—message. Some messages are more subtle and harder to read. The more in tune we are with our physical body, the easier it becomes to read these signs.

2.Eat what nourishes you. So much of what gets sold as food these days is not even food! You don’t have to get neurotic or rigid about it, but research clearly shows that eating well is our best defense against illness. Go for fresh, locally sourced produce grown without pesticides or chemicals, reduce sugar and unhealthy cooking oils, avoid MSG and foods that contain preservatives. It’s pretty simple. Just eat good food! I have a general rule of thumb that if it comes out of a box, I don’t eat it. If cooking healthy food seems too overwhelming, learn a few simple dishes that you can keep as fallbacks to make it easy to succeed. If you don’t have a backup plan, it can be too easy to go for fast food, which is usually not the best way to nourish your body. Taking care of yourself means planning ahead.

3.Clean up your environment. Are you living in a toxic environment? Toxicity can take many forms: environmental toxins can be obvious as in air pollution, or subtle, like when you discover you have mold infesting your walls. There are toxic relationships and communities, and we can speak to ourselves in toxic ways. We ingest toxins when we don’t pay attention to what we eat, or consciously when we indulge in drugs or alcohol. This is usually a simple fix, but the hard part comes in our attachment to habitual patterns. Taking care of yourself means eliminating or reducing toxins from your body, environment, relationships, and emotional state.

4.Get regular exercise. There are so many studies linking good health to regular exercise that most of us are pretty aware we need to move regularly if we want to practice self-care. Just get in a routine that feels manageable—not too hard, not too soft—and stick with it. Bonus points if you get outdoors to reconnect with nature as you exercise.

5.Prioritize sleep. This is such an easy and quick way to introduce self-care on a profound level. It’s amazing more of us don’t do this. Notice I didn’t say: get enough sleep. Most of us can function on less-than-optimal sleep, and convince ourselves that we are getting enough shut-eye. But to prioritize sleep, we start looking at all the ways we sabotage our rest cycle through stimulants, computer screens late at night, unresolved emotional issues, taking on too much, and generally not being aware of our natural rhythms. Try a phase of making sleep your #1 priority and see how your attitude shifts.

6.Develop nourishing relationships and set boundaries with unhealthy ones. We pick up habits from the people we spend time with. It is important to carefully choose the people you spend the most time with. If you hang out with a gang, you’ll eventually become a gangster. If you hang out with kind, compassionate people, you’ll become one of them.

7.Speak kindly, especially to yourself. Speak kind, truthful words, and notice how your mind-set changes. Most of us spend a lot of time criticizing or judging our experience. Even the smallest incident can bring on a wave of negativity: you’re trying to get a new app to work on your phone and it is not cooperating so you swear at the damn thing (see?). Watch how you do this…the way we use speech creates energy patterns that infuse the body and send out signals into the environment. If you are constantly lashing out in criticism—even if it is only in your mind—you are germinating a toxic inner environment. Antidote: Breathe and smile. Or…

May I be well, May I be happy, May I let go of the past

Om mani padme hum

Or hum a song—it’s surprising how calming this is.

9.Manage stressors. Learn to say no. This benign little word can be very empowering. Get clear on what supports your well-being and what stresses you out. You might want to add “thank you.”

10.Meditate daily. A daily meditation practice will do more for your self-care than most anything else. When you take time each day to check in with yourself, you start to notice patterns. We can only change what we are aware of.

11.Practice gratitude. Make a practice of recognizing the kindness others extend to you and share your appreciation with them. When you focus on positive qualities guess what you attract more of?

12.Breathe. Whenever you think of it, notice your breathing. It’s the most reliable way to quickly change your state of mind. If you find yourself getting worked up about something, take a few deep breaths, and observe the shift.

For each of the following, write about a situation that either evokes or needs one of the four immeasurables.

To discover this, listen to a guided meditation I’ve prepared for you in the Resources section.

Remember a time when you felt happy for someone’s success and write about how you felt.