CHAPTER
21

Zen When Life Is Tough

In This Chapter

Unless you are going through great difficulty, reading a chapter about dealing with it may not seem like your idea of a good time. Illness, pain, loss, death—these are things you naturally would rather not dwell on unless you have to. However, in Zen practice you are advised to explore everything, and are told that doing so will have a positive effect on your life. Even if things are going well for you now, you may find it helpful to know how to apply Zen practice to your life when things are very tough in a literal, tangible way.

After all, as human beings we know that adversity will come into our life at some point, so it’s hard not to be at least somewhat anxious about it. If you gain some confidence in practice, it can be a great relief to know that you can rely on it even when things fall apart.

If you are facing some of the hardships described in this chapter, hopefully you will be encouraged. Zen doesn’t deny that certain situations make life painful, distressing, or grueling, but there are no circumstances so difficult that Zen practice becomes irrelevant or ineffective, or loses its potential to help you find peace of mind and gratitude for your life. In fact, like all of the challenges discussed so far in this book, literal hardships are great practice opportunities—the greatest, and hardest, opportunities of them all.

Difficult Circumstances

Sometimes the circumstances of your life can be overwhelmingly stressful and discouraging. Just taking care of your responsibilities can seem an impossible task. Maybe this is because you don’t have enough money, or you are facing legal problems. Maybe you are stuck in a dysfunctional living situation, or have been left alone to care for your children without any help.

When the stressors build up, things tend to start falling apart: because you don’t have any money, you don’t have a car and can’t get to job interviews to find work; in your anxiety about the future you’ve gotten short-tempered with your partner and your relationship is in trouble; anxiety about your relationship makes you seek solace in buying things too expensive for your budget, so you have even less money … and so around and around it goes. You can feel like you’re doing everything you can to just keep your head above water.

There is nothing Zen can do to fix the practical aspects of your life for you. However, Zen practice can help keep you from the brink of despair, so you can be at your best when you’re trying to improve your circumstances. It can also help you maintain some centeredness and dignity through your struggles.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

When your life becomes very difficult, you may be inclined to think you can’t practice Zen. You may not be able to find the time or energy to sit zazen very often, or attend a Zen group, or do any Zen study. However, this is thinking of Zen practice in a limited sense. As discussed in Chapter 3, at the most subtle and profound level, Zen practice is approaching each moment of your life with awareness and the intention to decrease suffering for yourself or others. You can do this no matter what’s going on or how busy you are—and your life will benefit if you do.

Dropping the Stories

One of the most important things you can do when the practical aspects of your life seem to be falling apart is to give up the extra stories you’re telling yourself about your circumstances. It may take some mindfulness, karma work, and insight to even be able to see the stories, but if you look carefully you will find them. Chances are good that you’re thinking, “Things shouldn’t be like this.” Of course, this is dukkha in a more obvious manifestation than the rather subtle existential dissatisfaction you might feel when things are going well.

In your current circumstances, you are clearly of the opinion that things aren’t the way they should be. However, as discussed in Chapter 10, this opinion causes you stress and suffering, and it doesn’t help. It’s not that you should give up trying to change your situation, just that you’re better off starting your efforts here and now, in your present circumstances, rather than waiting until—by some miracle—your inner resistance has forced the world to be different. Things are the way they are, and ironically you can gain a measure of composure and peace from simply accepting that. Not that this is easy to do at all, especially when things are really tough! But the fact that it’s very difficult to do doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.

When your circumstances are hard, you probably also think, “What did I do to deserve this?” and, “Why are other people’s lives so much better than mine?” Both of these thoughts are based on stories about individual control, based on a belief that each of us has an inherent, enduring self-nature. This belief is erroneous (see Chapter 11), and leads us to further erroneous assumptions. These assumptions include the idea that there is an intrinsic, graspable you that misfortune is happening to, and the idea that you should be able to control the things that you have identified as being I, me, and mine.

When you hold on to the idea of enduring self-essence, you conceive of you versus the world; but the reality of your existence is that you are a flow of causes and conditions, deeply influenced by everything around you. There are no clear boundaries between you, “your” life, and the rest of the world.

Thinking about how you are empty of any inherent, unchanging essence may not seem comforting intellectually, but when you can directly experience how this is true, you are much less likely to fall into the trap of blame. Blame leads you to create one or more of the following stories: you are to blame for your situation; you are not to blame for your situation (and therefore others are, or “the world” is); others are responsible for their good fortune (and therefore superior to you, because you don’t have the good fortune); or other people are not responsible for their good fortune, and therefore have been unfairly rewarded (the universe is biased, and out to shortchange you).

Telling yourself these stories can lead to feelings of pain, anger, shame, disempowerment, persecution, envy, and confusion. None of these feelings is going to help you maintain your health in body and mind—and you really need that health in order to take care of your life.

CONSIDER THIS

Dropping your stories about your circumstances may sound a little bit like “Just get over it!” However, telling yourself (or others) to “just get over it” is unkind and unhelpful. When you work on dropping your stories, you should do so because you are ready to, and then employ patience and compassion with yourself. Dropping stories does not require you to deny the reality of your circumstances. Instead, you are voluntarily changing your mental habits in order to feel more positive and empowered—without giving up your intelligence or your determination to take care of your life.

How do you drop the stories? You apply karma work to them, because they are habits of mind (see Chapter 7), and you work on challenging the delusion of inherent, enduring self-nature (Chapter 14). First you get to know these habits of mind through careful, patient, and honest attention. You encourage yourself through this process by trying to summon compassion for yourself—admitting things are tough, and examining how they are affecting you.

Eventually, by getting to know your mind, you can learn to set aside certain thoughts or stories at will, even if just for a moment. Then you can see how they aren’t absolutely true, and how much better off you are without them. Ultimately, it helps to challenge your self-delusion and learn to live with less of a sense of self. This loosens some of the anguish around the worry about I, me, and mine, and lets you engage each moment without dwelling so much on the past or future.

The Perfection of Forbearance

When faced with difficult circumstances, or with any other hardship, it can be transformative to work on the Buddhist perfection of forbearance, or kshanti. Forbearance can help you maintain a sense of purpose and dignity, even when everything else seems to be out of your control. There are five other perfections that all help you master the art of living: generosity, morality, diligence, concentration, and wisdom. All take work to cultivate and are beneficial, but forbearance is unique among the perfections in that, when practiced, it doesn’t generally get you any special admiration, respect, or spiritual kudos.

Forbearance is the least glamorous of the perfections (not that you should be practicing perfections for the sake of your reputation, but it’s human to notice these things). Few people set out thinking, “I’d really like to practice kshanti.” You can probably picture someone acting out any of the other perfections, and how noble they would appear. If you picture someone acting out kshanti, they will simply be in touch with their spiritual center in the midst of difficulty. Kshanti is worthy of deep respect, but you may not easily recognize when it is being practiced.

DEFINITION

Kshanti is the perfection of forbearance, or tolerance. It can also be translated as “able to bear” or “composure.” It’s one of six perfections, which are to be cultivated in order to help support your spiritual practice. The other five perfections are generosity (dana), morality (sila), diligence or energy (virya), meditation or concentration (dhyana), and wisdom (prajna).

Forbearance is about recognizing that you have influence over how your life unfolds, but not control. At times, this influence may be extremely limited, sometimes to the point that the only thing you have any chance of changing is your own mind. Generally speaking, the more adverse your conditions, the more limited your influence.

Forbearance does not forbid acting to change whatever it is you can manage to change, but it means that you will try to have realistic expectations about your sphere of influence, and will graciously take care of whatever you can. You give up guilt, comparisons, attachments, stories, dreams, and ideals in order to be present in your life as it is. When you do this, your sense of groundedness returns. You have a stable place from which to meet your challenges.

The great thing about forbearance is that you don’t have to enjoy it. The fact that it is included as a perfection is the Buddhist acknowledgment that sometimes, no matter how well you take care of your life, no matter how spiritual you are, no matter how good you have been, things are going to feel awful. No amount of letting go of attachments, resistance, delusions, or stories is going to suddenly make things feel great or easy.

The radical thing about forbearance is that it points to the possibility that nonetheless your life can be lived with wisdom, grace, gratitude, dignity, and even a little bit of joy. Life doesn’t have to feel great in order to be worth living. Experiencing great difficulty does not obstruct your enlightenment; in fact, it gives you the supreme opportunity to let go of your self-concern. Doing so when things hurt, as opposed to when you’re looking for a more sublime spiritual state, is a more direct route to liberation. Knowing this can give you a sense of purpose and dignity when you are practicing forbearance.

Injustice

Few things can be more disturbing than witnessing, experiencing, or fighting injustice. Whether you are the victim of injustice or are taking up a cause on behalf of others or of the planet, it can be incredibly hard to let go of dukkha: your sense that things should not be like this. Because they shouldn’t! Things need to change! The injustice needs to be recognized, acknowledged, and addressed. Lives may be at stake. Existence as we know it may be threatened. To accept things as they are, or to try to see how life is complete and precious just as it is, seems to risk slipping into complacency and ignorance. As the bumper sticker says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

And yet, persistent agitation, anger, resentment, outrage, resistance, and fighting don’t seem to be the most effective way to bring about change. These negative emotions and postures tend to exhaust and embitter you. Your repeated reminders to other people about the existence of terrible injustice often seem to fall on deaf ears, as if people were just too wrapped up in themselves to care, or too unwilling to face the ugly truth.

Noticing this can further discourage you. Your efforts to change things probably meet with great resistance, whether it’s simple inertia or active opposition. Change comes very slowly, not nearly fast enough to satisfy your longing to see things put right. You can envision things being taken care of, justice being restored, peace and harmony prevailing, compassion and wisdom being manifested. This vision seems so close, why doesn’t it come about?

How can you deal with injustice more effectively, without giving up your integrity? It’s tricky. Essentially, it will involve giving up attachments: your attachment to being right, your attachment to being able to change things, your identification with your cause, and your vision of what things would look like if they were put right (among other things). As explained in Chapter 13, an attachment is something you have incorporated into your concept of self, or made a possession of self.

In the case of addressing injustice, if you are attached, you have invested part of your being into correcting the wrong. If the wrong is not corrected, if you are foiled in your efforts, your sense of self is threatened. This is distressing in a way that is very different from the pain you feel because of your sense of empathy, sympathy, sadness, or compassion for the beings affected by injustice. When your sense of self, your very existence, is threatened, a deep fear and opposition is triggered in you. This turns your cause into, “Things must change, or else ….” You may leave this “or else” unspecified, but internally you know that it more or less means total catastrophe. It’s a scenario that is utterly unacceptable, if not impossible.

It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s best to hold even your fight against injustice lightly. By this I mean you hold it the same way you hold any other desires you have, thinking, “It would be wonderful if…” instead of, “This must happen, or else ….” In the case of terrible wrongs, where people and things are facing injury and even destruction, this may seem like giving up the fight, but it’s not. Rather, you can continue the fight with less agitation, anger, resentment, outrage, and resistance—and therefore with more perspective, energy, and wisdom.

Your hope for change will be set against a background of a world without expectations. Instead of looking at the world as a place where people should act with wisdom and compassion, where they should pay attention to the long-term effects of greed and selfishness, where they should realize that their well-being is not independent of the well-being of their fellow creatures, you look at the world just as it is. It’s a crazy mix of beauty and ugliness, incredible generosity, and incredible selfishness.

There’s no rule book of the world that says it’s supposed to be a peaceful, wonderful place. So when people opt for justice, clarity, kindness, and selflessness, it’s cause for celebration. Your work to encourage this may look the same from the outside, but inside your approach can be transformed. People will notice that you’re hoping for the best from them, rather than judging them for being wrong or ignorant, and they will probably respond better. Your efforts will not feel so frustrating, and you will feel more gratitude for your successes, however small they may be.

Illness, Pain, and Old Age

Nothing challenges your sense of self, and your ability to appreciate your life, like problems with your body. The most enlightened Zen master is still dependent on her body and inevitably identified with it to some extent. When you’re faced with physical pain or the loss of physical abilities, your life can be radically altered. Depending on the severity of the problem, you may be uncomfortably reminded of your mortality, or you may essentially lose almost everything you have ever cared about.

In either case, life is prying your attachments out of your hands whether you are inclined to work on letting them go or not. At the same time, your physical challenges can make it difficult to do formal Zen practices like attending a Zen group or meditation retreats, or sitting still for longer than a few minutes. So just when you could really use Zen, it can seem like your practice is being taken away from you, too.

CONSIDER THIS

From a Zen point of view, illness, pain, and old age are wonderful opportunities for learning. Of course, “wonderful” doesn’t mean you should look forward to them, or enjoy them. Still, there are certain spiritual lessons you can’t possibly understand fully until you are personally faced with physical problems, and with your own mortality. In ancient Buddhism, it was understood that individuals could attain enlightenment, or nirvana, while they were still alive and healthy. But it was only when they died that they attained parinirvana, or complete nirvana. Only when they faced and passed through the experience of physical dissolution did they completely let go and attain ultimate liberation.

Worst-Case Scenario

In this section I’m going to talk about how to do Zen practice when you’re faced with what, for most of us, is the worst-case scenario: when problems with your body cause you to lose just about everything. The same ideas still apply when your physical problems are not so severe, but it will be easier for you to put them into practice. Also, your minor bodily issues remind you of your mortality, or the fact that eventually you will indeed face this worst-case scenario, so the issue is actually relevant for everyone.

I have learned a great deal from several Zen practitioners who have practiced with severe physical illness. Their lives are constrained by the needs and limitations of their bodies, to the point where their daily life consists largely of just taking care of themselves. Waking up, getting dressed, and having breakfast is enough work for a whole morning and subsequently requires a nap. Showering or doing laundry are major undertakings that have to be carefully planned in order to avoid facing major physical setbacks. Doctor’s appointments may require a recovery period of several days or more.

Given such conditions, activities most of us take for granted, like taking a hike, going shopping, or visiting friends, are pretty much impossible. My friends have to depend on help from others, despite the fact that they were formerly extremely competent and independent people. When they talk to others, they have to be careful not to be too honest about just how miserable and discouraged they feel, because then people will start to avoid them. To say that their situations can be depressing is understating the matter. Given their physical challenges, how do they practice?

Essentially, they continue to do their very best to practice in that most profound sense of the word: paying careful attention to their lives, seeking constantly for clarity and wisdom, and trying to decrease suffering and increase happiness for themselves and others. Sometimes they can do formal Zen practice, and sometimes they can’t, but they never give up the intention to try.

They also cultivate the perfection of forbearance, the quality of character described in the first section of this chapter. Giving up all comparisons, dreams, and expectations, they try to be present in their life as it is. They try to appreciate the view outside their bedroom window, the taste of their tea, the rare visit from a good friend. They acknowledge their pain and discouragement, and try not to fight it or dwell on the way things should be. Sometimes being afflicted with physical problems can feel like an injustice, in which case the practices discussed in the previous section become important.

The Universe in a Cup of Tea

If you have significant physical challenges and you want to find peace of mind, it is essential that you work on letting go of your attachment to who you think you are, what you think your life should be, and what you think a meaningful life should look like. When bodily pain, illness, or limitations get bad enough, the perceived dimensions of your life shrink. Before your challenges, your sphere of operation included many different physical places like work, beautiful outdoor locations, favorite places in your city, friends’ houses, and perhaps even places all over the world. Now your sphere may include only your own house and your doctor’s office, or perhaps even just one room.

Before your physical limitations, you probably interacted with all kinds of different people and engaged in all kinds of different activities and projects. Now you may just see one or two people on any regular basis, and your activities are limited to taking care of your own basic needs. If this is the case, any comparison of your life with before, or with the lives of others, is going to be a cause for despair. Fortunately, Zen practice can give you enough freedom of mind to work on changing the way you think and letting go of thoughts and stories that only cause you more difficulty and pain.

Even more importantly, letting go of comparisons and ideas about the way things should be allows you to sincerely appreciate your life just as it is. It’s not simply that you play mind games with yourself to make yourself feel better, it’s that you try to wake up to the reality of your life. Viewed without any expectations or comparisons, it is precious. The view that your life is small compared to the lives of other people, or less impactful or beneficial to others, is an illusion. There is no absolute truth to such comparisons, only relative truth.

Through Zen practice you can experience the way the whole universe is manifest right here, right now. The limited sphere of operation imposed on you by your physical limitations is the same kind of limited sphere intentionally sought out by Zen monks in monasteries, and Zen practitioners during meditation retreats. By simplifying your environment and doing without all the activities that usually give you your sense of identity, purpose, and pleasure, you are forced to find these in whatever is right in front of you. Amazingly, everything you need is right there, and nothing is lacking. It’s like the universe can change sizes, and be wholly present in single moments and tiny things.

ZEN WISDOM

“Actually, ‘accepting’ pain sounds to me too passive to accurately describe the process of successfully dealing with chronic pain. It fails to convey the tremendous energy and courage it takes to accept physical pain as part of your life. Truly accepting pain is not at all like passive resignation. Rather, it is active engagement with life in its most intimate sense. It is meeting, dancing with, raging at, turning toward. To accept your pain on this level, you must cultivate particular skills. After you have developed some proficiency, dealing with pain feels more like an embrace, or the bond that forms between sparring partners, than like resignation.”

—Zen Teacher Darlene Cohen, from Turning Suffering Inside Out

Remember: this teaching that everything you need is right there, so your life is precious no matter how much pain you are in, is meant to be experienced, not just adopted as a belief. If you just take it on as something you should feel or understand, you will just be adding another layer of dissatisfaction onto your life. Forbearance is about being authentically present with your life, and sometimes the physical or emotional pain will be too great for you to be able to feel wonder and gratitude for your cup of tea, or to ponder how precious your life is.

However, if you can base your life in something deeper than your feelings, you will be able to endure the really tough times and experience joy and gratitude again. There’s no denying this is very hard work, but the alternative to the hard work is despair. Every day—actually, every moment—that you are able to feel some contentment instead of despair, you are offering a gift to the world.

In Chapter 19 I talked about how any work can be offered as a gift, and that includes your work to take care of yourself and keep on living with the best attitude you can muster. Because, whether you know it or not, other people are watching you. When they see from your example that it’s possible to remain undefeated by physical problems, their confidence will be increased. When they finally face such problems of their own, your generosity will manifest.

Loss

One of the traps it’s easy to fall into in Zen practice is believing that you shouldn’t feel the pain of loss. After all, you are doing all this work on yourself in order to give up self-attachments, and to allow things to flow freely in and out of your life without depending on them for your ultimate happiness. Surely, if you were just skilled enough in practice, or dedicated enough, you would be able to shift your thinking so the loss of a job, a home, an ability, a relationship, a pet, or even a loved one wouldn’t feel so devastating. Ideally, you could see all of it within the bigger context of emptiness and perfection, and let it go, right?

Unfortunately, Zen practice does not protect you from the pain of loss. It also may not have the best tools or teachings for encouraging you to acknowledge, process, and be patient with your grief (you may want to turn to therapy for help with that; see Chapter 20). However, Zen’s main emphasis is on being completely present for your life just as it is, so it follows that you should be attentive to the pain of loss if that’s what’s going on for you, and not fight, deny, or just try to get rid of it.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Cultural understandings and traditions around grief may not give you adequate time to acknowledge, understand, process, and heal from loss. Even in the case of the loss of a loved one, other people may not be inclined to hear about or honor your ongoing grief six months or a year after your loss. If your grieving process seems to take a long time—perhaps many, many years—try not to wonder what’s wrong with you, or to withdraw your care and attention from your grief. It may be helpful to get support in your grieving, but try to accept that you cannot control the process or how long it’s going to take.

A Zen View of Grief

Here’s why loss can be legitimately painful, and not just something that challenges your attachments: as discussed in Chapter 11, your true self-nature is a flow of causes and conditions. It arises and is shaped by everything around you, including your work, your family of origin, your culture, your relationships, and your environment. Actually, not only is your self shaped by these things, there is no clear boundary between self and the rest of the world. In a sense, the things and beings in your life are part of you.

This “being part” is very different from attachment, where you conceive of yourself as having an enduring self-essence, and you appropriate things into your self-concept (see Chapter 13). The real way in which things are part of who you are is not at all self-centered; in fact, it challenges your sense of self, because these things that are part of you are not under your control, and they can be lost.

The pain you feel when you lose something that was a part of your life is similar to the physical pain and disorientation you would feel if part of your body was amputated. It is grief, or love in the face of loss. A hole has appeared in your self and in your life, a hole where something or someone you valued used to be.

This hole is a wound and may be extremely painful, or at the very least uncomfortable. It will take time for the wound to heal—and it may never heal entirely. Your self has been permanently changed in a substantial way. You need to rebuild a healthy sense of self—one that allows you to function effectively in the world—and you have to do it without the thing or being you have lost.

Loss as Teacher

If the wound of a loss always remains, even when you have more or less rebuilt your conventional and functional sense of self, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Over a lifetime, you will inevitably experience more and more of these wounds, but they can just make you more compassionate, understanding, patient, and humble.

Of course, this requires that you accept and embrace the wounds as part of you. If you just try to fill the holes left in your life by loss because grief is uncomfortable, you won’t be seasoned by your wounds. If you deny or fight the fact that you feel the pain of loss, you won’t be able to experience the deep, bittersweet peace of acceptance that still honors what you have lost.

Loss is also an incredibly valuable teacher when it comes to seeing the true nature of self. Few things so challenge your delusion of having an inherent, enduring, unchanging self-essence as experiencing a loss that radically alters your life. It will probably occur to you at some point, “If losing this can shake my entire sense of self, what else am I depending on that I can also lose?” It may seem like the solid ground you thought you were standing on is becoming very unstable, or even disappearing.

If you can stay with and explore this experience rather than running away from it (by trying to forget it, or by desperately searching for more solid ground), you have the potential to gain profound insight into the emptiness of self and phenomena. The basic point is that, indeed, there is no solid ground, and there is nothing concrete on which you can depend. And yet, it is possible to stand firmly without any ground under your feet at all.

ZEN WISDOM

“The journey into a life of awareness begins for most of us in a moment of helplessness … a child falls ill, a lover disappoints, or some vast, neutral power of the earth, such as a hurricane or fire, strips us of everything we have relied upon to stay the same …. We find ourselves plunging unprepared, a weakness in every limb. Yet this unexpected fall is also a gift, not to be refused—an initiation ordeal preparing us for new life …. Pitching headlong into this first descent of the journey, we struggle, we suffer untellable grief, but we also wake up—we begin to see ourselves and our lives for what they are.”

—Zen Teacher John Tarrant, from The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life

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