Fred Savage Is a Jerk, and I Am Fred Savage
If you had a roommate that did any of the things babies do, you’d ask them to move out.
—JIM GAFFIGAN
I remember telling a friend, a mother of a young child, about my idea to write this book.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “It’s like what would happen if Fred Savage’s character grew up to teach Buddhism.”
At first, I bristled at the comparison. “Well, okay. Sure. Except the Grandson is a complete jerk to his Grandfather in the movie. And to his mom.”
“Aren’t we all, though?” my friend said. “I mean, seriously, every kid is a jerk. They have no idea what we sacrifice for them. My son is an asshole to me, maybe … let’s say eighty percent of the time. He’s pretty much the worst roommate in the world.”
Precious Human Life
WHAT IS YOUR OWN PLACE among your relatives? When you consider your role as a member of your family lineage, does the thought of where you come from invoke resentment, fear, apathy, and sadness, or pride, gratitude, and appreciation? Maybe all the above? Hopefully, our basic experience of family is an even deeper version of the great qualities of friendship. In an ideal world, family is where we go to regenerate trust in our basic goodness. But what if you have certain family relationships that don’t work that way? And what if, like many, you’ve experienced conflict or trauma, or are estranged from members of your family?
Perhaps it is best to begin with gratitude. The issue many of us face with any practice of gratitude is how forced, how fake it often seems, like giving or receiving a compliment you know isn’t sincere. But we aren’t talking about fake compliments. Like every other practice, gratitude can be viewed as a mental muscle for positivity, a form of contemplative struggle that it’s worthwhile to pursue. Even if your family history is difficult, you can practice offering gratitude for the sacrifices your lineage has made on your behalf, and the positive experiences passed along.
Modern science demonstrates why gratitude is such a crucial element of human experience. We often feel incredibly negative about the legacy of being born human. For many, this negativity is justified, arising from a social inheritance that includes poverty, racism, sexism, and trauma. But for just a moment, let’s say, you are a relatively privileged member of this society, like the Grandson in The Princess Bride. We each carry a spoiled child around inside, and the spoiled child often makes a prominent appearance, especially during the struggles of meditation practice. The spoiled kid in each of us just doesn’t want to deal with any of it right now: not with growing up, not with work; not with relationships and family, aging, illness, or the letdowns of daily life; and definitely not with the mind itself. To my inner spoiled child, even a delayed train or dreary weather is rich material for complaints about life in general. Like the Grandson, and like me much of the time in fourth grade, we would love to call in sick to life.
The grouchy kid in me grows more spoiled when it comes to the details of family. That inner fourth-grader tends to view family obligations as a hardship. Where does all this negativity about family come from? It comes first from our evolution, and the corrective mechanism is the contemplation of gratitude. Gratitude might be more necessary now than ever. As Suzanne C. Parker of American University states, “The modern, Western-centric value of maintaining independence can lead to a tendency to idolize self-reliance, prize uniqueness, and perceive differences rather than similarities, eroding a felt sense of interdependence and gratitude.” Ancient Buddhist teachers lacked the physical precision of modern brain science, but they implicitly understood the psychological need for gratitude. From the subjective science of their own experience, they saw that we enter this human life with a bias toward negativity. This bias can be amplified based on difficult circumstances that happen within the early dynamics of families.
Because our nervous systems are geared toward spotting threats to survival in the highly predatory environment of the ancient world (snakes, saber-toothed tigers, and natural disasters of unusual size), and because many human beings now live reasonably safer lives, at least when it comes to predators, than we did tens of thousands of years ago, this negativity bias transfers itself onto other, less physically threatening scenarios. In media, bad news usually makes better clickbait than good, as minor irritations, complaints, and schadenfreude rise above good news in the hierarchy of your consciousness. The human nervous system often functions more like an overly sensitive burglar alarm than a reliable barometer of the weather. One telling example of negativity bias: let’s say someone sends you an e-mail with personal feedback about your work, and their feedback includes nine major compliments and one minor critique. Your mind ignores the multiple compliments and focuses on the lone criticism. Why?
This bias toward negativity also affects how we perceive, in the present moment, our relationship to the members of our families. When Grandpa Sol was around, for example, I might have had exactly the same response that Fred Savage had to seeing his grandfather so often: disinterested and bratty complaints about having to read a book rather than getting to play his video game. Now, in retrospect, every single moment with each of my long-lost grandparents seems exceedingly precious, and more so each day. Free from the momentary reactiveness of my nervous system to their physical presence, no longer bombarded by the drizzle of minor irritants and awkward duties of interaction, the explicit memories of my grandparents have been slowly reprinted with brightness and affection. This realization that my ability to appreciate my family has often been lacking has made me feel uncomfortably similar to the Grandson character, which is why I bristled at my friend’s comparison. I didn’t like the fact that I was (at least) as unaware of my good fortune as the Grandson was. I didn’t accept the fact that I, too, have been the worst roommate in the world. It is a difficult lesson, one that might bring shame with it—to realize that you are the inheritor of many privileges in this life, and that those privileges haven’t necessarily helped you achieve happiness. Thankfully, my teachers have encouraged me to counteract this negativity, to learn to contemplate my own precious human life not as a tool of shame, but as a foundation of positivity, a base from which both personal awakening and care for others can proceed.
The Tibetan Buddhist system begins with a series of contemplations beautifully designed to rebalance the negativity bias. Within the classical Tibetan curriculum, before a person engaged in any further Tantric meditations, the first step was to spend time in recurring contemplation on gratitude for one’s human life. This contemplation included thinking about the harmful circumstances from which the practitioner was free, and the helpful circumstances, or privileges, the practitioner possessed. Contemplating these freedoms and privileges was intended to provoke a confrontation, bringing the practitioner face-to-face with the prominence of complaint in the mind, while slowly building an acknowledgment of the precious opportunity of one’s current situation, a positive urgency to use their time wisely. Urgency without anxiety is crucial to any transformation, and this inspiration would launch their dharma practice with vigor.
You can think of the set of practices collectively called contemplative meditation as a productive struggle, a gentle grappling with a particular fact of life. These practices of deep, directive thinking form the basis for later contemplation on lineage. In the first contemplative meditation on precious human life, you struggle to recognize that you have supportive circumstance for living an awakened life, such as having your sense perceptions and mental faculties intact and not being born in a place of imminent danger or war, with enough free time to consider the meaning of life and the freedom to set intentions for how you spend your limited time here. One such contemplation involves repeating the following phrases and considering their meaning within the quiet and space of meditation: “Joyful to have such a human life,” “Difficult to find,” “Free,” and “Well-favored.” “Difficult to find” reminds us of the unfathomable number and types of sentient beings who don’t have the luxury of a human existence on this earth. “Free” refers to a contemplation of the difficult human experiences from which you are free. “Well-favored” signifies thinking in depth about the positive advantages and privileges your particular human life has offered. Traditional contemplative meditation involves a list of eighteen freedoms and advantages (for example, not being born in a war zone, having a healthy body, having a certain level of education) that a person might mull over to overcome complaint.
This contemplation of gratitude and privilege was never meant to invoke shame at your good fortune, or make you feel overwhelmed by whatever difficult circumstances you may inherit. Even I have often turned this contemplation into a way to beat myself up. For example, I’ve contemplated that I received an amazing education only to still be confused about how to act in the world’s class dynamics. Frequently, I hear those of us who live in the Kale Belt creating a new kind of self-aggression out of our relative “well-favored” position in the world. For example, let’s say your middle-class home in Portland suddenly floods. With gratitude in mind, trying to keep your suffering in perspective, you might say something about the difficulties of others, such as “Well, at least I am not in Syria right now.”
This is an attempt to put your own suffering in context, which is always a good thing, especially when your nervous system causes you to feel endangered by something that’s not life-threatening. However, “At least I am not in Syria right now” is not actually a contemplation of gratitude. For one thing, it alone doesn’t lead you to do much that is helpful for the plight of Syrians, and it also doesn’t necessarily lead you toward appreciation for your opportunity to be mindful and compassionate right here and now, in the midst of the flood. The contemplation of precious human life was not meant to generate further shame at resolvable complaints and momentary irritations. Rather, it was meant to invoke a quiet gratitude, and even joy, alongside a sense of opportunity. Then maybe we could do something small yet concrete to help Syria.
In working with family, touching upon basic optimism about where you come from is more accurate than you might believe. The energy necessary to pursue awakening requires a lot of accurate positive intention and view. If positive thinking is vague and generic, it becomes nothing more than useless platitudes, like telling someone to “cheer up” while their house is flooding. But positivity becomes accuracy when we realize we are abnormally tilted toward negativity due to our biological inheritance. When we see that we are geared toward misperceiving threats, focusing on difficulties because of the exaggerations of the nervous system, something powerful can shift. Out of the gratitude of contemplation, you start to complain less about things that don’t really matter, which saves a surprising amount of energy. And if you want to deal with difficult family relationships, you will need that energy.
Gratitude can be as simple as gently forcing yourself to dwell a bit longer, even a few extra seconds, on the positive experiences that come from ordinary sense perceptions, which are also a part of your family inheritance.
Chögyam Trungpa often talked about experiencing basic goodness in a very childlike way. He would say things like “We can appreciate vividness: the yellowness of yellow, the redness of red, the greenness of green, the purpleness of purple.”1 Depending on how you look at it, this quote is either incredibly profound dharma or a series of wasted and redundant words. I can imagine myself, as the Grandson, rolling my eyes at the total lameness of this instruction. (Really, Grandpa? The purpleness of purple?) I can see my own face scrunched at how “dumb” these words might sound. I see my younger self not appreciating the irony at all, fidgeting away from the vivid colors naturally surrounding me on all sides, returning with a meditative absorption to the preprogrammed purples and reds and greens of my Nintendo game. To take, say, ten seconds to appreciate the colors in the boring room that surrounds you as you read, to allow extra time for the spectrum of light currently entering your retina to affect you as imaginatively as it wants to, to acknowledge that the five senses themselves are a familial inheritance transmitted with great love from parent to child, is a contemplation of your precious human life. And these ten seconds of visual gratitude will literally make you feel better.
This sense of humble gratitude becomes crucial whenever you turn your attention to the events of your family history. Often, it may feel like history is aligned against you. Even if your grandparents and parents passed along to you neuroses, abandonment, and trauma, at the very least they brought you into a world where you have your sense perceptions, your motor skills, the ability to think, the ability to feel your emotions. Even if some of these skills feel impaired or blocked, even if some of them cause you to act destructively, much of what we inherit is an inexhaustible treasure chest. To begin to appreciate the stories of your family, The Princess Brides of your own lineage, is to start to open that vault. We must retrain to see the positive impact that our lineage has had upon us, especially if we want to pass along a mindful and beneficial environment to our own children and grandchildren.
Having engaged in this formal meditation contemplation for many years, I must say it has helped me get over some things, or at least make significant progress in working through them. I get caught less often in the complaints that arise from privilege and self-absorption. Many of us live with a kind of “latte suffering,”2 an inner environment of complaint about each minor inconvenience which perpetuates an unwillingness to accept reality as it is. The practice of gratitude has helped me not worry so much if life’s tiny comforts are not on my side today. Gratitude, as a practice, makes for a lower-maintenance human being.
Deepening the notion of precious human life, the Shambhala teachings use chants, ceremony, visualization, contemplation, and social interactions to form a relationship with lineage, both your own family lineages and your larger cultural lineages of authentic leadership. It is by cradling your practice of awakening within an ongoing connection to lineage that you begin to feel at home with your human inheritance.
Your Three Lineages:
Inheriting Karma, Inheriting Wisdom
IN ALL OF BUDDHISM’S RELATIONAL meditation practices, the benefactor connects you to one of your lineages. In the Shambhala tradition, three overarching aspects of lineage are emphasized: the mother lineage, the father lineage, and the ancestral lineage. This triad is made up of complementary aspects of your wisdom inheritance. Practitioners use these three lineages in study and practice to invoke a sense of connection, support, and personal empowerment for the journey. There is both a literal and a more energetic description of each of these three aspects of lineage.
First, as the classic Tibetan contemplation on benefactors reminds us, is your mother lineage. Taken literally, the mother lineage represents the wisdom we each inherit from our mothers, and from the maternal side of our families. Honoring the mother lineage would include paying tribute to the culture, ethnicity, religion, and wisdom of your mother’s family and ancestors as representations of your human inheritance. This would involve studying them and symbolically incorporating them into your spiritual practice in some way.
Addressing the topic more metaphorically, the mother lineage represents the energy of the mind that is related to space and insight, the nurturing openness to accommodate whatever thought arises within your awareness, the gentle environment needed for wisdom to arise and for clarity to grow. Awareness and gentleness are the internal mother lineage. In symbolism, the mother lineage represents those beings or cultural icons who have given you examples of this sort of gentleness and accommodating wisdom, those who have learned how to hold the space for clarity to arise.
Similarly, the father lineage includes all the spiritual and cultural inheritances of your father’s family that you incorporate into your practice. Moreover, the father lineage refers to all the benefactors representing fearless action and skillful means when it is time to do something brave in the world. In daily life, the father lineage is about daring and taking chances. Every break from the status quo of habit requires some bravery, and in the Tibetan system, the masculine form of energy is equated with knowing how to engage at exactly the right moment to get a job done.
When we discuss these masculine and feminine lineages, we are not looking at identified genders of people or physical embodiments, but rather at qualities of energy. Just as a battery has a masculine component and a feminine component, which together generate its full power, and just as many wisdom systems have looked at the balance of complementary energies (such as yin and yang, or rajas, tamas, and sattva), the masculine and feminine energies of lineage are complementary aspects of your emotional makeup. The mother and father lineages swim together in your being, collaborating to create an integrated person. In Tantra, someone who identifies as male might have tremendous feminine energy, just as someone who identifies as female can be part of the father lineage, depending on the kind of wisdom they embody and pass along. Ultimately, the lineages mix together to create intelligent confidence—confidence you can access whenever you remember the inheritance of your lineage.
The third lineage represents the wisdom of societal and cultural inheritance for whatever you are pursuing as your life’s work. Your ancestors, or ancestral lineage,3 refers to all the heroes and benefactors of your interests in the world, especially those ancestors who were skilled leaders, helping to bring about a more compassionate culture in their own time and place. In the Shambhala lineage, these include any previous leaders of society who brought wisdom and compassion into being. A very early example of enlightened leadership discussed in Shambhala was the great Indian king Ashoka, who began as a violent tyrant but later, taken by the teachings of Buddhism, transformed his terrain into a compassionate land. The makeup of your ancestral lineage depends on the sort of work you do in the world. If, like me, you are a writer, then your lineage would include the writers you respect and admire from the past. If you work for social justice, then the great activists of the past could be contemplated. And if you are a musician, you might visualize recently passed ancestors named David Bowie and Prince.
Your Lineage Has Your Back
ALONG WITH ALL OUR NEGATIVITY toward the perceived threats of the present moment, we often move through the world feeling like the past has screwed us over. Yes, we have each inherited habitual patterns through the interwoven conduits of genes, parents, education, and culture. We have also inherited traumas based on past conflict and oppression. Today, a rising field of scientific inquiry called epigenetics explores how our environment, relationships, and inherited trauma affect the very expression of our genetic coding. Meditation is already being studied in relation to its influence on one’s genes. It is not hard to imagine the study of one’s heartfelt experience of spiritual lineage, or the absence of a connection with lineage, eventually being included in the gene study.
The Mama-sattva
RECALLING THE SUPPORT OF YOUR lineage by invoking benefactors is designed to change the framework for how you look at all you have inherited. Sometimes, as you work to generate compassion for both self and other in relational meditation practices, it’s hard to think of a personal benefactor you really trust. It might be difficult to use direct human examples as your trusted benefactor, especially people from your family. “Don’t meet your heroes,” a famous expression goes.
Once you relate to humans in proximity, once you are close enough to “smell” them, they often display imperfections that trigger your mistrust too easily. The more intimately you know somebody, the more familiar (and familial) you become with their human flaws, the harder it becomes to see that person as a source of unconditional love. Sometimes even historical heroes you’ve never met seem inaccessible as embodiments of basic goodness. Revisionist histories tend to unveil the flaws of history’s giants. Sometimes, in order to believe in basic goodness, you need a fantasy hero, a superhero, an archetype of love and wisdom.
To aid the process of unconditional trust, Tantric Buddhism uses figures who occupy a different frame of narrative existence from the humans we’ve known personally. These more archetypal benefactors are designed to counteract our fault-finding tendencies, to create a pillar of support in our consciousnesses. This sort of psychological archetype, a fairy-tale embodiment of wisdom, compassion, skillfulness, and other positive qualities, was the original meaning of the term bodhisattva.4 These bodhisattvas are often imagined in energetic form, not as solid entities but as holograms of radiant light, positive projections generated by the mind. These bodhisattvas are not saviors but expressions of our highest qualities, and our recollection of them, or the reciting of a mantra associated with them, serves as support for the qualities we try to develop. Depending on the particular type of wisdom you are cultivating, the light and embodiment take on different shapes, colors, genders, and forms.
I am convinced that the bodhisattva’s significance in Tantric cultures arose for the same reason that the comic-book and fairy-tale narratives of Western civilization did: to inspire us to find real courage via symbolism. We need to visualize bodhisattvas, just as we need to see heroes on the screen or page. Often, real people are too easily perceived as flawed to inspire us, especially the real people in our families. As one of my mentors and colleagues, Dr. Miles Neale, has said, these bodhisattvas create an awakened filter, a helpful set of “training wheels,” which allow space for you not to get caught up in the perceived, or very real, shortcomings of your human mentors. You focus on bodhisattvas to help run the perceived imperfections of your real elders and mentors through a mental sieve, to gain confidence that your human leaders are, at their core, also pretty great. When you give someone genuine permission to be awesome, they might start to rise to the occasion, and then you begin to rise to the occasion in return.
About five years ago, a very unexpected thing happened with my imagined benefactor during one of these practices. On this particular morning, as I sat down to practice a version of loving-kindness meditation unfolding in stages, something new appeared. I invoked my lineage by reciting a chant to honor them, then closed my eyes and focused my attention on calling to mind a benefactor, a hero of loving-kindness. Guess who showed up, spontaneously and flawlessly vivid, like a 3D movie: my mother. This was a big surprise. Don’t get me wrong; my mother often appears in my loving-kindness meditations. Usually she appears at the stage of practice in which I work to generate greater empathy toward a loved one. Occasionally, when times have been hard between us, Mom appeared in the stage of practice done for an irritating or emotionally difficult person. I’m sure I’ve appeared similarly in her practice throughout the years.
But that day, she showed up in a totally different form, in a new light. Here was a grand female figure sitting cross-legged in the space in front of my mind’s eye on a pristine lotus flower. The figure was smiling with strength and power, radiating silky waves of moonlight from her heart center, as if she were an unwavering source of lunar power, power that was both soothing and invigorating to my heart. There was no flaw in my perception of this being, merely a new way of beholding her. She had many of the same symbolic qualities as the classic bodhisattva Tara, such as youthful elegance mixing with a wisdom behind her eyes that seemed to push back to the dawn of time. But this was not Tara: this being had my mother’s face and presence. This was the Mama-sattva.
In my younger years, as any son might, I viewed my mother as a complicated entity, a source of both attraction and aversion to the spiritual path I was on. Sometimes, like now, our relationship has been extremely close, and sometimes it has hit roadblocks. We even took breaks from speaking to each other. As with any two family members, we have occasionally reminded each other, unintentionally, of those things we’d rather forget. I reminded her of a man who hurt her, and she reminded me of a home in which I held no power.
But on this particular morning, Mom reminded me only of the depth of my human potential. She appeared in a form of total wisdom and strength, manifesting her deepest underlying nature. Suddenly, from this powerful image of her awakened essence, I plugged into a newfound respect for my mother’s bravery, and its place in my three lineages.
Hopefully, we all have those stories of the courageous triumphs of our lineage. I already had images of the bravery of my spiritual “ancestors,” especially the young Trungpa Rinpoche’s harrowing and traumatic escape from the developing genocide in the Kham region of eastern Tibet. After his miraculous arrival in the West, he was still adamant in proclaiming that “basic goodness” was the nature of humanity. I had stories of the bravery of my father lineage: hearing how Grandpa Sol, as a (too) young military doctor in World War II helped with the primary liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, and then treated many sick and wounded there. And now the Mama-sattva had helped me recall the power of my mother lineage, even if no genocide was involved in the quieter braveries of Mom’s personal saga. I saw her courage in moving from a small southern town to the bankrupt badlands of New York City in the early 1970s, knowing no one, in order to start a career in visual arts. I witnessed her later bravery at figuring out how to make life work as a single mother in an unforgiving city. I recalled her decision to switch careers in her fifties and take a big leap to start her professional life all over again, returning to school, becoming a psychotherapist, and choosing to help many more people work with their minds.
When the Mama-sattva appeared in my practice as a strong, capable, and pristine benefactor of loving-kindness, it said more about something shifting within my own heart than anything about her. At the time, I was in Texas, and Mom was two thousand miles away from me, in Massachusetts. She had no idea she was appearing in my awareness. For that moment, I was able to recover my faith in her human strength and wisdom, her Buddha nature, which already existed. Her body was literally my first home on this earth, and she protected me when I was utterly defenseless. Without her patient (and forgotten) instructions, even a spoon would have been too complicated an instrument for my neural network to comprehend. Given all these truths, connecting deeply with Mom’s awakened nature was a crucial step for feeling my own goodness, my secure attachment to planet Earth. With this image of her as a bodhisattva warrior, I had an experience of her that was awake, healed, and totally workable.
The mother, father, and ancestral lineages were now all present and offering their support to my consciousness, even if their bodies were absent. I am telling this story not because I expect the same to happen to you. It’s possible that your own relationship with your mother, or another figure from your mother, father, or ancestral lineages, is more difficult to relate to than the one I’ve described. Or it’s possible that your mother has always been your clearest benefactor. It might take a while before you can practice loving-kindness toward your mother, or it might be effortless.
Either way, the blockages in your connection with each of your three lineages can be slowly healed in your own heart, and you can come to build trust in your family’s inherited goodness, wisdom, and strength. All sentient beings have been your mother, all have been Grandpa. All have taken a turn as your protector. The wisdom of your social and cultural ancestors, both recent and historic, is available in the present moment. In fact, if you permit a long enough scope of time, every relationship can become more pliant, softened, and workable. Even if some of the work happens in the next “lifetime,” that’s okay.
When I was in fourth grade, both my family and spiritual lineages experienced moments of sudden collapse. Everyone inherits obstacles, but if you focus only on the confusion and trauma of your inheritance, you end up moving through the world with a defeatist attitude, pre-programmed toward negativity. So often, we wake up in the morning feeling that the past is lined up against us, that the function of history is to screw us over in the present. What’s the point of even getting out of bed, then? As we struggle through each day from this perspective, we feel imprisoned by our inheritance. Contemplating and connecting with the mother, father, and ancestral lineages allows a shift. It’s not about a perfect relationship with those who came before, because those who came before had issues, of course. Rather, it’s about feeling like you don’t need to fight your past. It often feels as if we’re each in a duel against our personal histories. But when you form a connection with your wisdom lineage, suddenly, amazingly, the past has your back. Despite whatever grief I still carry, I know my imperfect lineage has my back. And this means that I can begin to have the future’s back. On that basis, I can show up and work with family, just like everything else, as a practice. I can now become someone else’s benefactor. Eventually, perhaps, I will become Grandpa myself. And that is how a lineage continues.