Author: Kadampa Ryan

Taking refuge in deceptive things

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life

Let’s face it, life is hard!  All day, every day, we are confronted with problems and difficulties.  At home, at work, in the family, within our bodies, in the environment or in the world.  Yes, there are occasional moments of luck and good fortune, but for the most part we spend most of our life dealing with problems, and it wears us down.  This is definitely true with parents of small children.  It is very hard work taking care of kids, especially little ones.  It is definitely much harder and more demanding to take care of kids than it is to work in some office.  And in most families nowadays, both parents work and take care of their kids.  So both parents essentially have two full-time jobs.  From the early morning hours of getting everybody ready for the day until when the kids finally go to bed, it is non-stop work.  And even after the kids go to bed, you then need to deal with paying bills, chores around the house, and that mountain of administrative paperwork required in modern life.  Usually by the end of the day, the only thing we can do is collapse!  This is the reality, and indeed the very nature of, modern family life.  With such demanding days, people quite naturally need some means for decompressing and for taking a break.  We also feel that for all of this hard work we do, all the struggle, we need to have something ‘good’ in life that makes us happy.  We feel like if we don’t have some means of relaxing we will literally go insane.  It is true, we need a break, and it is true, we need to have something good.  But how we take that break and what good thing we turn to is the central question.  In a future article, I will discuss home healthy ways of relaxing, but first I want to discuss some of the unhealthy ways we do.

Modern life is full of options for how we can entertain ourselves and “treat ourselves” to something “good.”  The problem is we usually seek refuge from life’s challenges in the wrong things and with the wrong mental attitude.  We, generally speaking, seek refuge in things that promise to give us happiness but in reality harm us.  Normally, we say something is “deceptive” if it promises one thing, but delivers the exact opposite.

There are some things which are just “the wrong things” to take refuge in.  These days, for most people, the three “wrong things” which give us the most trouble are taking intoxicants, being obsessed with sex and entertaining ourselves with violence.  I think we can also add to this list lying and gratifying our sense powers, such as with “luxury” goods and services.  What follows is an explanation how each of these things is “deceptive”.  If we no longer believe the hype, we will no longer be fooled into taking refuge in these things.  In fact, the more we see clearly their deceptive nature, the more we hear or think of the lies the more we will become disgusted at how deceptive these things really are!

We will now try identify how and why these objects are deceptive.  When we see their lie, we cut their power over us and from there we can break free of their influence.

  1. Taking intoxicants.  Here, the ones that give us the most difficulty are alcohol, cigarettes and soft drugs like marijuana or ecstacy.  Alcohol promises to help us relax and let go of our inhibitions (so we can have fun), cigarettes promise to make us look cool and give us a buzz (they also promise ‘a break’ from our normal work), and soft drugs promise a funky experience.  The reality, though, is alcohol makes us do stupid things, cigarettes are slow-motion suicide/cancer sticks, marijuana attacks our mental factor intention where the only thing we want to do is more marijuana at the expense of everything else, and ecstacy gives us an intense surge of pleasure the result of which is for the rest of our lives everything else seems bland and boring (so for one moment of pleasure we get a lifetime of ‘blah’ experience of everything else).
  2. Being obsessed with sex.  There is nothing wrong with sex per se, but let’s be honest, as a society we are obsessed with sex.  Hollywood and Madison Avenue know that nothing sells better than sex.  Have a can opener to sell?  Have a hot babe hold it, and it will sell!  Young men (and old) feast on endless sexual images, warping their views to the point where women cease to be conceived of as anything other than a sex object.  Porn used to be back alley and brown paper bag, now it is mainstream.  Our society is so sexualized, that young girls today voluntarily transform themselves into sex objects as a means of fitting in and living up to society’s expectations, thus robbing themselves of any sense of self-worth beyond their sexual attraction.  How much money do we spend on dates and exotic vacations just so we can get laid?!?  How many relationships have been destroyed by infidelity?  Obsession with sex makes us crazy, where we are willing to risk everything for it, our reputation, our position, our family, and sadly our spiritual life.  Think about Bill Clinton, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Wiener, some Catholic Priests, and many a spiritual leader – all brought down by obsession with sex.
  3. Entertaining ourselves with violence.  Few of us ever commit violence ourselves (except against insects, which we don’t give a second thought to…), but most people in modern society rejoice in it and are entertained by it all the time.  From the Gladiators of ancient Rome to action “heros” of Hollywood, violence has always been one of our favorite forms of entertainment.  Here’s the problem:  from a karmic perspective, there is little to no difference between engaging in violence ourselves and rejoicing in it being committed.  We essentially create the same karma from rejoicing in violence as committing it ourselves.  If you really take this in, this is a very scary thought.  Video games that glorify violence or enable kids to enact it leave powerful impressions on the mind about how to solve problems while also giving them a similitude of the karma of actually committing such violence themselves.
  4. Lying.  This seems a strange one to add to the list, but it is actually quite common.  Because life is so hard, we are very often willing to lie to make our life easier.  In this sense, it too is an attempt by us to relax or escape life’s challenges.  From early childhood on, we lie to avoid getting in trouble.  We lie to our partners, we lie to our bosses, we lie on our taxes, we lie to ourselves.  Lying and cheating (and stealing) usually go hand in hand (in hand).  We may even “get away with” our lies externally, but karmically we never do.  When we lie, we not only create the causes for others to deceive us in the future (thus guaranteeing we will always be led astray in the future), we also create the causes for nobody to ever believe us (thus robbing us of our ability to ever help others in the future when we are well intended).  It only takes one lie to destroy somebody’s trust in us forever.  Lying also destroys our self-confidence like a cancer.  Inside, we know we are a sham and do not feel like we are capable of anything ourselves.  Cheating and lying can become such a way of life that we will often put more effort into cheating than it would take to actually succeed.  When we lie we sacrifice our dignity and integrity, and when we lose these there is nothing holding us back from all other forms of negativity.
  5. Gratifying our sense powers.  For the very rich, this has always been common.  Surrounding ourselves with every luxury and indulging ourselves in every pleasure.  But lately, this has gone mainstream.  Luxury soaps, creams, towels, sheets and scents fill our malls.  “Spas” which promise to indulge our every sense pleasure have become quite common.  We spend obsence amounts of money for luxury cars, homes, vacations and entertainment systems.  The debt crises in both Europe and the U.S. have been fueled by consumers borrowing against their future to satisfy their desires for luxury today.  But no matter how much luxury we ever indulge ourselves in, there is always something more luxurious over the horizon.  We endlessly chase the end of the rainbow, but like ecstacy, the only result is more and more of the world becomes bland and boring for us.  Yesterday’s luxury become today’s banal.  From a karmic perspective, we burn up our merit like a blazing inferno.  In the future, we will have no karmic provisions left for the long road ahead.

Virtually all of society is organized around the pursuit of the five deceptive objects discussed before.  They are our modern gods, and we sacrifice everything for them.  But they are all deceptive.  The test of a reliable object of refuge is simple:  the more you have of it, the more protection and relief it gives you.  All of these things are the opposite.  In the beginning, it takes only a little of these things to give us great ‘pleasure’, later it takes more to get the same amount of pleasure, later still it takes even more to get less pleasure, penultimately it takes even more still just to feel normal, and finally it takes a tremendous amount to just not feel awful.

In an ultimate sense, of course, everything is empty.  All things are equally empty and so equally transformable, so why do we say certain objects or things are to be abandoned?  Let’s get real here!  Just because in theory something can be transformed doesn’t mean, at our current level of spiritual development, we ourselves can transform it!  More likely than not, we use the fact that in theory something can be transformed as a rationalization for indulging ourselves in something we know we shouldn’t do.  Doing so is to completely misuse spiritual teachings, and creates the cause to never meet pure spiritual instructions again in the future.  Without access to qualified spiritual instructions, how can we ever hope to attain real freedom for ourselves or be able to help our loved ones do the same?  The honest reality is this:  at the early stages of our spiritual training, we are not even remotely capable of transforming these objects and to even try is either self-deception or simply too dangerous.  At the later stages of our spiritual training, these things no longer tempt us at all so we have no interest in even turning to them in the first place (not to mention, how turning to them would set a bad example for others).  So I think we can safely say, if you feel tempted to turn to these things you are not yet able to transform them, so don’t lie to yourself and risk destroying your one shot at spiritual freedom.

The foundations of Buddhist moral discipline are the pratimoksha and refuge vows.  Quite simply, these say “don’t take refuge in the wrong things (pratimoksha vows) and do take refuge in the right things (refuge vows).”  The pratimoksha vows are to abandon killing (and by implication harming), stealing, lying, sexual misconduct and taking intoxicants.  It’s interesting how the list of the pratimoksha vows pretty much sums up the five things listed above…  Venerable Geshe-la explains in Modern Buddhism that the essential meaning of the refuge vows is to “make effort to receive Buddha’s blessings, to put the Dharma into practice and to receive help and inspiration from your spiritual friends.”  Moral discipline in a Buddhist context is not externally imposed, rather it is internally adopted.  It is an inner wisdom that protects us from going down roads we know are self-destructive and sends us along correct paths that lead us to where we really want to go.  We do not resent our moral discipline any more than we resent street signs pointing us in the direction we want to go.  But before we can adopt any form of moral discipline, we must take the time to examine and realize how we are taking refuge in deceptive things and instead we need to seek our respite in that which is indeed reliable.

Your turn:  What is a deceptive thing that you have taken refuge in.  Describe how and why it proved deceptive.

Dealing with family conflict

Kadampa Ryan Cultivating healthy relationships with others

The reality is this:  until all living beings have fully realized the ultimate nature of reality, and thereby abandoned any sense of independent self, conflict within families is inevitable.  Even if we have attained full enlightenment, others who still have these delusions will enter into conflict with us (though, at that stage, it certainly won’t be a problem for us!).  So the question is how do we respond to this conflict in a wise and constructive way?

Generally, in dealing with family conflict, people fall into one of two extremes:  “repressing” or “crusading”.  Repressing works as follows:  somebody in the family does something we do not like, such as harming us in some way, taking advantage of us in some way, etc., and because we do not want to “make waves” we just swallow it and pretend that everything is OK.  Essentially we sacrifice inner peace on the alter of outer peace.  The other person is completetly oblivious to the fact that we have a problem with them, which internally just infuriates us more.  They continue with the behavior we do not like, we continue to repress, until eventually we can’t take it anymore.  We then lash out against them in some typically dramatic fashion.  The other person thinks we have gone insane and cannot understand why we are making such a big deal out of such a small thing (they only see the most immediate event, not the pattern over time).  They then get very defensive, harsh words are said to each other.  Then, because neither side knows how to deal with conflict, each side just stops talking to the other for a sufficiently long time that all of this recedes into the past.  Time, however, never completely heals the wound, it just helps us forget about it and see it in a different perspective.  We never really forgive the other person, so when we do start going back with the other person, the seeds are still there for future conflict.

“Crusading” works as follows:  again, somebody does something we do not like and we know the faults of repression.  But so convinced are we of our self-righteousness and so determined to right every wrong that we are constantly on the attack against everyone for every error.  So we charge in, force people to confront their errors, and we do not stop until everyone is in agreement that we are (and have always been) “right”.  We feel completely self-justified in our crusade because we ‘know’ we are right, they are wrong, and the injustice cannot stand.  In the end, we tell ourselves it is for the benefit of the other person that we battle with them because once they see how we are right, they will be brought to the “higher level of understanding” that we occupy.  We may even convince ourselves that our constant battling with those around us is part of our bodhisattva path to lead all beings to enlightenment – they just don’t understand that yet, but in the end, when they see the light, they will thank us.  Obviously, I have explained each of these extremes in their extreme form, and normally we fall into a more subtle version of one of these two extremes.

So what is the middle way?  It is “re-solving”.  Both parts of this word have meaning.  The “re” reminds us that there was a time where we genuinely got along with this other family member, loved them, appreciated their good qualities, and were not in conflict with them.  The goal is to get back to that state where our relationship is one of love, appreciation and respect.  “Solving” means we fully acknowledge there is a problem (not pretend there isn’t one like with repression), and we actually solve that problem so that it is no more.  Together they mean we are not trying to get back to some nostalgic state of how things were, rather we are trying to once again get back to the point where our mind is free from all delusion towards the other person (and hopefully vice versa) having worked through whatever difficulty there was.  In other words, we try use the conflict as a means of deepening and improving our love and relationship with the other person.

We will now explore the three stages of resolving our family conflict, which are:

  1. Correctly diagnosing what the “problem” is, namely delusions.
  2. Abandoning the “need” for the other person to change.
  3. If necessary, skillfully approaching the other person with the intent of making the relationship better.

No doctor can heal any patient if they have misdiagnosed what the problem is.  From a Dharma perspective, the cause of all problem is our delusions, such as anger, attachment, jealousy, selfishness and ignorance.  Normally, we blame external circumstances or other people, but if we check deeply none of these things have any power to harm us.  It is our own deluded mental reaction to these things that harms us.  If we responded to these same things with wisdom we could learn to grow from them, so far from harming us, they would be helping us.  As explained in Transform your Life and many other books, if our minds are peaceful, we are happy regardless of how difficult our external circumstance is; and if our minds are unpeaceful, we will be unhappy regardless of how perfect our external circumstance is.  So in the end, our happiness depends entirely upon our ability to keep our mind peaceful and positive in all circumstances.  Delusions are, by definition, those minds which disturb our inner peace.

One mistake we commonly make is we say, “yes, delusions are the cause of all problems.  His or Her delusions are the cause of all the problems.”  No, it doesn’t work that way.  Your delusions are the cause of all of your problems, and his or her delusions are the cause of all of his or her problems.  Nobody can cause you problems, rather your delusions create all of your own problems.  There is no solution to your own problems other than resolving your own delusions within your own mind.  So the first step in dealing with conflict with family memebers is to take the time to honestly identify what are the delusions functioning in your own mind and to apply effort to reduce and finally eliminate them.  For a complete explanation for how to identify and abandon your delusions, see Eight Steps to Happiness, Joyful Path of Good Fortune, and Understanding the Mind.

The second stage is to abandon any need for the other person to change.  This is crucial for any conflict resolution.  As long as you are convinced that your happiness depends on the other person changing, any effort you make at conflict resolution will correctly be interpreted by the other person as manipulation and they will resist you and conflict will ensue.  If, however, you have no need whatsoever for the other person to change, then they will not feel like they are being manipulated or controlled, and their minds will open to resolving the conflict.

So how do you abandon any need for the other person to change?  You realize that their faults are exactly what you need for progressing along the spiritual path.  It really comes down to one thing:  what do you want.  If what you want is a life of ease free from difficulty and problems, then changing all those difficult people in our life will always be a priority for us and we will always be in conflict with them.  If, however, what you want is to make progress along the spiritual path, then difficult people will no longer be a problem for you, they will be a blessing – an indispensible asset in your spiritual training.  Each difficult person, each difficult situation gives you an opportunity to further train your mind to abandon your own delusions at deeper and deeper levels, whether it be your miserliness, your anger, your jealousy, your selfishness or your lack of skilfull means.  Each difficult person in your life is like a magical mirror that reveals to you a different fault you have in your own mind, and your relationship with them is a spiritual training regimen for overcoming that fault.  When you have such an attitude, you no longer need other people to change – their faults and difficult behavior are experienced and welcomed by you as exactly what you need.

One very powerful way of developing this constructive attitude is to rely wholeheartedly on the Dharma Protector.  The Dharma Protector is like our personal spiritual trainer.  His job is to eliminate any obstacles to our practice and to arrange for us the outer and inner conditions which are perfect for our swiftest possible enlightenment.  So if we are confronted with a difficult family member or circumstance, we can make the request to the Dharma protector, “Please arrange whatever is best with respect to this other person’s behavior:  if it is an obstacle to my spiritual training, may it stop; if it is best for my spiritual training, may it increase!”  Then, whatever happens after you make this request, you accept that this is exactly what your personal spiritual trainer has organized for you, and you get to work on transforming your own mind.  For more on how to rely upon a Dharma Protector, see Heart Jewel.

The third and final stage is to skillfully approach the other person with the intent of making the relationship better.  Again, before doing this, you must first abandon any need for the other person to change otherwise your efforts at approaching the other person will backfire.  The doubt may arise, “if I don’t need the other person to change, what is the point of me even approaching them at all?”  There are two answers to this question:  first, you are asking for their patience while you work through your own delusions; and second, you are giving them a chance to change themselves if they so choose.

When you approach the other person, your (sincere) attitude should be “I really love you and I want this relationship to work, and it is because I want things to be harmonious between the two of us that I thought I needed to come to you about some of the things I am working on.  When you do X, it triggers Y deluded reaction in me.  I know my attitude is wrong, and I am working on it by trying to be more Z-like in my attitude, but I just throught I would let you know.  So if I act strange or I sometimes lash out at you in W way, I just wanted you to understand where I was coming from and why it was happening.  I am telling you this because I very much value our relationship and I want to make things better between us.  Out of respect for you, and a trust that you too want our relationship to improve, I thought it was better to come to you than to just let this linger under the surface.”  Most people will respond to this as, “gee, I had no idea my behavior could be perceived that way.  Thank you for letting me know.  I will try be more careful in the future.”  It is also possible that the other person will tell you, “well the reason I am like that is because you do Q which really bothers me.”  If they respond in this way, it is important to not get defensive.  You need to understand that they too have likely repressed a good deal of delusions towards you and will want to express themselves.  So your response to this should be, “gee, I had no idea my behavior could be perceived that way.  Thank you for letting me know.  I will try be more careful in the future.”  As the old adage goes, be the change you want to see in the world!

There may be times when the other person is either unwilling or incapable of maintaining a harmonious relationship with you, but in such circumstances you should always leave the door open to them changing their mind in the future by saying, “Look, I love you and I want this to work.  If ever you change your mind and want to try work things out, then my door is always open.”  This stance by you will place a marker in their mind where in the future everytime they think about you they know what needs to happen, and in their heart of hearts, they know you are being eminently reasonable.  They might never see this and might never come around, but at least from your side you are doing the right thing and giving them a chance to do so.

The point is this:  until we attain enlightenment, conflict is inevitable.  Either we allow this conflict to destroy our relationships or we use it to make our relationships even stronger by working through our differences.  Marriages that last 50 years do not do so because there is never any conflict, but rather because the two people in the marriage know how to use conflict to deepen and strengthen their relationship.  The same is true with any relationship with any family member, and even any relationship between any two people (or countries).

Your turn:  Describe some family conflict you have had and how you used the Dharma to resolve it.

Helping your kid get through the middle school years

Kadampa Ryan Cultivating healthy relationships with others

When I think back to my life, the worst years I had were from ages 13-15.  When I was in primary school, I was very popular and everybody liked me.  I did well in school and all was good.  When I showed up to 7th grade, for no apparent reason, I became the lowest of the low, a loser even amongst “losers.”  I didn’t change any, I was the same person I always was, but everything around me had suddenly changed, and it was awful.  Nobody would talk to me for fear of associating with me and being ‘tainted’ by how uncool I was.  People would literally spit on me as I walked down the hall.  I remember there was this one guy, Bret, who literally took great delight in tormenting me and leading his friends to do the same.  I would go home crying very often.  Nobody had any good advice to give me.  I was lucky, though, in that there was one friend who stuck by me.  He didn’t care what others thought, and if it weren’t for Ben, I don’t know how I would have survived (metaphorically, not actually).  The sad thing is this:  my experience is not all that uncommon.  I sometimes wonder if Buddha had been around in modern times whether he would have said there are four lower realms (instead of three), one of which being Middle School!

These middle years are awful – we want to still be a kid, but we are scorned if we do.  We try to be an adult, but we have no idea how and everything is ackward.  We start to have a billion hormones rage through us in countless directions, and we have no idea how to deal with them.  We don’t feel like we can turn to anyone reliable – we don’t dare turn to our parents because they are just so embarrassing and they still think and relate to us as a kid, we can’t turn to our teachers because then we are a brown-noser.  We can only turn to our friends, but they are just as lost as us.  We are not allowed to like anything, because doing so is a sign of weakness – we are somehow twisted into believing we have to hate everything that is good as a sign that we are not a kid anymore.  But above all, we are completely obsessed with what other people think of us.  We would sacrifice anything on the alter of getting people to like us, but the more we do so the more we become entwined in pain and endless drama.  Many kids turn to cigarettes, drugs, alcohol or sex in a desperate effort to “fit in” and “not be a kid anymore.”  It is at this age where being ‘cool’ becomes much more important socially than being successful in school, sports or activities.

And here is the really sad and scary thing:  it is all starting much earlier now for our kids.  11 is the new 13.  All of our kids are going to have to go through this stage of their life, there is simply no way around it.  Some might be lucky and get by OK, it does happen, but many more will find these early teen years to be the worst of their lives.  So what are we as parents supposed to do to help?

Probably the most important thing you can do is make yourself somebody they feel free to come to for advice.  If they don’t come to you, you become directly useless to them.  You can still set a good example for them (and never underestimate the importance of this), but our ability to directly help them becomes very limited.  So how do we become somebody they want to come to?  There are four keys to this:

  1. Wait for them to come to you.  This is so hard to do, but it is vitally important.  When others give us unsolicited advice, what do we do?  We reject it and we become defensive.  Our kids are the same.  But when they come to you on their own, then they are open to what you have to say.  You may wind up saying less, but what you do say will stick and be well received.  A great time for this is when you put your kids to bed.  We have a policy of “you can ask one questions before you go to bed.”  Since they want to stay up, they get in the habit of asking you questions, then when things bother them and they trust you, they ask questions about how to deal with the problems in their life.  Your first instinct may be to say, ‘we will talk about it in the morning’ because you want to get on with your own evening, but these times with our kids are precious and we should not waste them.
  2. Don’t judge them. When people judge us, do we feel like going to them for advice?  Of course not, so why would our kids be any different?  We should never judge, but instead be an understanding advisor who has traveled this path before and can offer some friendly advice.
  3. Respect that their actions are their choice.  This too is vital.  When others try to control or manipulate us, what do we do?  We rebel and do the opposite of what they want just to show them whose in charge.  Well teenagers do this doubly so!  We genuinely need to respect the fact that they have to make their own choices and decisions.  We tell them, “you have to decide what to do, I can’t do it for you.  I can only help you make your own decision.”  The interesting thing is the more we put the responsibility for making decisions onto them, the more responsible they become with the decisions they make.  And it is true, it is their choice.  We can’t control them even if we tried.  Yes, we can blackmail them but we can’t control them.  The sooner we accept this truth, the sooner we start helping our kids become responsible for themselves.  There is a huge difference between lecturing our kids and helping them solve their own problems.
  4. Don’t get mad at them regardless of what they come to you with.  Establish early on a policy which says “if you come to me first with something you have done, I promise you won’t get in trouble.”  This is very important.  If they know that they won’t get in trouble, then they will come to you.  But if they do get in trouble when they do come to you, then they will hide everything from you and you will enter into a dysfunctional game of cat and mouse with them.

Finally, let’s examine some parenting strategies during this challenging period of our children’s lives.

  1. Start preparing our kids early.  Start identifying and working on what will be their greatest weaknesses.  After a kid turns 8, they become more or less self-sufficient.  From 8 to about 12, you can still work with them.  You should view this entire period as laying the foundation for what is to come.  It is like preparing for battle.  You need to think about what middle school will be like for them, and how they are likely to get themselves into trouble, and start working on those things now.
  2. It seems to me the number one common weakness to most middle school kids is attachment to what other people think.  So when you see early signs of this, you need to repeat thousands of times, “it doesn’t matter what other people think, you need to form your own opinion.”  Every occasion we have to transmit this idea, we should use it.  It does not matter if it becomes obnoxiously repetitive for them where they are repeating it back to us in a mocking way everytime we say it.  Keep saying it.  By doing so, we will drive it deep within them and we can only hope that it will echo within their minds when they are lost in their darkest hours.
  3. Another common pitfall for middle school kids is to go to the other extreme of completely isolating themselves from everybody else.  From one perspective, we might think this is a good thing, but how many of us are strong enough to not get lost with no healthy support network around us?  We all know people who isolated themselves in these years and never really recovered – they remain people who really have no life and don’t know how to relate to other people at all.  So if we see those tendencies in our child, then we need to apply effort to get them out of the house, off of the video games, or their nose out of their books.  Obviously books and video games are not all bad, but if we notice that our kid is using them as an escape to avoid having to deal with people then this is an early warning sign for trouble down the road.
  4. It is likewise very important to start preparing them early for what is to come.  Sometimes we think it is best to not talk about things that are coming, but I disagree.  Within reason, of course, I think it is very important to prepare our kids in advance for the challenges we know they will face, such as bullies, quickly turning friendships, drugs, alcohol, porn, sex, etc.  Yes, all of these are very difficult subjects, but if we don’t educate our kids early about these things then their friends will do the job for us later on.  They first start hearing about these things around 8 or 9.  They will often even ask you about them.  The conventional wisdom is to tell them they are too young to think about these things, but I think this is when we should be talking to them about.  Tell them straight up, in a forthright manner, what these subjects are all about and how people get themselves into trouble with these things.  They will ask lots of questions that make you uncomfortable, but don’t hold back.  Answer them honestly.  Your doing so will earn their trust and respect, and with that they will listen to your advice about how to deal with these things.  Explain to them what are the healthy ways of dealing with these things so that they know.  Tell them the truth about where these things lead if taken to extremes, and how easy it is to start doing these things in an effort to fit in, but then how easy it is to become sucked in by them where we find it difficult or impossible to stop.  Don’t be afraid to make them scared, because frankly, they should be.  Don’t moralize about these things, just try equip them so that they can make responsible choices.  It is helpful if we ourselves do not drink, smoke or do any drugs.  If they see us doing it, we are implicitly giving our kids permission to do the same.
  5. Help your kids know that there is something on the other side.  While I know it appeals to not the best part of me, my father always used to tell me that “in the end, the nerds rule the world.”  How many “Kings of High School” wind up lost in life?  Many.  We need to help our kids see through the shroud of the middle school years to what lies on the other side.  When they can see this, it will act as a compass for what is important and help them not get swept away.
  6. Adopt a policy of “you have discretion within a box.”  Kids naturally want the freedom to make their own choices.  So we tell them, I too want you to be free.  I will give you as much freedom as you can use responsibly.  So you define for them a box within which they have the freedom and discretion to do as they wish.  Then, the deal you make with them is if they use that freedom in a responsible way then you will expand the box of their freedom; but that if they use it in an irresponsible way, you will shrink the box.  It won’t take long before they understand the dynamic – they will get their freedom, you will get your responsible kid.
  7. Don’t be bothered by them spewing venom towards you.  Our kids will say all sorts of hurtful things towards us about how we are ruining their lives, they hate us, they can’t wait to get out of the house, etc., etc., etc.  If we allow such comments to bother us, then we give our rebellious teenager power.  Think “water off a duck’s back.”  When a patient in a psychiatric ward verbally assaults their doctors, the doctors remain unphased because they understand that it is the person’s mental sickness talking, not the person.  In the same way, during the teenager years, our children are possessed by the host of delusions of the middle years, and so it is their delusions talking, not them.  Don’t let it bother you.  If you do let it bother you, you feed the dynamic and it will only get worse.
  8. Hold your breath (and pray)!  A very experienced friend once told me you have until about 12 to shape a kids personality.  But after that, for the next 6-12 years all you can really do is hold your breath and hope they come out OK on the other side.   During these times, all you can do is accept and pray.  Your acceptance protects you from developing attachment to your kids making certain choices (this is important because if you are attached to them making certain choices, then you will start to manipulate them into making these choices, which, as we saw above, just leads to rebellion).  And your prayers protect them internally.  You have a very close karmic connection with your kids, and you also have a close karmic connection with the Buddhas, so you are in many ways a bridge between the Buddhas and your children.  Buddhas have the power to bestow blessings.  The function of a blessing is to turn somebody’s mind towards correct paths.  This is exactly what our kids need.  The power of our prayers is entirely dependent upon three things:  our faith in the Buddhas, the purity of our compassion (free from attachment) towards our children, and the depth of our karmic connections with both the Buddhas and our children.  We need to actively develop all three so our prayers have maximum effect.  A deep understanding of emptiness is also a very powerful way of increasing the power of our prayers.

Just as these years are some of the most difficult for our children, they are also some of the most difficult for us as parents.  In the movie “the Weatherman”, Nicholas Cage has a very famous line, “easy is not part of the adult vocabulary.”  It is not easy, but spiritually speaking it will be a time of tremendous growth for us.  Ultimately, we have no control over what happens, and learning to accept that is a huge part of our spiritual path.

Your turn:  What is your worst memory from middle school?  What spiritual lesson can you learn from it now?

Dealing with the toddler years

Kadampa Ryan Cultivating healthy relationships with others

I have a “theory” that before they turn three, our children are not yet “human beings”!  I am not quite sure what they are, but you certainly can’t reason with them, you can’t expect them to be able to do anything, and you can be guarranteed they will do the opposite of whatever you want them to do!  Of course I am joking, but sometimes I do wonder…  Before our kids turn one, they are just babies and don’t get into too much trouble.  But from the time they can crawl around until about three, three and a half, kids are at their most difficult (until the teenage years, of course).  Once you get past three, it generally gets easier and easier.

During the early toddler years, our kids have a very well developed sense of “no-dar”, meaning they head straight for whatever is the most dangerous thing in whatever room you find yourself in!  I remember when my first child was 18 months old, and she thought it was really funny to climb up on top of my desk everytime I would turn my back and then start jumping up and down on it like a monkey going “yeahn yeahn yeahn yeahn”!  By the end of this period, our homes are virtual fortresses, with baby gates, security clips and barricades everywhere.  Anything of value, well frankly everything we own, is put up on shelves beyond their reach.  There is just no deterring them, they are like the Energizer Bunny!  So for about a year, all the hear is “no” as they head for the wires, the knives, the garbage, etc.

It is no surprise then that between ages two and three we have what are affectionately known as “the terrible twos” where they only know one word – “NO”.  But this time, it is them telling us no!  Everytime we try elicit their cooperation for basically anything, they are pre-programmed with one response – “NO”.  By this age, they have discovered our weaknesses.  When we go out in public, they know we will do anything so they don’t throw a fit and embarrass us, so what do they do?  They threaten to throw a fit everytime we don’t give them what they want.  For example when we go to the store, if at any point we made the mistake of buying them something they asked for at the store, then from that point forward everytime we go to the store they will ask us to buy them something and threaten to throw a fit if we don’t.  Stores know this which is why there is so much candy and little kid plastic crap toys in the checkout lanes!  (Note for any future parents:  a good rule is “we only buy things we decided to buy before we got to the store”.  If you never say yes once, then you avoid this dynamic).  They also know we are at our most vulnerable when we get on the phone or when we have guests over.  Look out!

So what is a parent to do during these difficult toddler years?  The following are the things that have helped me:

  1. Accept this age as purification for your own past toddler years.  When we were toddlers, in all of our countless past lives, we too did the same things.  So we happily accept this as purification.
  2. We remind ourselves that this is entirely normal.  Especially for first time parents, these years can be terrifying – oh dear, I am raising a monster!  But don’t worry, every parent has gone through the same things, probably even Ghandi’s mother.  It passes, so don’t worry.
  3. Don’t feed the behavior by responding to it in an animated way.  If you show that the behavior bothers you, then you can 100% guarrantee you will get more of it.  Remember, at this stage of their development they are trying to figure out how the world works.  If I push this red button, Elmo sings a song.  If I go digging in the garbage, mommy freaks out.  Look, how fun!  We need to maintain total equanimity with respect to everything they do, not freaking out, just dealing with the situation calmly.
  4. Just accept that your house will have to be completely baby proofed for several years.  Some parents think they can somehow teach their kids to not keep pushing the power button on the TV.  Maybe some succeed, but I have yet to meet any myself…  And even if they do, at what emotional and mental cost?  Not just for our own sanity, but actually for the child’s development, I think it is better to create giant “safe to go” zones, where they can roam around freely and do anything without exposing themselves to danger or breaking anything valuable.
  5. The less words you use the better.  It is useless to try lecture them or reason with them.  In general, the more we talk to our kids, the more it becomes an endless “blah blah blah blah” to them and they learn early on to just tune us out.  As the proverb goes, actions speak louder than words.  If they are putting their hand in the blender, don’t talk, just act – physically remove them from the area.  They will kick, they will scream, but you just act – clearly and decisively, without hesitation (if they smell the slighest hesitation in you, they will exploit it to the end).
  6. Primarily tell them what they can and should do, not what they can’t and shouldn’t do, “the DVDs are for watching movies, not plates for your dolls” or “the silverware is for eating, not banging on things.”  In particular, it is good to start developing “wisdom power words” that in one word communicate everything they need to do.  For example, many of the problems come when our toddlers have to wait for us to be able to help them because we are doing something else.  When they start to smolder, say “patience” in a loving way.  At first they will have no idea what you are talking about, but when done again and again they will start to understand, and then with just one word you help them know what they should be doing with their own minds.  Other good examples are, “calm” or “calmly” or “share” or “gentle”.  Doing this early and often helps lay the foundation for later when you use wisdom phrases which are more complex (I will do a future post on this).
  7. Redirect to try minimize the times you need to say no.  Generally, at this age they are programmed to explore.  So you have to find something more interesting than what they are currently looking at and redirect them towards that instead.
  8. First time gets a “pass”, second time gets a pre-explained “natural consequence.”  Very often our kids will do something wrong, and then we punish them.  But they didn’t even know it was wrong to begin with, so it seems very unfair to them.  Instead, the first time they do something wrong, you should say, “what you did is not correct for X reason.  That object should be used in Y way.  If you do that again, then I will apply Z natural consequence.  Then verify that they agree.”  A real life example was “hitting your brother on the head with your dolly is not correct because that hurts him.  Dollies should be loved, not used to hit people.  If you hit your bother again with the dolly then I will take the dolly away for the rest of the evening.  Do you agree?”  Then, have them acknowledge what you say and agree in advance to the consequence.  Then, if they hit their brother again with the dolly, without saying a single word, just take the dolly away and put it some place beyond their reach.  If they protest and scream, which they will, you just remind them that they agreed.  Then you let them cry and throw their fit, but don’t give in.
  9. When they are out of control, be prepared to put them in their room or crib until they calm down.  Toddlers throw fits.  That is what they do.  How we respond is our choice.  Sometimes they get themselves so worked up that there is really no talking them down.  At such times, it is generally best to just give them a time out in their room.  First, you should give them a warning, “if you don’t calm down, then you will need to go to your room to calm down.”  If they still don’t calm down, then again, without saying a single word, you pick them up and take them to their room.  When you put them in their room, tell them in a loving voice, “once you are calm and once you are ready to say sorry, then you can come out.”  When you leave the room, they will FREAK OUT.  You need to accept this and let them cry and scream.  This is harder to do if you have neighbors who can hear your kids screams.  To deal with that problem, you can do two things:  let go of your attachment to what other people think and in a non-crisis time go have a talk with your neighbors letting them know that your kid is a toddler and you are not beating them, but just giving them a time out until they calm down and are ready to say sorry.  It is a training, and you are sorry for the noise, but you just wanted to let them know.  Most will understand and when they do scream, you will not worry so much.  You can’t really do this for kids under 20 months, but after 20 months you can.  In terms of how long to leave them crying, the rule of thumb we use is we check back in with them avery 3 to 5 minutes.  When we check in, we say, “are you calm yet?”  Obviously they are not since they are still screaming, but asking the question gives them a chance to say yes and then they calm down.  If they don’t say yes, then you go back out for another 3-5 minutes and repeat the cycle.  Once they say yes, they are calm now (and they actually start calming down), then you ask, “are you ready to say sorry?” Remember, these were your two conditions for letting them out.  They might not be, so you go back out and start over until they answer yes to both questions.  Then you pick them up, give them a big hug and lots of love and have them sit on your lap for awhile cuddling, so you can recharge them with your love.  Then you ask, are you ready to go back out now?  Then off they go!  The first couple of times you do this, it will take a long time, but once they learn the pattern, it will get quicker and more and more effective.  Just stick with it.

The key spiritual lesson of all of this is to realize it is because we love our kids that we need to set and enforce realistic limits for them.  Sometimes we feel so cruel when we let our kids cry, but that is compassion without any wisdom.  Our kids need and in fact want clear (but fair) limits because it actually simplifies their life.  Our attachment to their being happy (something quite different than compassion) prevents us from living up to our responsibility of actually being a parent for them.

Your turn:  Describe some challenging/funny situation you have had with a toddler and what spiritual lessons you learned from that situation.

Do not waste a single moment of being a parent

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life

There are many many people who ‘wanted to have a baby’, but didn’t necessarily ‘want to be a parent.’  There is actually a huge difference between the two, and it is this difference that usually determines one’s experience of being a parent.  For the former group, once the novelty of having a baby wears off and the work starts, being a parent is essentially a perpetual source of frustration.  As a parent, you essentially have to put ALL of your own wishes and desires on hold.  All of the things that you used to be able to do, such as travel the globe, go out dancing, intimacy, etc., all of these things come to screeching halt (or at least really slow down and become much harder).  Financially, having a child these days is an enormous expense and you will feel financially strapped basically for the next 25 years at least.  No sleep, no travel, no going out at night, etc.  So many wishes frustrated.  The parents then become generally resentful towards their kids because of all of their frustrated desires, and then it winds up where the general emotional state parents express towards their kids is one of frustration and annoyance.  The kid of course doesn’t understand at all what is going on, and doesn’t understand why their parents are so upset at them all the time when they are just trying to play.  So they conclude their parents are mean or don’t love them, so they start acting up and misbehaving.  This then reinforces the parent’s frustration and they enter into a vicious cycle.  Then the teenage years come…

When you think about it, we have very few opportunities as human beings to actually care for another person, I mean really care for them and assume personal responsibility for their welfare.  Normally, this is not even the slightest bit a problem for us because we normally think having to look after others is such a bother!

The way to break this cycle is for the parent to realize how incredibly lucky they are to have the opportunity to be a parent, and to really be able to care for another living being.  As we progress in our spiritual training towards becoming a Buddha, we will realize that caring for others is what gives our life meaning.  We will want more and more to have opportunities to care for others and we will realize how rare it is that somebody will even let us really help and care for them.  When you think about it, it is only with our kids and with our elderly parents that we have such opportunities.  These times of our life are incredibly precious from a spiritual point of view.  During such times, there is no space for selfishness, and we are pushed to our absolute limits in terms of giving our time and love to others.  Is it hard?  Yes, very hard.  But that is why we are growing in capacity.  Will their be times when our selfishness and frustrated desires will raise their ugly heads?  Yes, of course there will be.  But these are times where we can train in recalling how lucky we are to have such opportunities to care.

In Buddha’s teachings, it talks about having a precious human life.  The word precious here is not an automatic give away.  Our human life becomes ‘precious’ only if we use it to train in spiritual paths (Buddhist or otherwise).  If we only use our human life for the sake of this life and engage in actions not much different than those of an animal, then our life is an ordinary human life.  In the same way, our parenting only becomes precious if we use it as an opportunity to train in spritual paths.  If we have such an attitude, every moment is like a spiritual bonanza.  Otherwise, it is just an ordinary parental life, full of frustration mixed in with the occasional joy.

Our opportunity to be a parent really doesn’t last long. When our kids reach 8, they become largely self-sufficient.  After 12, they don’t want to have anything to do with us since they are in their early teen years.  Later, we just become an ATM.  When we cease to be the ATM, we become the object of blame for how hard their lives are.  Later they discover modern psychology, whose sole conclusion is our parents are to blame for all of our screwed-up-ness!  Then we are really the object of blame!  Then our kids have kids and don’t want us controlling what they are doing or looking over their shoulders, and their primary objective is to not make all of the mistakes that we made!  Then we become old and a burden on our family, and our kids then ‘have’ to take care of us.  We are grateful for their help, but are a bit miffed that they are so ungrateful as to be resentful about the fact that they are having to take care of us now when we did so much to take care of them when they were kids.  But then we recall (or perhaps we choose to forget) that we too were resentful about our wishes being frustrated when they were kids – it all has come full circle.

Don’t let this happen to you.  Instead, create a new cycle by embracing the opportunity to work 24/7 for the sake of others.  Be grateful for the opportunity to smash your selfishness and break the chains of your worldly desires.  Welcome the countless annoyances as opportunities to purify.  Understand that it is in dependence upon the love and virtue you create with your family that you will eventually become a fully enlightened being.  Our opportunity to be a parent can be spiritually very precious and it won’t last long, so we need to remind ourselves again and again to not waste a single moment of it!

Your turn:  Describe some selfless task in your life that you normally try to avoid.  How are you going to act differently towards that task now?

Conclusions of retreat, summer 2012

Kadampa Ryan 5. Reliance upon Dorje Shugden

On July 23rd of this year, my family went to the U.S. for six weeks.  While of course I am sad to see them go and I miss them, I decided to really try use my Summer for retreat.  When I was in Geneva, I had the great good fortune to have a large chunk of my summer off where I could focus on the Dharma, go to Manjushri and the Summer Festival, etc.  This was really precious time for me, and it is one of the main reasons why I switched to teaching as a career at that time.  The last couple of summers were difficult in that respect, but this year I had a great opportunity.  I remember what Venerable Tharchin said:  if you have an opportunity to focus on your Dharma practice and you seize the opportunity, you create the causes to have even better opportunities to practice in the future.  But if you have a good opportunity and you squander it, you burn up the karma on your mind to have any time to practice and you will face more and more obstacles in your practice.  Principally for this reason, I made this summer my retreat.

But, as per my karma right now, my retreat had to be a non-conventional one.  Normally, when we do retreat, we want to cease all of our normal activities, go into solitude and focus on training our mind.  But I had to work and deal with my normal business during this time.  One of the biggest things my new life has taught me is that everything depends upon your mind.  If I adopt a “mind of retreat,” then I can transform any set of appearances into an experience of doing retreat.  And if we lack such a mind of retreat, even if externally we have all of the conditions of a retreat, we are not actually doing retreat at all.  So I view whatever appears to my mind once I “go into retreat” as the conditions that Dorje Shugden has arranged for me to train my mind with.  Different experiences at work, etc., then become emanted appearances during my retreat.  With such a view, we then naturally “take the bait” and work on training our mind in whatever way seems the most approrpiate given the circumstances.  In this way, our normal life becomes our retreat.  So anyways, this is what I tried to do this summer!

So what are my main conclusions:

  1. It is so very important to reconnect with Sangha, especially at the international festivals.  I had the fantastic good fortune to be able to go to the first half of the second week of the Summer Festival.  Gen-la Dekyong gave the Je Tsongkhapa empowerment and a commentary to the practice of the Yoga of Buddha Heruka.  This is exactly my daily practice, so it couldn’t have been more perfect.  But it was also so very important to me to have had the opportunity to reconnect with my Sangha friends.  Without Sangha contact, it is very easy to have our practice gradually decline.  But when we have an opportunity to go to a festival, it recharges us and reorients us to be back in alignment with the tradition.  I realized very clearly from this experience how important it is to do whatever I can to make it to the major festivals (to the extent that my karma reasonably allows).  I am definitely going to try make it to Portugal.
  2. It is likewise very important to always be on a study program of some kind.  From 1994 until 2010 I was on a study program.  Most of this was by correspondance but also at Manjushri.  But in early 2010 I simply couldn’t keep up with anything so I stopped.  This was a really big deal at the time.  But since then I gradually lost the desire to be on a study program.  But when I went to the Summer Festival and had a great conversation with my “mother” Gen Wangchog of Mexico, I realized how important it is that I restart my correspondance studies.  I then had a meeting with Venerable Tharchin, who I have been doing correspondance with for years, and I committed to restarting, though at a very slow pace.  He said “wonderful.”  So after I got back, almost every night I could, I listened to one of the classes (Heart of Wisdom).  This has really helped me get back to how I was before.  I am going to really try continue during the school year, but at the very least I am going to try use all of my summers in this way.
  3. I recalled how my main (and indeed only) practice should be to rely upon my guru’s mind alone.  I once did a retreat many years ago where I came to this as a monumental conclusion.  This conclusion stayed with me until the end of my time in Geneva.  But like so many other things, gradually I lost this conclusion and this approach to my practice.  Two things this summer helped me recall this conclusion.  First, I watched the TimeLife DVD series on the Bible.  The Bible is basically one incredible story after another of people who relied upon God alone (basically, the same idea).  Second, Gen-la Dekyong’s teachings and example exuded one very clear message:  our main practice should be to rely upon the spiritual guide alone.  These two together helped me recall clearly my conclusion from my retreat from so many years ago.  Since then, I have been rediscovering what it means to do this in every aspect of our practice.
  4. For me, writing is a method of meditation.  Geshe-la defines meditation very broadly by saying meditation is the mixing of our mind with virtue.  With this definition, we can be meditating all of the time in everything we do.  If we can master doing this, we can be just like the practitioners of old who dedicated their whole life to wandering the forest and practicing.  When I write about the Dharma, it forces me to clarify my own thinking and understanding, and in doing so, it helps reveal things to me like a giant contemplation.  I don’t know if my writings are of any benefit to anybody who might read this blog, but I do know that writing for this blog is for me a major part of my “meditation” practice.  I have done a lot of studies in my life, and this has trained my mind to think through writing (theses, dissertations, etc.).  So it is only normal that for me writing will be a spiritual practice.  It is the same for those who are into art, theatre, music or even different sports.  Different people express themselves and understand the world through a different experience and skill set, so it is only normal that the method of spiritual practice that will work the best for us is the one that corresponds with our experience and skill set.  Just as we need Kadampa bloggers, we need Kadampa artists, actors and playrights, musicians and why not sports teams (anybody for a Kadampa World Cup soccer tournament?).  But don’t worry, I will stick to writing…  😉
  5. The NKT has completely reinvented itself around Modern Buddhism.  The feeling I got at the Summer Festival was Modern Buddhism has become the NKT’s main platform upon which it launches itself into the future.  When I first read Modern Buddhism, I realized it was the synthesis of everything that Geshe-la had taught us up until then.  It is his crown jewel.  But it has become so much more than that, it now seems to be the organizing principle around which the tradition will expand in the next era.  In particular, Geshe-la introduced two huge institutional reforms to the NKT.  First, he created a new study program called the Special Teacher Training Program.  The way it works is it takes 37 of the tradition’s best and brightest budding bodhisattvas who wish to become Resident Teachers, and it brings them to Manjushri for a 6 month intensive study of Modern Buddhism taught by none other than Gen-la Dekyong herself.  You just don’t get any better than that.  These 37 spend all day every day together for 6 months going over every word of Modern Buddhism and internalizing deeply its meaning.  They also form powerful karmic connections with one another (the class of 2012), creating a web of an extremely close and supportive Sangha.  These individuals are then sent to the four corners of the world to become Resident Teachers in some center somewhere in the world, yet due to their close connections and modern social media, they can stay very close to each other.  But they will all be teaching Dharma from the perspective of Modern Buddhism.  The second major reform he introduced was the new city program.  He wants to open centers in the busist parts of downtown (where the people are…) and teach Modern Buddhism and some other books as part of a new special program.  The people who go through these would then, quite likely, find themselves joining FP and TTP in traditional centers.  This means that for the most part going forward those who enter into the tradition will do so through the door of Modern Buddhism.  All of this has profound implications:  if we are to align ourselves with the tradition and the tradition itself is aligning itself with the presentation in Modern Buddhim, then it is a good idea for us as practitioners to align our own individual practice and understanding of Dharma according to the presentation in Modern Buddhism.  Everything that came before was the preliminaries…  😉
  6. The biggest external thing that happened this summer was we found out we are going to China for our next assignment.  This has tremendous implications for the trajectory of the lives of everybody in my family.  So we have one more year in Brussels, then we go back to Washington, D.C. for a year when I will be learning Chinese, and then in April 2014 we head off to China.  The kids will probably stay behind in D.C. to finish the school year then go to Spokane until August like they usualy do.  Then they will join me in Chengdu!  Chengdu is the last major city before Tibet.  It is, for all practical purposes, China’s backwater.  This will be an incredible experience.  I obviously have a lot of karma with Tibet given that my Spiritual Guide is Tibetan.  China is also the fastest growing country and the new emerging superpower.  The relationship between the United States and China is probably the most important geo-political relationship the United States has.  I will be able to observe China’s rise and globalization from the perspective of its backwater.  It is an incredible vantage point on the world, when you think about it – it is where Tibet (where Lama Tsongkhapa emerged) interesects China while it is emerging as the next global superpower.  This will also be an incredible opportunity for my kids, because the story of their professional lifetime will be the rise of Asia in general and China in particular.  This will be incredibly valuable experience (especially if they learn some Chinese) for a wide variety of careers.  This assignment also makes it probable that I will do other assignments in Asia, such as Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Kuala Limpour, Bangkok, etc.  This is an area that the NKT is growing quickly in and where some of the tradition’s best teachers are stationed.  As Kadam Morten said, “everything we did in the West is really just the preliminaries for what is to come – Asia!” When we think about the direction the world is going, this makes total sense that this is where the tradition is going.

Loving others as we do our own children

Kadampa Ryan Cultivating healthy relationships with others

Just before I was to get married I was at the Summer Festival in England.  I went up to what was then the Protector Gompa (a special meditation room dedicated to the Dharma Protector).  I felt like getting married was the right thing to do for my spiritual practice, but I still had doubts.  So I made as sincere of a request as I could that my path be revealed to me.  What happened next was the only time something like this has ever happened to me.  I was meditating, my eyes were closed, but in my mind a Buddha who I understood to be Tara approached me.  She was made of a silvery metalic liquid, but very much alive.  In her hands was a baby – in normal flesh and bones that I could see as clearly as I could see any person out of meditation.  She then handed me the baby and said, “this is where you will find your heart.”  And then everything vanished.  I can still vividly remember and see this within my mind.  All doubt was then dispelled and I knew what my path was to be.  Thirteen years later, I now have five kids!

Prior to my being a parent, I was very much a Vulcan – heart-felt emotion wasn’t really part of my personality, and I was very intellectual in my approach to the Dharma (I still am, unfortunately, but it is slowly changing…).  I really struggled with feeling any Dharma realizations like love and compassion in my heart, and as a result I tended to shy away from such meditations and instead to focus on emptiness and other philosophical or technical topics.  “Finding my heart” was (and still is), in many respects, my greatest spiritual challenge.

To my surprise, the love I have for my children is not some sappy, mushy sort of thing, but is rather very active.  It can best be described as “there is nothing I wouldn’t do for them.”  It is a feeling of a fortunate assuming of personal responsibility for their welfare – I am glad it is me who is responsible for them, because I wouldn’t trust that anybody else would look after them the way I would and I very much want them to be taken care of.  It is a love that ‘knows them’, in many ways better than they know themselves.  I know and understand how they work and think, so I am always sensitive to what is best for them.  It is a love that happily works for their benefit.  It is a love that would rather me have the hardest tasks or the worst things so that they can have the best.  It is a love that somehow can see past all of their faults and understand where those faults are coming from and develop compassion wishing to protect them.  It is a love that literally laughs out loud when I see their summer portraits and the unique goofiness in each of their expressions!

And here’s the thing:  all of this comes naturally.  I haven’t worked to develop this love, I just naturally feel it.  Venerable Geshe-la explains the reason for this is because we have special karmic connections with these particular beings from our previous lives where we now spontaneously feel a pure love towards them.  Of course there are times when our minds are full of delusions towards our kids, but compared to everyone else we feel the most natural love for our kids.  It is thanks to my kids that I ‘found’ my heart, I realized what it means to feel an active love for somebody.

The work and spiritual training of a Kadampa parent is to learn to extend and replicate this feeling we naturally have towards our children with everybody else.   I had a very good friend who once said, “I only need two things to attain enlightenment, my son and my Spiritual Guide.  On my son, I impute all living beings, so by caring for and loving him, I am caring for and loving all living beings.  On my Spiritual Guide, I impute all of the Buddhas, and by relying upon and receiving blessings from him, I am relying upon and receiving blessings from all the Buddhas.”  There is actually tremendous wisdom in this statement.  Practicing in this way is really the doorway for extending our love to others.

Then, when we see others, the trick is to impute “this is my child too, so therefore I should love them as I love my own kids.”  How can we understand this to be true?  We all know the meditation of all living beings are our mothers.  Well, by extension, this also means that all living beings are our children.  If our child died, would we think the person is no longer our child?  Of course not.  In the same way, all of our children have died but they have all been reborn as the beings around us.  So we can correctly say that each and every person we meet not only was our child, but still is our child.  Therefore, we should cherish them as we do our own children.

Another more profound way we can consider all living beings to be our children is to consider their emptiness.  The teachings on emptiness explain that everything is a mere appearance to mind arising from our karma, including others.  Basically, emptiness says that everything we see is all a dream.  If we dreamt of having a family and children, where do these children come from?  Likewise, where do the various people we encounter in our dream come from?  They all come from our own mind (and karma).  In the same way, if our waking reality is simply the dream of our waking mind, if we are ‘dreaming’ our current family and we likewise are ‘dreaming’ of the other beings we encounter in our world.  Where do all of these beings come from?  Our own mind (and karma).  They are all, quite literally, the offspring of our karma and the nature of our own mind.  What is our child if not our offspring?  Seen in this way, we can understand Venerable Tharchin’s statement that “all beings are our spiritual children.”

By training in the recognition that all beings are in fact our children, and recalling the love we have and actions we engage in for our children, we then apply effort to do the same for others.  In the beginning, yes, it is a bit artificial, but with training it becomes habit and more and more natural.  Gen Losang said, “What is natural is simply what is familiar.”  With effort, we make it familiar, and then it feels and becomes natural.

When we understand all of this we will feel so lucky to have our children.  We will cease to view them as obstacles to our spiritual practice.  Yes, it is harder to go to festivals and teachings when you have kids, but every day is a spiritual training.  We see how they are a stepping stone for our enlightenment and how without them it would be impossible for us to really progress along the spiritual path.  Our feeling lucky to have them will then increase our love even further, creating a virtuous circle of greater and greater love and progress along the spiritual path.  Fantastic!

And this is not even to speak of how we can use the love we have for our children in the context of our Tantric practice.  We train to be the Vajra Father (or Mother as the case may be) of all living beings.  We can bring all of our parenting experience into our self-generation practice.  This will not only help our self-generation practice, but it also creates a virtuous feedback into becoming a better parent too.

Your turn:  Take the most difficult person in your life right now.  How does viewing them as your child change your mind towards them?

Dealing with in/laws and family members who think you are in a sect

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life, Cultivating healthy relationships with others

We live in a post-religious society, where in general people have little or no interest in spiritual matters.  Most of our families, likewise, have few spiritual inclinations, at most going to church on Christmas or Easter.  So when we start to develop interests in spiritual matters, it naturally raises a few suspicions or concerns.  Doubly so if we show interest in something non-traditional, like Buddhism.  When our family members see us becoming very interested, then their radar goes up and their immediate assumption is we have joined a sect.  This dynamic in particular comes out from our parents (who naturally assume we have no idea what we are doing) and from our in-laws (who fear for their loved one that is now linked with us).  Once they start becoming concerned, there is really no limit to how far they are sometimes willing to go to create obstacles for us in our practice.  They may resort to all sorts of blackmail, ultimatums, threats, insults and general mayhem.  I personally have experienced all of the above.

So the question is how should we deal with this?  I suggest the following as a multi-layered approach (if the first one fails, try the second; if the second fails, try the third, etc.):

  1. Appreciate how they are coming from a position of loving.  At the end of the day, their main concern is for our happiness.  They are not trying to create problems for us, they think they are protecting us.  When we assume they are being hostile and we respond defensively, then it feeds their narrative that we have been brainwashed, and then they redouble their determination to deter us from the wrong path we have taken.  If instead, we respond with understanding and appreciation for their concern, then we disarm the hostility and conflictual nature of the exchange and there is a chance we can have a healthy, rational discussion about the matter.
  2. Show them you yourself have already had all of the doubts and questions they raise, and then even show you have gone farther.  Explain to them how you too were skeptical at first, and how you too had many doubts and questions.  Show them that you are going in with your eyes open with a healthy skepticism.  Talk about all of the questions you yourself have asked and explain to them the satisfactory answers you have received as to why this is the real deal and not some sect.  When they see that you have already taken their objections into account and come up with reasonable answers to them, then they know that you are not being blinded.  It is important to even go further than they did in your doubts and concerns that you have addressed.  Show them that you have done even more due diligence than even they call for.  When they know that you have checked things out, their concern will be less.
  3. Completely and totally abandon trying to get them to appreciate Buddha’s teachings themselves.  Sometimes we fall into the mistake of thinking they need to appreciate the power of Buddha’s teachings for themselves, and then their resistance will go away.  But if we start to try to do that, they will feel us trying to ‘convert’ them and it will only feed their view that we have gone off the deep end.  Rather, you should take the approach of saying, “to each their own, you have your food, I have mine.”  You need to show total respect for their views, even if their views are completely hostile to you having your views (“it is your right to think like that”).  When you show respect for the diversity of beliefs people can adopt, and they show intolerance, then it becomes apparent to all who is being reasonable and who is not.
  4. Figure out what they want from you, and show with your actions (not your words) how the more you practice Dharma, the more they get what  they want from you.  For example, imagine your mother-in-law is creating trouble for you.  Why?  Because she is concerned about her daughter.  What does she want from you?  She wants you to be a good husband, who treats her daugher with respect and makes her daughter happy.  So use your practice to become a better and more loving husband.  While it may take time, you will become a better husband, your spouse will become happier, and your mother-in-law will come to see that actually your practice has made you better for her daughter, not worse, so she will come to accept it and even appreciate it.  But you should never say what you are doing because that ruins the whole thing.  Just let your actions speak for themselves.
  5. Patiently accept the obstacles that come your way.  Why are others creating obstacles to your practice?  Because you have created obstacles to others’ practice in the past and now it is coming back to haunt you.  You created the karma for this and you have not purified it, so now you must patiently accept it.  If you accept it as purification, then you will gradually purify this negative karma until eventually it exhausts itself.  If you start to retaliate and create obstacles for or fight with your family members, then the cycle starts all over again.  It may take years, even decades, even lifetimes before people come to accept, but if you sincerely accept the obstacles as purification, eventually the obstacles will pacify.  Two useful things you can do to help speed the process:  first, generate a specific bodhichitta motivation towards whoever is creating the biggest obstacles for you (I need to become a Buddha so I can help this person in the future).  If done sincerely in a qualified way free from any attachment, this will very quickly purify the negative karma you have with that person.  Second, make sincere requests to the Dharma Protector that he arrange whatever is best with respect to these obstacles – if they are harmful, may he pacify them; but if they are helpful, may he make them worse!  Then, whatever happens, accept that this is what has been emanated by the Dharma Protector as being what is best for your practice.
  6. If all else fails, don’t give into the blackmail, but don’t rub their faces in it either.  If your family members blackmail you saying ‘if you don’t quit, then I will … (insert emotional penalty)’, and then you give into that blackmail and do what they say, then you will remain forever trapped in their manipulations, you will lose your practice, and you will allow them to create the karma of successfully creating obstacles to the spiritual practice of another person.  This will then be bad for them in the future when they experience similar obstructions.  Yes, we are supposed to cherish others and fulfill their wishes, except when their wishes are wrong.  Assuming you have done your due diligence and you are on a qualified spiritual path, then their wish for you to abandon it is wrong.  To indulge them in that wish does not help them, it does not help you, and it does not help all the countless beings who you would otherwise help if you were to become a Buddha.  So you need to let them throw whatever emotional penalties they want at you, but you still keep going – you never abandon your practice.  Eventually, they will realize that no matter what they do, you will not give in and they will give up trying.  But you should also avoid the extreme of rubbing their face in it – “ha, ha, I am going to practice and you can’t stop me, na ni na ni na ni”.  Dharma practice is, above all, an internal thing.  We don’t need ostentatious external displays of our spiritual-ness!  Be skilfull so that they are not forced to confront it, but just quietly do your thing.  There are no rules with this, just be skilfull.

Your turn:  Describe some obstacles you have had with those close to you and how have you overcome them?

Dealing with temptation

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life

We all have things we are tempted by, whether it is cigarettes, alcohol, porn, drugs or even just wasting time watching too much TV or playing video games for hours on end.  It could be any number of other things.  The thought arises in our mind that it would be great to indulge ourselves in one of these things.  We think it would bring us happiness and there wouldn’t really be any negative reprecussions.  We think back to times when we did these things in the past and we romanticise how great it was, somehow forgetting the bad that came with it.  We think we can get away with it and nobody would ever know.  We try rationalize to ourselves why doing so is not all that bad.  We start to make plans for how we will do these things to test them out to see if they are workable and if we can find a way to do them that has minimal fallout or chances of getting caught, but that still enables us to get what we want.  Since we know we can’t and we shouldn’t, but we still want to, we experience a good deal of mental pain wrestling with this.  We feel pain at not being able to have what we want and we feel pain of the struggle within ourselves to not execute on our plans.  We think the way to eliminate the pain is to say ‘screw it’ and to go ahead and indulge ourselves.  We tell ourselves we will just do it once (or twice, or three times…) to get it out of our system, and then “that’s it”, afterwards we will be good (even though our past experience has taught us that giving in now just makes it that much harder to say no next time, so we keep giving in again and again).  Sometimes we will have unique circumstances where we can do these things with minimal external impact, and we tell ourselves “if I don’t do it now, the window of opportunity will close on me and then I won’t be able to do it again for a long time, if ever.”  It starts to become the only thing we can think about, and every time we have a spare mental moment we start thinking about this again.  If we are already a Dharma practitioner, when we go to sit down to meditate and our mind starts to become more quiet, it seems as if these calls become even louder (they don’t, we are just becoming more aware of the deep currents running underneath the surface).  We might even try rationalize things with the Dharma, such as by misusing the tantric teachings.  Even though there can be extraordinary risks of losing everything we hold dear, we think the risk is minimal and it will be OK.  Does any of this sound familiar to anybody?

Here’s the thing:  all of this is completely normal.  This is the normal struggle faced by anybody who has chosen to adopt some form of personal moral discipline.  Here’s the other thing:  there is a way we can turn this process to our great advantage!  But our ability to do so depends on one thing:  we have to have more faith in the law of karma than we do faith in our object of attachment.

One of the laws of karma says that the practice of moral discipline is the cause of higher rebirth.  In particular, there is a practice of moral discipline called the “moral discipline of restraint.” Basically it says we restrain ourselves from giving into our negative impulses.  Everytime we successfully practice the moral discipline of restraint, according to the law of karma, we create the cause for a higher rebirth.  In other words, with one moment of saying no (and yes, this means “depriving” ourselves of the “happiness” we think our object of attachment will give us), we create the causes for an entire lifetime in the upper realms.  Even at an ordinary level, we will have far more happiness in an entire lifetime in the upper realms than we will in that one moment of indulging ourselves.  So the choice is a little bit of enjoyment now or an entire lifetime of enjoyment in the future.  It is like a dollar today or a million dollars tomorrow?  The choice is not a hard one.

The reason we use to say ‘no’ is very important in determining the karmic consequences of our having said no.  If we say ‘no’ because a lifetime of enjoyment is better than a moment of enjoyment, then that is what we will get – an ordinary upper rebirth (still, not bad…).  But if the reason we say ‘no’ is a spiritual reason, the karmic consequences are far better.  If we say ‘no’ because we want to avoid falling into the lower realms, then we create the causes to have not just an ordinary upper rebirth, but a precious human life in which we will encounter instructions on karma and moral discipline and we will have an interest in practicing them.  If we say ‘no’ because we have made the decision that we are going to get out of samsara and indulging ourselves in this object of attachment takes us in the wrong direction (back in vs. getting out), then we not only create the causes for a precious human life where we can continue with our practice of moral discipline, but we also create the cause for a rebirth outside of samsara as a liberated being.  If we say ‘no’ because we have made the decision to transform ourselves into a Buddha so that we can liberate all countless living beings from samsara then it really starts to get good.  Not only do we create the causes for a rebirth as a Buddha, but we create countless such causes.  Engaging in moral discipline for countless living beings is karmically equivalent to engaging in moral discipline for one being countless times.

The point is this:  each time the temptation to break our moral discipline arises within our mind, it provides us with an opportunity to create the causes for up to countless precious human lives and even countless causes to become a Buddha!  If transformed in this way, each time temptation arises within our mind it is like we are winning the spiritual jackpot.  If temptation arises in our mind 20 times every five minutes, if we stay with our practice we just won 20 spiritual jackpots.  You can even go so far as to say without these temptations arising in our mind we would not be able to engage in this practice.  So instead of fearing and suffering from the internal struggle of moral discipline, like a seasoned warrior, you will relish the battle!

If we have more faith in the law of karma than we do faith in the ability of our objects of attachment to give us real happiness, then we will succeed in our practice of moral discipline because we will clearly know there is more to be gained from saying ‘no’ than by giving in.  How do we develop such faith?  You can read the chapter on Karma and the faults of attachment in Joyful Path of Good Fortune.  How do we improve the scope of our spiritual reasons for saying ‘no’?  You can engage in a daily practice of lamrim as explained in the New Meditation Handbook and once again in Joyful Path of Good Fortune. 

If the doubt arises, “if I only need one cause to be reborn as a Buddha, why do I need countless of them,” the answer is because we need to get that one seed to ripen at the time of our death.  If we have countless negative seeds and only one pure one, statistically speaking which one is more likely to ripen?  If we have the doubt, “saying no is just repression of/suppressing my negative impulses.  Won’t the desire to indulge just come back even stronger next time until eventually it overwelms me and I give in,” the answer is there is a difference between repression and a qualified practice of moral discipline.  Repression says “I want to indulge the negative impulse, but I shouldn’t”, whereas a qualified practice of moral discipline says, “I do not want to, because it is just not worth it.  I have much more to gain by saying no than I do by giving in.”  If we have a qualifed practice of moral discipline, the tendencies to indulge in negativity will grow weaker and weaker until eventually they have no hold over us at all.  It takes time and it is a long training, but it is doable and if we perservere we will get there in the end.

Your turn:  Describe a temptation that you have struggled with and how have you overcome it?