Mind Training for Difficult Situations

In complex situations many patterns are triggered simultaneously. Conflicting thoughts and ideas race around in your mind. Conflicting feelings tear your heart apart. Your body moves first in one direction, then another. Patterns and identities struggle to maintain themselves. You experience their struggles as turmoil, uncertainty and indecision. Or you move to absolute certainty and inflexibility to avoid the turmoil and chaos.

In difficult situations, you cannot possibly think through what to do because all your thinking is in the service of one pattern or another.

Instead, sit in the mess. Keep coming back to attention until you find a quality of open clarity - in the mess, not apart from it.

Clarity means that you experience what arises clearly. Thoughts and feelings arise like reflections in a mirror. When you look at a mirror, you do not see a mirror - you see reflections. When you know the reflections are reflections and not actual objects, you know you are looking at a mirror. Thoughts and feelings are similar. When you know that thoughts and feelings are thoughts and feelings, you know you are looking at your mind.

That is clarity.

Open means you see without prejudice and without confusion. You do not suppress or ignore anything that arises, internally or externally. Regard all that you experience as a dream. At the same time, see what is what. Do not confuse one thing for another - experience every element in the dream vividly and distinctly.

The intensity of your thoughts and feelings lessens because you are in and aware of the space in which they arise. Like silence and sound or stillness and movement, thoughts and feelings are not separate from the open space of awareness. You still feel everything, but you are no longer struggling against it.

It is tricky, because if you succumb to even a little distraction, you lose attention and you are once again lost in the mess.

Keep coming back to that open clarity and resting in the mess until you become aware of a timeless awareness that is you and not you. It is you, because you are aware. It is not you, because "you" as a separate entity is not there.

In that timeless awareness, a knowing arises. This knowing is non-conceptual. It is not driven by reaction or pattern. It arises from meeting, opening, understanding and accepting exactly and precisely what is arising in your life. You know where the imbalances are, not through thinking, but more through sensing directly. And you know what needs to be done to address those imbalances. That knowing takes expression through your body, through action.

Imagine that you are an avid poker player. You hang out with a circle of people who enjoy playing poker, a circle that extends not only through your home town but to other towns within easy driving distance.

One night you are playing with a group of friends and the dealer drops the cards. Everyone helps pick them up and the dealer deals the next hand. You end up with really good cards. The betting begins, and it's quite exciting. The stakes rise. It's by far the biggest pot of the night, but you are confident in your cards. When the dust settles, you are the winner. Big winnings! And then someone at the table says, "You cheated. When the cards were dropped, you picked up a couple of good cards and that's why you had such a good hand."

The silence around the table is deafening. You start to protest, but before you can do so, another person says, "Let's check the deck." The deck is found to be two cards short, and then two cards are found on floor near your chair.

Nobody says anything. They just look at you and quietly leave. You know you didn't cheat, but what can you do?

The next day, your Twitter account and Facebook page are filled with postings about the card game and what happened. Your friends won't speak with you and your colleagues keep their distance. Your relationship with your circle of friends has changed dramatically. Yet moving away isn't an option for you.

What does mind training have to say about this situation?

Your response to the above post may reflect a perspective that pervades how people generally think about practice these days, namely, that the point of practice is to help you in your life or, in this case, help you to find a way through a difficult situation.

While many practices can help you in difficult situations, the help usually takes the form of ‘seeing’ and not being trapped by the reactive mechanisms operating, both yours and others.

However, when you take the aim of practice to be able to meet difficult situations, you are close to adopting a transactional relationship with practice. In transactional relationships, you are primarily interested in what you get out of the relationship. If you find something that is more helpful, you take up that. The focus on what you get out of the practice inevitably reinforces the sense of self that keeps you from experiencing life without that sense of separation.

Perhaps there is a progression here. You may begin to practice with the idea that it will help you in your life, but as time goes on, you realize that you have become more interested in what you can accomplish through the practice (awakening, presence, whatever you want to call it). But as still more time goes by, you come to appreciate that any kind of goal, any kind of objective, prevents you from being present in your experience and, increasingly, the only thing to do is experience whatever is arising as completely as possible.

That kind of effort is often extremely challenging. In the case of being falsely accused of cheating, your effort requires you to experience the emotional pain of social humiliation and approbation, the pain of the loss of friends and human connection and/or the pain that comes with the recognition that, despite your best efforts, you may never be respected or appreciated the way you would like to be. On the other hand, there are great joys, too, the joy of freedom from conventional notions of success and failure, the joy of the peace that comes when you know you can experience whatever life throws at you because you know, experientially, that there is no "you" as such, and the joy that arises naturally when there is no separation between you and what you experience.

Yes, mind training and other practices may help you in difficult situations, but the aim of the mind-training instructions is not simple utilitarianism. They give you a way of being in your experience, whatever it is. What that leads to is not something you can know or control. As T.S. Eliot says in Four Quartets (Section V in East Coker), "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." Not everyone wants to live this way, but if you are taking up mind-training, taking and sending, or any of many other practices, that is where you are headed.

TMMK