Adler v Buddhism

I am just wrapping up reading The Courage To Be Disliked by Kishimi and Koga. It works through Adlerian psychology using an interesting kind of dialogue style. Basically, a cynic asking “yeah but” questions for the whole book. What occurred to me while reading it is that Adler’s psychology is pretty spot on for Buddhism, except without the mystic elements. The main shift seems to be this:

Teleology: We try to find causes to justify our choices.

This can also be summed up as: The past does not exist. It has absolutely no hold over you other than that which you give it.

If you were punched by your parent as a child, you might think this would cause you to hold a bunch of personality traits. But Teleology says no – that you want these traits, because they serve you in some way, and you’re using being punched by your parent as justification for holding onto those traits. The task is then to ask yourself “why have I chosen this feeling/trait”.

A shorter term example is “That person did X and that made me angry so I did Y”. According to Adler, you wanted to do Y anyway, so you used the event X as an excuse. The right question then is “Why did I choose to do X? What do I get from having done X? Is it really a choice I want to make again? Does it really serve me, or is it just habit that I want to do X?”.

Another example: This person does such annoying things that they have caused me to dislike them. No – you chose to dislike the person, and now you’re mining through their corpus of behaviours for evidence of how awful they are to justify your dislike of them. The question should be “Why have I chosen to dislike this person? What does it get me? What would I risk by choosing to like them instead?”. I, for instance, really dislike my mother in law. Everything she does irritates me. She eats with her fingers (disgusting), and acts like a little girl at the table (she’s 70), and makes constant requests for our time and pouts when she doesn’t get her way. Justifiable dislike, right? Let’s rethink: I should say, I have chosen to dislike her. As such, I am looking for evidence for my dislike, and am interpreting things that wouldn’t normally bother me as totally unacceptable. Eating with fingers? In someone I liked, that would be interpreted as whimsy. Acting like a little girl? In someone I liked that would be interpreted as inducing a casual atmosphere to put people at ease and bring a sense of fun. Making constant requests? In someone I liked, this would be framed as someone who likes me and my kids, and wants to be around us as much as possible. We’ll get to the pouting later. So why have I chosen to dislike her? My choice is likely based on a perceived threat — early on I was concerned she was trying to break up me and my husband (I’m not sure I’m wrong about that, but it’s been 25 years, so she clearly hasn’t been successful). I’ve held on to disliking her for that act since then. To justify my choice I’ve had to search for evidence, and present the evidence of her being unacceptable to my husband, who finds it pretty distressing (it’s his mom!). I’m also fairly rude to her when she comes over, because I never wanted her to visit in the first place. So ages ago, I chose to dislike her as a misguided way to keep my husband’s attention and commitment. Now that dislike is pretty out dated, and probably didn’t help anyway. I can now just let that go and choose to like her! I can open my heart up again because I don’t have anything to gain from the dislike!

This is the ultimate vehicle to letting go of the past. It’s a fascinating approach. Just turning the question around, rather than *just* letting go abstractly. Asking yourself “Why am I choosing to hold on to this?”, and not asking that rhetorically but asking it genuinely!

The formation of the question is important. “Why I am choosing”, rather than “Why am I”. Because “Why am I” seems externally imposed. “Why has the universe made me dislike this person; Why am I doomed to be angry all the time?”. Instead, “Why have I chosen to be angry” gives you answers like “Because it helps me keep people at a distance so that I’m not confronted by their criticism of me”. “Why have I chosen to dislike this person” might lead to “I’ve chosen this because I believe they are superior to me in some way and I am wanting to place myself above them instead”. It moves away from focusing on justification of the anger, or the dislike, or the reactive strategy, and focuses on the choice.

Our reverse-thinking (post hoc justifications) could be seen as the delusion that Buddhsts talk to. The ultimate self-trick: “They made me do it”. Our psyches construct a world filled with unavoidable outside influences that we are unable to defend against. We are victims of the world around us – and everywhere we go, our emotions are triggered by these interlopers! Hence: Suffering.

Suffering takes the form of anger, paranoia, clinging. These are all defensive behaviours, meant to ward off the effects and influences of others on our lives. We set ourselves up in opposition to those around us. We even set ourselves up to be in opposition to ourselves!

By taking total responsibility for our feelings, and asking “why have I chosen to feel this?” we can deconstruct the suffering. We don’t have to choose to get angry in traffic. We chose to do that because it made us feel something (moral superiority? virtue?). We don’t even need to hate ourselves for our failures — we believe that self-hatred is a form of virtue, so we choose to hate ourselves. But does it get us where we want? Does it make us happy? Does it make us better at our work? Is it serving us the way we had hoped? If not, discard!

Drive all blames into one never made sense to me until this point. In this context it could mean completely owning your reactions in a situation and look at why you’re choosing to have them. Yes, that person rear-ended your car. That makes you angry. You blame them for your anger. But it was your choice to be angry. The blame for your anger is your own. You have to ask: Are you going to use their action as the final excuse you needed to scream at someone that they’re an asshole? Why have you chosen to decide they’re an asshole? What does that serve you? Have you made other choices that make you feel personally compromised? Maybe at work? And you’re feeling powerless? And so now you’ve chosen to identify this person as an asshole to give you an excuse to scream at the person to try to make yourself feel superior at least to this idiot who hit you in traffic? You have power in every situation. You are not an emotional victim. You are the agent of your own emotional choices. That’s not to say you shouldn’t swap insurance, and make sure to get reimbursed for your car repairs! But driving blames into one(‘s self) in this sense means remembering you have power and responsibility in each situation, regardless of who started it.

So let’s revisit the case of my mother in law who pouts when she doesn’t get what she wants. This is her own emotional response to me doing something to her (saying “it’s not a good weekend for a visit” will do it). Put in Adlerian teleological terms, I have, in the past, chosen to be intimidated and angered by her pouting. But Adler would say I don’t have to make that choice: that her emotional reaction is her own task to solve. If I have had a relationship with her that is open hearted, and I’ve given what I can, but accepted my own limitations for what I can offer, then if she finds that inadequate, she actually needs to work through that herself.

The social contract espoused by Adler is very Buddhist middle way: Behave in good faith in the world. Act morally. Treat everyone as equals. Contribute to others, as they ask, whenever you are able, but know your limits and don’t martyr yourself. Own your own emotional responses (Drive all blame for emotional influence into one’s self).

Adler gives us the means to step off the Karmic wheel: To let go of the past by asking ourselves why we are choosing our feelings to serve us in the present. We can stop neurotically reliving old wounds by genuinely asking ourselves what the reliving was supposed to achieve, and looking actively for a better way to achieve it. Our whole society has been built around “I am responsible for your feelings and you are responsible for mine”, but this is flawed, and leads to suffering. We cannot be held responsible for others’ feelings because we don’t have total control over them. It’s unsustainable and crazy making. We have been taught blame as a mechanism to make sense of the world (“Who moved my cheese?”) but blaming others gets you into a trap of waiting for others to save you, when really you have trapped yourself.

I Choose Anger

I choose anger to give myself the excuse for yelling things I would not otherwise say: You’re hurting me; I resent you; You’ve let me down; I feel abandoned by you;…

I choose anger to give myself a sense of superiority and to show people that I’m high value.

I choose anger to distance people who I do not have the courage to just politely walk away from: faced with my anger, they may walk away from me.

I choose anger to make others see I’m serious, and to get them to take me seriously: I am afraid of being ignored; I am afraid of being powerless.

I choose anger to make others afraid to say no to me; I am afraid of losing control.

Them Too, Now what?

What a sad state of affairs. More and more Gurus are being exposed for being sexually exploitive of their students. Chogyam Trungpa himself has been put forward as doing some horrendous stuff, and his son, the Sakyong, is currently facing a litany of accusations. I say accusations, but they seem credible to me. So I’m just going to say that I’m guessing he did the rapey things of which he is accused. I’m focussing on the Shambhala folks because that’s where I hung out for years, but it’s definitely not limited to them. Yoga gurus, Zen gurus, and more, have been finally revealed as being really pretty awful people.

For years the conversation around Trungpa, specifically, was “can an alcoholic and drug user really be enlightened?”. The general consensus seemed to be “yes”, but mainly because he was so good at doing both. He could keep going with conversations, keep giving talks, etc etc. He was a very functional alcoholic, so people kind of said “well he controls the vice, the vice isn’t controlling him”. With these new revelations, I feel like this point is moot, and the question has moved on to “can a rapist be enlightened?”. Well I, for one, believe enlightenment and rape are mutually exclusive. I know some folks think you can be spiritually mature, and emotionally stunted, but I’m not buying it. As I’ve discussed in earlier posts – I believe enlightenment to be the height of maturity: true adulthood. Grown ups don’t rape. It is the act of a person stuck in toddlerhood, with an added twist of evil.

So what do we do now that we know that these Gurus are not actually enlightened, but instead are kind of academic enlightened people. Maybe it’s a case of Those who can’t do (enlightenment), teach (enlightenment). But does that even make sense? Can someone give instructions on how to attain something that they haven’t themselves attained? Maybe .. maybe they’re just parroting what they’ve heard from other (hopefully enlightened) people, and so are at least passing on knowledge that has some validity. People can speak academically about a lot of topics, with a lot of authority, without ever having had direct experience of those topics. But given that the topic in this case is “being a good person” and they are decidedly not “good people” do their takes on the philosophy even have validity? I feel like that’s a real grey area, with a likely slide down to “no”.

So, I think this all comes down to the fact that we shouldn’t trust anyone but ourselves. Every single individual is wrapped up in their own illusions about themselves, Gurus included. Trungpa said as much. So we can’t necessarily much extract value from their words: they were, at best, kidding themselves that they had authority on this topic. At worst, they were lying hucksters just trying to empire build and gain a following.

But do we need them? After all, we know the goal: to be sane. We don’t need religious instruction to tell us whether we’re there. We probably have a sense of when we’re feeling insane, and when we’re feeling more sane. Maybe we have never felt fully sane. Fine. let’s just stick with those relative values, realising we may never reach that end point. We can likely use the evil guru’s advice on how to meditate (that’s a technical concept, without much subjectivity — any teacher is probably fine), and we can likely check in with a counsellor so we don’t get stuck in our own delusions about our own sanity. We can use empirical assessment, and carry out practices that we can quickly, or over time, observe to make us kinder and more stable people. If something makes you less kind, or less stable, stop doing that thing.

TL;DR: We’ve got to get beyond the guru, because honestly, nobody is perfect. All heroes have feet of clay. They might not all be rapists, but they’re not angels, either. They’re just people and they’re completely fallible, and prone to all the human foibles. They might claim to be “Awakened”, but I’m guessing being Awakened is like being on the wagon – you can fall back off of it, and boy did some of these folks fall hard. So to get sane just do the work: follow the noble truths, follow the 8 fold path, get a counsellor, get enough rest, and exercise and eat well. And be as honest with yourself as you can. And don’t put up with rapists.

Let (A Little) Go

I think that when we consider undertaking a new philosophy or approach, we always jump to the extreme case to see if it will pan out in the long run. If we’re contemplating going keto, we immediately think “but what if I’m at my best friend’s wedding — would I eat the cake??”. If we are pondering lowering out carbon footprint, we think “but if my family member were dying across the continent, would I fly to them?”. And similarly, when we think about becoming Buddhist and letting go of all attachments, we think “so am I meant to not love my children? Am I meant to let go of my parents? Should I not be sad if my cat dies?”

This technique is “optimising for the corner case”: we plan our lives around situations that will barely ever happen, if they even happen at all. We fail to take moderate action, because of fear of what our technique would look like at the extremes. This is a logical fallacy: plan for the typical case. What happens at the edges doesn’t really matter that much in the long run!

So rather than thinking about what letting go of attachment looks like in the extremes, think about what it looks like in the norms. What does letting go look like while driving to work? While making breakfast? While playing with your child? While talking to your spouse? Maybe you need to let go of expectations for your teenager (let go of the expectation that they will be organised, for instance). Maybe you need to let go of your expectations for your ageing parents. Maybe you need to let go of your expectations for yourself! You can’t be perfect. Let go of the image of yourself as a superhero. Just let go of that tiny thing, a million times a day.

The upside here is that letting go of these normal clingings will mean you’re in better emotional shape when the weird situations come up. If you have not been berating your teenager for being airy fairy for the last few months, they may be more present and supportive if your parent dies. If you have not been beating yourself up about not being perfect, you may be more able to handle it if something happens to your child that you need full mental presence to deal with. These micro-clingings (fury at others over not making a light, or getting cut off in the Starbucks line up, or fury at ourselves for forgetting things, or cutting someone else off in traffic (stupid! stupid!)) are exhausting! You need energy to deal with difficulties — but you won’t have it if you’ve clung to tiny injuries.

So let go of the little, normal things. Start local. Don’t worry about the edges – they will work out fine.

Don’t Go It Alone

Buddhism, I believe, is at its heart the search for sanity. The release from neurosis, which is the ultimate cause (and symptom) of dhukka. Feelings are not the enemy: our reactions to our feelings are what turn pain into suffering.

By embarking on the path to sanity, we fall prey to insidious delusion: the notion that we are “really getting somewhere”, when later we look back and realise we were in momentary insanity. We can sometimes convince ourselves that we have gone so far on our spiritual path that we undertake manic actions: we give things away that we later realise we actually needed, we quit a job we actually kind of liked, we take on a task we can’t handle. We write checks that our future selves just can’t cash. We’re operating in a kind of punch drunk mindset.

Chogyam Trungpa put it well, and suggests that what you have really done is re-defined the concept of the dharma to suit your own bent psyche: “you adapted the message of this particular doctrine to your own needs rather than hearing the doctrine as speaking the truth. You are a spokesman for the doctrine for your own sake; therefore you have manufactured the truth of the doctrine.” (this is from Cynicism and Warmth from The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa, Volume Three)

Myopia and self-reference is anathema to progress. What Trungpa is saying is that you need someone to call you on your shit. We come to Buddhism because we’re a little crazy. We are worried that we see the world wrong, and we are right about that! But because our vision is clouded, we need someone outside our own heads to give us perspective. You need someone to say “Okay – so you feel enlightened today – now try getting stuck in traffic/going home for Thanksgiving/… What comes up for you? Let’s work through that!”. In the past, these people were Buddhist Gurus. They had the market on self-discovery cornered. But just like physics has migrated from the realm of philosophy into the realm of science, the quest for sanity, and understanding of the mind, has tracked a path from spiritual Guru to Therapist. The quest for enlightenment is more a search for mental clarity than spiritual magic. Most of us don’t expect the end-point of enlightenment to be suddenly seeing auras or more dimensions. We expect that we will be able to see situations without wrapping them in our own insanity and bias. That our own neurotic/psychotic needs won’t eclipse our sense of reason. This is what therapists are for.

Therapists can help you walk the 8 fold path. Therapists have direct tools, validated (I believe) by science, to address the “inner critic” — the voice in your head that tells you you’re terrible at everything (right thought); to help you identify your own delusions (right view, right understanding); to help you find your authentic purpose (right livelihood); to help you keep your actions and reactions authentic and not harmful (right speech, right action). Therapists can give you activities and exercises to do that will sure up your muscles of self inquiry and self control (right effort, right mindfulness).

Meditation is a key component: it will let you hear that your inner voice more clearly, and distance yourself from it so you can remedy the situation, it will let you watch your actions rise up, so you can pause before you cause harm, and it will teach you the superpower of calming yourself in times of stress.

But you need someone to shepherd you through the process of working with your mind. You cannot blindly lead yourself. You can’t get sane just by reading self-help books, and you can’t attain enlightened sanity just by staying in your own head. Or maybe you can, but it will certainly take longer.

Maybe a Buddhist Guru is what you need – but those are hard to find, and tend to have a lot of foibles. Therapists are everywhere, and many are rooted in mindfulness and will exploit meditation practice as a mechanism for self-inquiry and ultimately sanity.

So don’t go it alone. You need someone whose opinions you trust, who is outside your own mind, helping you along the way.

Steady Yourself

Moment to moment, how do we progress in the path towards growing up, towards being enlightened? Deepak Chopra, and most of the other Buddhist(ish) teachers suggest that “Present moment awareness” is a method for bringing enlightenment practice into every day life. Not saving meditation for special sitting occasions, when the stars have aligned, and you’re perched on a cushion in front of your special shrine. Instead, blend it into your mundane activities. Stay here, and now. But what are the possible mechanics of this?

This brings me to thinking about the times when present moment awareness would be brought into use. The examples are typically “while washing dishes”, or “while walking”. I find the intensity of focus almost strangely distracting while washing dishes. If I’m too connected to “the oneness” (as Lama Surya Das sarcastically put it), I’m actually not going to do a great job of navigating the sidewalk. Meditation, paradoxically, can be distracting! I know that means I’m doing it wrong — but what would it mean to do it right?

All the statues of the buddha have one thing in common – they are all balanced. They are sitting squarely. They look like human paper weights. The Zen teachers, and most of the meditation instructors, indicate that finding a proper seated posture is paramount in making progress in sitting meditation. You must become a human paper weight too!

But what is it you’re doing when you sit like that? What does it matter?

They key is that balance. Stoking the sense of balance. And also the sense of where you are in the space. The 6th and 7th senses: Proprioception (awareness of body in space) and Balance.

Sometimes my thoughts are so powerful I’ll feel almost pulled off the meditation cushion. By maintaining a sense of balance and place, I can recenter myself. I can feel where down is. It’s easier to do, the better the balance I have on the cushion. If I’m tipping because I’m uncomfortable, it’s actually harder to maintain the awareness of balance and space. When thoughts tug you off balance, rebalance again. Watch the tugging sensation from a balanced pose. Don’t let it drag you over. Chogyam Trungpa’s meditation instruction (whatever we may now feel about him as a teacher) was to focus slightly more on the out breath. I think he’s in good company with meditation instructors on that point. It’s in the out breath when we can really feel that downness. We can feel our body relax, and succumb to gravity a little bit. Up is a bit of an airy concept (ha!), but down is unambiguous. So: by exhaling and turning attention to that exhalation, we connect not with which way is up, but which way is down. We ground ourselves in here, and in now.

Balance can be regained moment to moment. This is how we bring our practice into every experience: Before washing dishes, make sure you’re squared up, centered on your task. Don’t wash dishes at an awkward angle (you’ll break one!). When you’re walking down stairs, feel yourself landing on each one. Don’t lunge forward. Notice if you’re leaning weirdly (I often am!). Sometimes the lunging and leaning is very subtle — my head is very slightly forced forward, with my forehead tensed up. Or I feel tension behind my eyes that I am moving into. I can gently ease that awareness back, into the portion of my head that sits on top of my neck, which then sits on my shoulders and hips. And if I’m standing, then sits on my heels, which are on the ground. By rebalancing in every action, we bring ourselves back down to ground, which has a natural effect of bringing us into now.

Balance as a proxy for sanity makes sense: Being unbalanced is the term we use for someone who is displaying insane traits. Feeling off kilter means we are not feeling like we’re stable, and suggests a feeling of derangement and momentary craziness. Dizziness (a loss of sense of balance) is directly related to anxiety: one causes the other, and vice versa!

Regaining balance only takes an instant, but it has profound effect. It improves the efficacy of every action, and takes the anxiety out of every interaction. If you can’t act with balance, don’t act. Rebalance first. Breathe until you regain the feeling of down. This is the act of an independently standing person. A real grown up.

Thoughts are Escape

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my journey to being a grown up is to face my feelings without reacting to them by transforming them into aggression towards others. My feelings of anxiety almost immediately spin around and become daggers pointed outward. Like a dog that feels attacked: it attacks.

I’ve had a lot of time to consider my deepest fears: that people will be mad at me; that I will not be seen as valued; and on and on. I’m becoming more familiar with the things from which I’m running away: the huge boulders causing turbulence in what would otherwise be a smooth flowing river.

Yongey Mingur Rinpoche of Tergar International points out in a video that he was crippled with anxiety when he was young. It would hit him in waves, even (or especially) when meditating. Gradually, he learned to watch his anxiety, the same way we are taught in meditation to watch our breath. Eventually, the anxiety just wasn’t there any more.

But what I’ve noticed is that my thoughts while meditating do not centre around those fears. They do not precisely characterise them. Instead, my thoughts are distractions from my fears. My inner dialogue may as well be a TV show I’m using to not look at how I’m feeling. My fears aren’t as robust as the Rinpoche’s anxiety — they run away and hide pretty fast. If I try to look directly at them, they just dissipate, like blown smoke. They’re of course lurking, ready to ruin nice moments, or to make me yell at my kids. But they don’t bubble up such that I could learn to dispassionately watch them!

Or so I thought!

It seems now that when a thought arises in my mind while I’m meditating, if I cast my mind around my body, I’ll be able to feel the physical feeling from which the thought is trying to distract me. I’ll think “I need to go do work task x”, and then I’ll look inside and see a kind of pull, or knot, at the pit of my stomach: an ache, usually not associated with any specific scenario. But the physical feeling itself is identifiable. And pretty strong. By not following the thought, the physical feeling stayed. So then I watch that feeling.

Maybe someday, like the Rinpoche’s anxiety attacks, the ache will go. For now, I guess, I’ll let it be. I’m hoping that by doing this, when these feelings arise in daily life, I can just be with them, rather than having escapist instincts. Those thoughts take the form of being impatient with my kids, or being surly with my spouse. Maybe I can feel the feeling, and not let it become the operator of my mind. Let’s see.

Tantrum Test

TLDR: A handy test for checking whether you’re being a grown up, on your path to attaining Very Grown Up Enlightenment.

Today I was stopped at an intersection, in the left hand lane. Lots of traffic in both directions. One car ahead of me at the light. I don’t like the left lane, because there are left turners. But this person wasn’t turning, so I was good to go. The right lane (and opposing traffic) looked like something out of an apocalyptic evacuation scene, so I was pretty thrilled with my lane choice.

Then it happened: the car in front of me suddenly turned on its indicator. IT WAS TURNING LEFT!

My blood boiled. I attempted to shoot death beams from my eyes, but alas, those haven’t been working lately. I “TSKED” a bunch. I didn’t scream “YOU ASSHOLE” but I wanted to. I didn’t do anger-spreading by giving him the finger or honking! But believe me, it was close!

It was at this moment when I heard a voice in my head say “WAAAAAH WAAAAAH WAAAAAH! I don’t WANT TO BE STOPPED! I WANT TO GO NOooooooOW!!!!”. in a kind of 2-year old tone. And I thought “Ah. I’m throwing a tantrum”. Grow up. Get over yourself. Let go of your childish expectations. Roll your eyes and smile.

So this is the tantrum test! If you have a reaction to something, and you can re-frame the reaction as a 2 year old stomping his angry little foot or writhing around on the floor having a hissy fit, then you’re not being a grown up. Take a breath. Chill out. Realise you need to let go of your expectations. Look at the situation, and assess your options.

My option right then, in that traffic, was to wait until the next light to get through the intersection. That ended up being fine. I could have jumped straight to “fine” without causing the heart damage of all the anger and resentment. Without the fantasy laser beams shooting at the other driver.

I’ll do better next time!!!

You’re Not All That

Yesterday I went to lunch with colleagues. I got seated at a particularly problematic end of the table. All the people with whom I have easy conversation were seated at the other end of the table. I was seated next to folks (with a couple of exceptions) with whom I have just never managed to get … let’s call it … social flow. I sat there while they discussed things that I knew nothing about, or things that I felt were flat out boring. They chatted in a way that meant that I could barely contribute, besides sitting there, trying not to be rude, and smiling like (I can only assume) a moron.

While I was sitting there grinning and nodding, I was also thinking. I had a lot of thoughts. Aside from the standard wishing for some kind of mandatory seat reshuffling, I thought about myself. I thought: “I am the most interesting person at this end of the table. All the other people are dullards”. Then as I watched them all converse happily about all these weird foreign facts, I thought “Oh shit – I’m the least interesting person at this end of the table! If I were more interesting, I would be able to chime in! To contribute! To add something!”. This morphed into “I am the least valuable person – if I left, nobody would care, and probably people would be happy for my absence!”. Which then shifted nicely over into “These people are assholes for not noticing I’m not involved in the conversation”. And finally winding up with “I’m out of my depth, socially in this group – I bet any of the people at the other end, if swapped over here, would do better than I’m doing – I’m a weirdo silent grinning freak”.

I think I had an existential crisis.

Then I came home and meditated. And this morning, I went for a walk in nature, doing some walking meditation, and then did some breathing meditation while sitting in a too-hot bath. And I had one of those “aaaaah!” moments. It went something like this:

“You were not the most interesting person at the table. You were not the least interesting person at the table. The concept of “interesting” or “not interesting” doesn’t even really exist. It exists only in your imagination, and its only purpose is to obtain imaginary self-definition. “I’m the most interesting person at the table”. “I’m the prettiest girl at the dance”. “I’m the smartest person in the room”. “I’m the dumbest person in the room!”. These are all imaginary. And these imaginary concepts can cause tremendous harm. “I’m the best driver on this road” can lead to hubris that hurts someone. “I’m the least liked person in this group” can lead to lashing out and alienating people. We act on these conceptions, and it’s almost never beneficial.

You’re not the most interesting person in the room. You’re not the least. You’re just a person. The other people are also just people. Yes, they have quantifiable traits: number of words spoken; height; age; hair color. But usually these quantifiable traits don’t actually affect us much. It’s the imaginary traits that we derive from those quantitative facts that provoke insane and irrational behaviour.

When we look at others, we don’t see their facts, we see our interpretation of their facts. We see our own bias. We see our own imagination. That person is an idiot. That person is a saviour. That person is who I want to be. If I had her hair, I’d be okay, because with her hair, she’s okay. None of that is real. And it’s the road to ruin.

Thankfully, I didn’t actually act out my insecurities at lunch. I managed to keep my crisis of self-ness to my self. But my existential ruminations and inward distraction likely did keep me from seeing opportunities to contribute, so that I at least could have enjoyed myself. I could have asked questions and been curious. Or I could have just settled in and listened to what they were saying and just had vicarious fun. Oh well. Hopefully, with this new perspective, I’ll be more ready for the next time I get stuck in a conversation about football.

Maintain Balance

Recently I was able to attend a talk by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. He’s the leader of the Tergar International Buddhism community. It was a lovely talk. And he took some questions! Someone asked how we can manage to find meditative space in the midst of our insanely busy lives. The recommendation was to meditate in little moments in between the insane times. Just got a kid to bed? Take a deep breath, and really feel that breath. Just about to eat? Another breath. Just whenever you have a moment, feel that moment.

The beauty was that what the Rinpoche described as meditation was so simple! He said “just be aware of your breath. Breathe in. Breathe out.”. But what’s awareness? That sounds intense. So he held up his hand and said “do you see my hand?”. Everyone in the audience of course enthusiastically said “YES!”. And he said “That’s awareness”. Just seeing the hand. Not thinking about the hand. Just seeing that it’s there.

So the recommendation for moment to moment meditation was just remembering that you’re breathing at all, a few times throughout the day.

I’ve been doing this for the last week or so since the talk, and while yes, it’s true, it’s not very long, and the placebo effect of having gone to a lovely talk might still be going strong, I am going to claim that it’s making a difference! What I’ve noticed is that sometimes I will feel like I’m careening out of control, and that if I just really experience a single breath (or two, if there’s time – there often isn’t) I can kind of regain equilibrium.

This practice is helping me realise that typically I am really quite off balance! Like someone stuck in one of those illusion rooms, unable to figure out which way is actually up. When I was in one of those, after hanging onto the railing for a while for dear life, I remember closing my eyes (because they were totally deceiving me), and just feeling for the balance in my body. I was then able to figure out what up was, and make my way to the door – rebalancing every couple of steps.

I wonder if life is a little like one of those rooms. My kids tip the room; my work tips the room; my sense of obligation to friends and colleagues tip the room. I feel like I’m constantly off balance, trusting my eyes rather than my body. Sometimes the room seems very tipped indeed! To the point where I feel like I’m standing on the ceiling!

But the down is always down, and up is always up. And maybe we all have the capacity to tell which is which if we just breathe for a moment.