MINDFULNESS FOR MENTAL HEALTH: OVERCOMING DISTORTED THOUGHTS

FEBRUARY 10, 2018

Sidney Burris Professor, Department of English Co-Founder, Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas

The Five-Stop Roadmap

Our Problem: Why We Suffer

Our problem, then, can be stated simply: we are continually reacting unproductively to the world as we think it should be rather than finding harmonious ways to live in the world as it actually is. This is the first stop.

Why we Suffer

The root of our

suffering

Beginning to alleviate

our suffering

Methods for

alleviating our

suffering

The desirability

of suffering

The root of our suffering, then, lies in our ignorance of how the world truly operates and of our natural position within its admittedly complex operation. And this is the second stop.

Clearly, then, the third stop on our journey concerns how we might alleviate our suffering and increase our happiness. Just from the little bit we’ve learned already, it should be obvious that we lessen our suffering by syncing our lives harmoniously with the fundamental structures of our world: our galaxy, our planet, our countries, our nations, our homes, our families, our friends, and our enemies. Less unnecessary friction, less resistance, and more happiness.

A Brief History

Lojong (Mind Training)

Lojong is credited with having been brought to Tibet by an 11th-century Buddhist sage, Atisha, who traveled to Indonesia (a 13-month journey) to receive the teachings from Serlingpa. Once there, Atisha remained for 12 years where he received instruction and practiced the teachings he received.

To explain how we can begin to alleviate our suffering, let me share a personal story. In my youth, I would go swimming near Topsail Beach in North Carolina. During low tide, my friends and I would swim out to a sand bar that would become exposed. On one such occasion, when we reached the sand bar, the tide started flowing out towards the ocean, and it was rising. With great effort, we were swimming directly towards shore, but found that even after two hours of exhausting swimming, we were now further from the shore than even our starting point on top of the sand bar. Our strategy was not working. We needed to stop resisting the flow presented to us. Instead, we then let our bodies drift naturally slightly parallel to the shoreline. Using less effort, removing unnecessary fiction, and staying calm, we were after some time wash shore three miles down the coast. There are great forces that act against us in our everyday lives, and we must shift our thinking in order to overcome them.

The story goes that Atisha learned two sets of instructions: 1) The Seven Point Mind Training; 2) Exchanging Self with Others. After journeying to Tibet, he taught the former publicly, and the latter privately to his best student, Dromtonpa.

Later, the great Tibetan philosopher and practitioner Lama Tsongkhapa, combined these two into a single practice of eleven steps.

lo — mind, thought, or attitude

jong — training (acquiring a skill); habituation or familiarization with specific ways of being; cultivating specific mental qualities

Our Common History

As a species, having descended from Australopithecus (4 million) and Homo Erectus (1.9 million), human beings share a common wish both to embrace happiness and avoid suffering, and several million years later, we are here trying to find ways to do precisely the same thing.

The problem? Conditions for survival in the 21st century are very different from what they were on the African savannahs when our ancestors were roaming in groups, foraging, mating, and fighting for their lives.

50,000 years ago, modern humans first wandered into Europe and encountered a saber-tooth tiger. The skills for dealing that with that threat are not the skills we need to deal today with an aggressive office-worker, although the impulse for aggression, anger, and hatred still exist deep within us in muted forms.

So many of the inherited traits that kept our ancestors alive and pushing their genes into the next generation—jealousy, rival kinship, defensiveness, tribalism, aggressiveness, possessiveness—are not as useful to us now as once they were.

Yet still, these old habits die hard and continue to govern our behavior.

So what are we to do?

Keeping It Simple: Experience & Ability

“ . . . your mind should not fasten on the negative characteristics of suffering; instead, you should gain experience in keeping your mind in its normal condition and remaining in its own state” (71). — Appendix, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Transforming Problems Into Happiness.

”To apply this practice to your life, whenever suffering arises, you must have a training in a virtuous practice according to the ability of your mind” (71) — Appendix, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Transforming Problems into Happiness.

And so combining these two phrases, we find the core advice: “you should gain experience in these practices according to the ability of your mind.

So Far, So Good.

Every bit of this sounds reasonable, practical, even attractive.

But is it possible? In this case, the possibility of the project lies squarely within the method of the project.

In short: How do we do this?

We need a method, and in this case, we are lucky. There are ancient, tested, and proven methods for achieving these ends. But as always, there’s a catch.

The catch is that, as Westerners, we are very practical people when it comes fixing our cars, repairing our gutters, training for a 5K. If we can't do it, or we aren't ready to do it, we get a manual, we get a training program, we follow it methodically, and we give it a shot.

But our spiritual lives, our happiness? Not so much. Here we become idealists, hoping a benevolent spirit from somewhere bestows upon us a blessing of some kind at some time after we've wished or hoped or prayed for it. And then we wait.

Not so with these methods, these programs for achieving happiness.

They are training methods, no more, no less. and to get the results you have to do the exercises. Let's call it SPIRITUAL ATHLETICS.

After all, one of our greatest spiritual athletes, the Dalai Lama, tweeted exactly the same thing.

Methods

And so here we come to our fourth stop on the journey: the methods we need to accomplish our goal of more happiness, less suffering.

Here, we have an embarrassment of riches; in fact, one of the challenges that lies at the fourth stop is finding the set of instructions that are both authentic and helpful to you, and you alone.

The One Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa have occupied many on this journey for a lifetime, while The Lam-Rim of Lama TsongKhapa have been the root text for others. You have to find your trainer, you have to try the program, and you have to decide if it’s working.

But I will introduce one method, leading to the development of one mental quality that all of these schools recommend: equanimity.

What Is Equanimity and How Do We Develop It?

Equanimity is the balanced mental state that arises naturally from what the Tibetans have called the “clear light of the natural mind.” The actual teaching is: “The nature of the mind is clear light; / Defilements are only adventitious [accidental].”

This clear light isn’t judgmental; it isn’t biased. It is the purest form of awareness and it simply illuminates what is happening with crystal clarity. What occurs afterwards—our reactions to what is happening, which can either be positive or negative, angry or peaceful, or neutral—falls under our control, though we are often not aware that it does.

But here then is the moment of intervention, where we can interrupt our chain-reactions to what we see happening, and substitute helpful, loving emotions for destructive angry ones.

We can, in fact, train ourselves to recognize these moments where intervention is helpful, and interrupt these destructive emotions with helpful, positive ones.

You’ve heard of catch and release? This is simply catch and replace. The mental state that allows us to catch the harmful emotions and replace them with helpful ones is equanimity.

A Meditation to Achieve Equanimity

As we visualize an example of each one of these, we watch our minds react, we note its characteristic reaction in each case, and then we say to ourselves for each of the three:

Loved One

Stranger

Enemy

✦ Attachment

✦ Apathy

✦ Anger

This person, LIKE ME, wishes to avoid suffering and find happiness, and no matter how it appears to me, I am certain they are attempting to do that, JUST AS I AM.

They are all heirs to the pristine mind, JUST AS I AM, and so there is really very little difference between us. However, when I do this meditation, I do get to see how these defilements creep into and cloud the clear light of the mind: what would my relationship to these three classes of people be like without, respectively, attachment, apathy, or anger? THAT IS THE MEDITATION. What is left afterwards is EQUANIMITY. Do this all day, wherever you go.

It is SO difficult to do.

Shantideva (8th Century)

“. . . one should ward off anger toward those who injure spiritual mentors, relatives, and friends by seeing this as arising from conditions.” — VI, 65, The Way of the Bodhisattva

For the Shantideva quotation, realize that this is removing the personal agency from those who are committing harmful actions, and seeing it as an inevitably result of the causes and conditions that are, at least temporarily, beyond the person's control.

How difficult is this to do, all the time? Very.

Still . . .

Accomplished scholar and monk, Matthieu Ricard, reminds us that these actions are their own reward, and that through habituation and endurance we will develop our goal without any regret towards the struggle.

The Meditation on Sentient Beings and Mothers

The traditional meditation goes like this: the mind that you carry around today has arisen from the one you carried around yesterday; and this goes backwards not only day by day, but second by second.

Go all the way back to the moment of conception, and think about how the mind of the newborn baby is also a moment of continuity that also needs a preceding moment of mind from which it arises. And then follow this along the parental lines, all the way back through their lives to their parents, and so forth throughout all time.

The conclusion: the continuum of the mind is beginningless, for all practical purposes, and so all sentient beings share this continuity with us, and so are, in this sense our parents.

Note: the purpose of all these meditations is to weaken our insistence on all those things that divide us (race, gender, nationality, political party, food, music, clothes, livelihoods) and strengthen all those things that unite us. We are simply undertaking the task of breaking the bad mental habits that increase the distance between us and substituting for them productive mental habits that bring us closer together.

Shantideva (8th Century)

“If inflicting harm on others is the nature of the foolish, then my anger toward them is as inappropriate as it would be toward fire, which has the nature of burning.”— VI, 39, The Way of the Bodhisattva

The Fifth Stop: the Desirability of Suffering

As promised, we have finally arrived at the last stop on this journey, and it is an unlikely one because we will try to train ourselves to be undeterred by the obstacles that confront us, the problems that plague us, the suffering that continually chases us.

In fact, we will ultimately attempt to view our suffering, and our productive encounter with it, as the only way to develop our equanimity, the gateway to lasting happiness.

To understand this fundamental, but counter-intuitive point . . . a story.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche

“In short, train your mind to see the beauty in all problems. In order for problems to appear desirable to you, you have to stop looking at the shortcomings of the situations. Put all the effort into looking at the benefits of the problems. Whether a life situation is wonderful or not depends on the way your mind perceives and interprets it. You can choose to label an experience ‘wonderful’ or ‘problematic.’ — Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Transforming Problems into Happiness (12).

General Observations Based on My Own Practice

Never have these teachings been so available, so inexpensive, so widely shared since they first appeared on the planet several thousand years ago.

Read the best books, listen to the best podcasts, attend the best teachings, talk to those who have the most positive influence on you, keep your critical mind intact and vigilant all the time, and compare yourself and your progress to no one.

Even the Buddha himself said that his teachings were to be examined, investigated, and judged with a skeptical mind. This is your journey, and most importantly, your understanding.

Remind yourself continually that this particular journey defines the evolution of our species, and might well be its definitive trait, and as we rewrite our genetic software

Growing up I lived in the countryside, and we would on regular occasion hunt for rabbits. Now wild rabbits are very curious, as you can walk into a pristine pasture that is filled with them and never encounter a single one. They are excellent at hiding, and staying hidden. These rabbits also hide in the darnedest places. Quite often such places are in the torn bushes. To lure the rabbits out, and have an opportunity of getting them, you have to walk through the brambles, with its thorns and vines, cutting, scraping, until suddenly, having suffered through that, out came the rabbit! The point: suffering can expose the very defilements that stand in the way of our achieving equanimity (such as fear, jealousy, pride, anger, ignorance, etc.), and being thus exposed, we can more easily see them, target them, and vanquish them once our mind can easily distinguish them.

through these exercises, we are directing evolution as we would have it directed, not as the environment, and millions of years of pre-programming, would have it go.

Bibliography

Mind Training: The Complete Collection. Thupten Jinpa. Wisdom Publications.

How to Generate Bodhichitta. Ribur Rinpoche. Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive (available as an e-book, from Amazon for .99).

Transforming Problems Into Happiness. Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Wisdom Publications.

Mindfulness in Plain English. Bhante Gunaratana. Wisdom Publications.

Why Meditate? Matthieu Ricard. Hay House.

Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. Daniel Goleman & Richard J. Davidson. Random House.

The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Robert Wright. Vintage.