The Opposite of Bodhichitta
My co-worker, Deva, read my post on bodhichitta (loving-kindness/compassion) and asked if there was an opposite to that. I wasn’t really sure, so I cracked open my copy of the Sutra of Fifty Two Ways to Say You Suck and I found the answer…Bitchichitta. Bitchichitta is the energy of the awakened ass-holiness we all possess and exercise to different degrees. It’s that quality of being that arises when someone thoroughly pisses you off to the point you just know you have to say something back.
Bitchichitta has a function though. It shows me where I need to practice. Without bitchichitta I can never see the way to develop my bodhichitta and become a better member of the Earth Sangha.
“When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are the times that we connect with bodhichitta.” –Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You.
It also takes the patience and kindness that is fostered and strengthened in meditation and mindfulness practice. It takes being curioser and curioser because overcoming bitchichitta can be a challenge, especially if it has its foundation built on self righteousness. The action of curiosity is to create an open space in us in which to work.
In meditation practice the mind begins to slow down. We learn not to give any energy to the random thoughts that go by. By not feeding them, they diminish. There is a saying in the dynamics of energy and consciousness that says “where attention goes, energy flows.” Well, thoughts without energy tend to shrivel up and blow away. After enough of this practice, it becomes easier to see the gaps between thoughts and gaps between events and our reactions to them. In those gaps is the opportunity to transform bitchichitta into bodhichitta. Those gaps between ‘pissed off’ and ‘get them back’ are places of rest and the chance to choose differently, focus differently, give our attention to bodhichitta and make it bigger…where attention goes, energy flows.
So, yes, Deva, there is a Santa Claus, and there is an opposite to bodhichitta.
Finding a place to stand
The process of writing for this blog slowly reveals to me truths in my life that have been present but in some way un-gelled or not coherent in words yet. This in itself reveals another truth, that being how often our language is inadequate to describe experience. There is a teaching that says words are traps that try to capture experience and once you get it, let the words go.
Recent conversations have had a theme around them of a very difficult to translate word in English… possibly one of the most elusive to define, in fact…Love.
No, I’m not talking about any personal dating situation, so just simmah down if that’s where you were going. I just have had at least two conversations where the issue was at hand for a friend or was in the subtext of what was being discussed and the difficulty in being able to deal with that hard to define word was part and parcel of what drove the conversation. It seems pretty common that folks have the cling-ons for that word whether they be positive or negative.
I’ve found a more handy word in my Buddhist readings that seems to capture more of the essence of what I think love is. It’s called Bodhichitta. Bodhi has the meanings of awake/enlightened/completely open. Citta has the meanings mind/heart/attitude. Together they describe a state of openness and unbounded compassion for all beings. Now that’s love, ain’t it?
Love in the relative/historical (as opposed to the Ultimate) dimension is pretty limited. I know for me it has often only existed under certain predefined circumstances and situations. If the person or situation didn’t meet the criteria, he/she/it got no lovin. In the Ultimate sense, it’s easy to say the goal is to love everyone…because it really doesn’t take any effort or action to just speak the words. It’s like going to church on Easter and Christmas…just showing up doesn’t really put the rubber to the road.
Bodhichitta doesn’t let us off the hook that easily, though. In fact, it is a pretty large focus in the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism…where the concept of Bodhisattva comes from (a person who vows to work for the enlightenment of all beings before allowing enlightenment for themselves). It’s the energy that drives and nourishes the Bodhisattva ethics and it, like mindfulness, is also a muscle that needs development.
So I guess why these words keep bouncing around for me is because I’m trying to figure out where to put Bodhichitta into practice so that I’m helpful in my conversations with others and so that I’m improving my personal relationships with friends, family, and potential dating partners. What is the balance between loving kindness to others and loving kindness to myself so that I am not run down or taken advantage of and diminish my capacity for the practice? In other words, how do I be a loving person when people are sometimes not?
A quote from Pema Chodron in her book The Places That Scare You: “It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and – withouth even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.”
So for now, the Dirty Dharma lesson for me to explore is: When the shit hits the fan, love is where you stand”.
The Search for Buddha’s BENGAY
There’s a metaphor in Pema’s latest book, Take the Leap, that also struck me as being simple yet powerful. In it, she talks about going from habitual ways of living life to a more free method of operating that is based on what’s going on around you, rather than dramas playing out in your head. Her phrase for that is ‘don’t bite the hook’ of habit. But the metaphor she uses to express the concept is having poison ivy and knowing that the only way to not spread it is not to scratch. Scratching would be the same as ‘shenpa’ or inappropriate clinging to old ways of being.
So over the past couple of weeks since I’ve been home from vacation, I’ve been back on the South Beach diet (which is a method of carb control…cuz my carbs were a mess) and reducing coffee intake which in me creates artificial highs and lows like it does in everyone but I was finding that I used it to way to much and the effects were more intense than I liked.
Changing habits is tough because I want to scratch the poison ivy or, let me translate that back to my issue… I want a fuckin’ pot of coffee and a pile of biscuits.
Now I am trying to meditate through the cravings and use the internal space created by mindfulness to soften the feelings of jonesing, but there have been a couple days in the past few where I thought I was going to come unhinged. Yes, I gots da shenpa for da coffee and carbs, ya’ll. I am, however, seeing a shift in the mental battles that go on and I know it’s because I’ve been hitting the meditation cushion more regularly and with more focus than I ever have in the 27 years I’ve been meditating, and the addition of the Dharma has really been like adding jet fuel to the process. That poor mindfulness muscle of mine has gotten such the workout over the past month, I’m gonna have to get me a tub of Buddha’s BENGAY cream for the little bugger.
…and Buddha’s Benedryl for all the poison ivy
Follow up to Shenpa in the Moutains
I’ve been meaning to follow up on the last post. So yeah, you know it wasn’t all roses…wouldn’t be much dirty Dharma if it were, huh? LOL
If I had written that post at the end of my time in the mountains it would have been a little different. Well…little is the operative word I guess as you’ll see.
So what happened was…one night of my last week there, the ex was drinking (secretly of course). I got wind of this over the phone, so my entire drive back to the house was filled with old anger, ugly and hurtful things to say, dramatic re-enactments of arguments that had not happened yet, etc. Standard stuff I had gotten used to while living with an alcoholic. It was often like I turned red and swollen and 30 foot tall with anger and resentment.
Now what was different this time around was that my mindfulness muscle was strong enough that all those things were going on in my head, but this time, instead of 30 feet tall, it was about 3 inches. When I got home, I took a book and went to my room to read with the door shut. I’ll take 3 inches of drama over 30 feet any day.
I will tell you this, however, my mindfulness muscle was only strong enough to get through that episode. If it had happened again too soon, it would not have been so pretty…so I just got validation that I got a lot of sitting yet to do…not that I want to stack stressful situations up just to see how many I can take.
Anyway, there’s more to come. I am really behind on what I’ve wanted to blog, but I wanted to get this little bit cleaned up.
Ahead will be some more on death, giving up effing coffee (no i’m not bitter) and much to come on the class I’m taking on the Zen precepts.
Shenpa in the Mountains
I wrote this post during my vacation and am just now getting around to uploading it. I’m going to get it out here now and then follow up on it soon…because at the end of the post, it sounds kinda rosy and that is because I wrote it towards the end of the vacation portion of the trip. The next week, however, had a day that was not so smooth so you know it couldn’t be all lollipops and rainbows 
More on that later.
Pema Chodron’s latest book, Take the Leap, focuses on the concept of ‘shenpa’ which is a Tibetan word describing the idea of attachment or what she calls ‘getting hooked’. A better translation for me would be ‘clinging’. It makes more functional sense to me.
The importance of this concept is that in the teachings of Buddhism, a major cause of suffering in life is caused my inappropriate attachment to things, situations, etc. The reason I prefer the word clinging is because when I attach to something inappropriately, you’re going to find my claw marks in it should I have to let it go. ‘Clinging’, to me, describes that desperate life or death feeling that comes up when something I have shenpa for is taken away voluntarily or not. For instance, whether I voluntarily chose to give up my morning coffee or whether someone took it away from me, my concept of morning coffee would have deep gouges in it as I went through the throes of letting it go. I gots a lots o’ shenpa for my coffee, ya’ll.
Shenpa can be inappropriate clinging to anything, so it doesn’t matter if it’s aroused by things that are positive or negative. An example of clinging to what is negative in my own life would be the incredible anger, even hatred, that I had towards my ex and his addictions and the way our relationship dissolved around those things. For the longest time I felt quite justified in my hanging on to those negative feelings…my shenpa was mighty powerful strong on those items, yessiree. I chewed many a bitter pill and kept myself up nights over it.
Shenpa over positive or neutral things can be seen in the way I overly charged the notion of living in Colorado and being in the mountains and generally out in nature. When I first moved back to Texas, I not only had the clinging to negative things, but I also generated a lot of negative energy for my grief over not living in the mountains anymore. I was awash in comparing how awful Texas was to how wonderful Colorado was. Both versions of clinging were making me quite depressed. I was attached all over the place and it was making me gosh darn miserable…even worse (and here’s the shenpa part), I felt quite justified in all that clinging and that made me cling all the harder.
Anybody ever been all that caught up in something you just could not let it go whether it was good or bad for you? No, surely not J.
Well, ya’ll, all that clinging just sucked. It burned up a whole lotta energy and made me generally miserable most of the time. Meditation practice, thankfully, helped me de-energize all that craziness. Meditation helped me remember how to slow down and take my Cling-ons and extract the shenpa by letting the craziness come up in my head but choosing not to give any of it extra energy. Well, as the rule of energy and consciousness says: Where attention goes, energy flows…and I stopped giving the Cling-ons any juice to live off of…they sort of shrunk up and fell off.
I’m writing about this because in the last week, I’ve been back in Colorado and back around my ex and for him I’ve had mostly neutral feelings (the previously negative cling-on) and for the mountains and rivers and nature in general, I’ve been able to just be in them and with them and just enjoy them as they are, not as my magical cure alls (the previously positive cling-on).
Frankly, I have shocked myself. If I had planned these things rather than just let them evolve as they organically have, I could not have planned it all out better and more likely would have screwed something up.
Curiouser and Curiouser
I know it ain’t a word (curiouser), but it does get the point across as you’ll see later.
Just in time for my vacation, my two favorite authors and people I consider to be my teachers…Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron, have both released new books. Wasn’t that thoughtful of them? I sure think so.
It’s a good thing, because when I have to travel (which my habit/conditioned mind reads as stepping outside of my daily routine) I start to experience fear tremors. This morning is 2 days away from setting off back to Colorado and the tremors are in full force as I try to contemplate packing and organizing for 2 weeks away from home.
Whatever the case, I got the willies and that means it’s Pefect Pema Time.
Pema Chodron talks a great deal about dirty Dharma around the notion of dealing with groundlessness. Groundless being the state of ‘WTF!?’ and ‘Holy Shit’ where your notions of the everyday world (relative world to use a Buddhist term..as opposed to the Ultimate world) are at best not helping and at worst causing pain. DEFCON 1 would be total mental meltdown. I’m only at DEFCON 3-ish and staying with my breath to keep from going any lower. You know the DEFCON rating right? It’s a scale from 5 (best condition) to 1 (worst condition) and stands for Dharmic & Equanimity Failure Coming On Now. I think I read that in the Sutra on Pulling your Head Out of Your Ass.
One of her methods of explaining the mindset that will defuse some of the intensity is to stay open and curious to your feelings and reactions. Curious would mean approaching your opinions and strongly held notions that are causing a low DEFCON number with a gentle questioning openness. This is opposed to clinging to strongly held ideas and opinions that are not working. Thich Nhat Hanh would call it embracing the feeling with mindfulness like you would a child.
However you choose to understand it, the practice means to have you step out of your habit mind and into unconditioned mind. Not an easy task if the mindfulness muscle is not present to help create space around the feeling.
Space and openness would be the opposite to clinging and contraction. It sounds counter-intuitive to how we are generally taught to deal with issues, but trying it over and over again does create a certain amount of peace. Even if the space you create is a small distance of time between the moment you want to throw your shit out the window and actually doing it, in that amount of time you might just save your shit…just sayin.
So I’m going to be reading the new books and maybe start putting together blog posts I’ve been wanting to do where I take an author’s book and do a post per chapter that explores more deeply what their teachings are. And let me tell you this also dear readers…I’m going to be staying in my house with my ex, so there may be a lot of Dharma hitting the fan for the next two weeks and creating a lot of material for blogging as well. J
…and to keep from throwing shit and/or my ex out the window, I’ll be getting curiouser and curiouser!
