The Downside of Schadenfreude: On Not Profiting from Sorrow

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New slogan is a bit of a doozy:

Don’t seek others’ pain as the limbs of your own happiness.

The language is a bit obfuscating, but not terribly so. Still, I turned to the UnfetterMind.org page about this tenet and found a much more intelligible version: "Don't look to profit from sorrow." The explanation added depth to my preliminary understanding as well:

"All Buddhist practice, and mind training in particular, is about ending suffering. Anticipation of gain from others' suffering, or even complacency about it, breaches the intention of this practice."

After reading that I had a moment of guilt, especially after all the videos of cat fails that I've watched. I can even admit to the occasional juicy moment of schadenfreude. However, since I'm not one to shy away from growth and challenge, I moved onto the Tricycle page about this tenet.

One paragraph in particular stood out as a reason for me to work on this but not to beat myself up too much about it:

"This slogan is about exploitation. It is about taking advantage of others in order to maintain our wealth and privilege. It could also be applied to our attitude to our mother earth. It is about the habit of take take take, with no gratitude, and with blindness as to the consequences."

That idea of "with no gratitude" resonated, still resonates, so strongly. Gratitude is a huge thing for me. I'm grateful to people who hurt me because it gives me the opportunity to grow. I'm grateful to people who help me for the same reason. I'm especially grateful for cat fail videos that make me laugh. Heck, I'm even grateful to the animals and plants who give their lives so I can eat, to the farmers who grow my food, to the drivers who transport it, to the cooks and grocery clerks and so on. I think it is impossible to live and never benefit from someone else's pain even distantly. It *is* possible to feel grateful for the people who help you be who you are.

It's about mindfulness. Lief's advice for this tenet, "Whether you think of yourself as privileged or as underprivileged, contemplate the effect of buying into the paradigm that increasing your happiness depends on decreasing the happiness of others," doesn't feel as applicable to my life this week. Instead, I'm going to try to pay attention to all the people who do benefit my life in whatever way and express my gratitude for them.

So, that's what I'll be working on. Until next time, namaste and all that.

Accepting Enlightenment, No Matter How Tough: On Not Making Gods Into Demons

Have to say, I'm quite happy with myself for sticking to the original schedule of publishing weekly. Not sure it will last, but I'm enjoying it while it does.

Regardless, let's turn to the next tenet:

Don't make gods into demons.

The UnfetteredMind.org translation isn't too different: "Don't turn a god into a demon." But the explanatory passage gave me pause.

"Mind training becomes a source of reactive emotions when you take pride in what you accomplish with the practice."

The thing is, I am happy about the progress I've made. If I'm truthful, I am sometimes proud. With that dismaying realization, I turned to Judy Lief's piece on this teaching. One particular passage stood out to me:

"At first meditation and compassion practices seem so beautiful and gentle. We feel enriched and nurtured. But as we continue, we begin to encounter a more threatening and provocative side to mind training practice. It makes us feel unmasked and exposed, embarrassed by our own mindlessness and the puny nature of our compassion for others.

As the practice begins to bite or to be more challenging, when it is no longer simply an add-on to our regular way of going about things, but a call for personal transformation, we feel threatened." 

I've had moments like that lately, where I feel my pursuit and study of Buddhism has changed me in ways that I never anticipated. When I first found and started to study, it made so much sense to me - things I'd read prior to Pema Chodron had me ready. But I've recently found a transition between Buddhism fitting into my preexisting understanding of the way things are and how I see it now... I feel like my ideas from before have kind of melted in the face of lojong.

So I'm not particularly worried about this becoming a problem in the immediate future. Seeing each new day as an opportunity to deepen my practice and letting go of old patterns, even when the new day brings "negative" things to me, is part of my practice. And yet, I need to be vigilant. Or, as Lief admonishes, "How can you identify with the dharma without making it into just another credential?"

So, that's what I'll be working on. Until next time, namaste and all that.

Examining Motivations: On Not Acting with a Twist

Sometimes translation is everything when it comes to my initial impression of a new-to-me slogan, and this week is a perfect example. The cards I've been using have this for the thirty-sixth tenet:

Don't act with a twist.

My confusion was immediate. At first I thought about twist ties, and then I thought about this twist:

After I had a little laugh at my imagination, I turned to UnfetteredMind.org and found an immediately intelligible translation: "Don't make practice a sham." Don't be a Buddhist for show, in other words. As usually happens when my understanding starts to dawn, I felt a little guilty and like I've been doing it wrong. That feeling intensified when I read the short explanatory passage:

"Your practice is a sham when you use it to gain higher status, greater abilities, or other benefits. Practice is about being present. It is not about your getting something for your efforts."

Then there was a whole different kind of twist: one in my stomach. My gut twisted a bit because I wrote a post about my Buddhism for my other blog this past week. My initial impulse to write that piece came from an acquaintance of mine questioning and insulting my practice as a Buddhist. But if I'm honest, I do like the attention Letters to a Young Librarian gets and there was a drop of trying to get "something for [my] efforts" in the mix as I wrote.

I let myself feel the guilt for a moment, but not too long. I took a deep breath and turned, as I usually do, to Judy Lief's piece on this slogan on the Tricycle site, and that helped me a bit. Well, to be honest, what Lief wrote made my stomach twist a bit more at first. This passage especially had me feeling self-recrimination:

"We keep track of our acts of kindness and our moments of awareness as demonstrations of how we ourselves are progressing. Instead of genuinely opening our heart, we go through the motions. Then we look around to make sure that our benevolence is properly noticed and admired. In reality, under the guise of helping, we are just using people. They are props for our self-development project."

But that's not what writing a post about Buddhism for my library/librarian blog was about. I'm not a Buddhist for anybody but me. I know in my heart that I'm not doing this to be noticed or admired. I don't want to take my perspective for granted, though, so I will still follow Lief's advice and examine my motives as I progress through the next week and beyond.

Until next time, namaste and all that.

Just Keep Swimming: On Not Trying To Be The Fastest

Last week's work was hard. There are some things going on in my life that made that slogan particularly pertinent, but I think I'm stronger for the attempt.

This week will likely be just as necessary and difficult:

Don't try to be the fastest.

I got a small quiver in my stomach just from reading the card: I definitely recognized myself there. Remembering how I needed both the resources I normally consult, I went first to Unfettered Mind and found they'd translated this slogan as: "Don't be competitive." Their short explanation resonated even more than when I first read the slogan:

"Open to the sense of deficiency, of not being enough, that pushes you to be needlessly competitive."

Did I say "resonated"? I meant "punched me in the gut." Because really, that sense of deficiency is a specter I struggle with regularly. Not just the feeling, but the difficulty of owning it publicly. Like right now - I have to struggle to admit to struggling sometimes.

I turned turned to Judy Lief's response to this slogan with a bit of trepidation, but I needn't have worried. While it's true there has been a time or two when I was left feeling more confused by what Lief had to say, but that's been rare. And when I found the following passage, I realized I've been working towards embodying this tenet even longer than I've been actively studying Buddhism:

Slogan practice is about cultivating both awareness and compassion, both in formal practice and in daily life. Ideally this is one complete package. You don’t try to get somewhere, but you just keep going.

And that made me think of a movie line I've been quoting a lot lately as I navigate my struggles:

The movie itself... I enjoyed Finding Nemo but it's not so much the story as the idea embodied in that gif above that is important. And that advice above, with a touch of mindfulness, is the same kind of thing I found in Lief's advice for how to work with this teaching:

"Notice how the quality of speediness affects your practice and your daily life. Do you feel superior or special because you are faster than others and have passed them by? On the contrary, do you feel of inadequate that others are passing you by and leaving you in the dust?"

So that's what I'll be doing. Until next time, namaste and all that. 

Keeping Balance: On Not Transferring the Ox's Load to the Cow (or the Donkey)

This week's slogan didn't resonate with me at first, even after going through all my normal research.

Don't transfer the ox's load to the cow.

Of course, being who I am, the first thing that came to mind after I read the slogan was the opening of Cow and Chicken, but once I was done singing that a couple of times, I moved onto the research.

Because I've found such help there over the course of this blog, I decided to turn to Judy Lief's piece at the Tricyle website first. The whole of her short discussion seems to look at concepts like false modesty and shifting responsibility at work and in our personal lives. I, on the other hand, tend to think false modesty is bunk. Further, I've got a bad habit of taking on too much at once and saying yes to everyone. Learning to delegate is one of the biggest challenges I've had in my professional career. At the very end of Lief's piece, just before her suggestions for applying this teaching to our daily lives, she did share one idea that started to help this come into focus for me:

"This slogan is also about developing skill in working with others. It is an art to know how much responsibility to take on yourself and how much to direct to each of the people you are working with so that each person feels challenged but not overwhelmed."

That's when it started to click that, even if I'm the ox and others are the cow, I still need to figure out a balance.

I turned next to the place where I had been starting in the past. Now, the translation provided by UnfetteredMind.org isn't different enough to share it here, but the brief explanatory paragraph did begin my understanding of this teaching:

"Life is what you experience. What you experience is your life. Don't try to shift the unpleasantness your reactive patterns bring you onto another person."

I could help but think of all the times I've said things like, "They're too busy to add something else to their plate, so I'm not even going to ask for help because I know they'll say, 'no.'" It's a different way of shifting blame for the unpleasantness, but I think it's still within the scope of this tenet.

So, instead of following Lief's advice, "Pay attention to the temptation to shift your burdens to those who are weaker than you," I'm going to reverse it and pay attention to the temptation to shift the burdens from others to myself. I'm going to keep that poor donkey up there (which was the picture accompanying the Unfettered Minds post) in mind.

So, that's what I'll be working on. Until next time, namaste and all that.

To Pounce or Not To Pounce: On Not Bringing Things to a Painful Point

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Those cats in the gif are (mostly) just playing. If you look elsewhere, you'll find pictures and videos of these two cuddled up and friendly. Trust me, I'm a big fan of their blog so I know. 

But this kind of angry or even play-angry pouncing cat behavior is exactly what came to mind as I was reading up on this lojong teaching:

Don't bring things to a painful point.

On the surface, it's kind of a no-brainer. Why bring things to a painful point? The whole goal for my studying Buddhism is to ease away from the sometimes painful noise in my head, right? But then I started digging for commentary.

The first thing that stood out to me as relevant from Judy Lief's piece was a doozy: 

"We all have lots of faults, and it is easy to get caught up in dwelling on them. It is easy to see all the things that are wrong about everyone and everything else as well."

I'm completely guilty of focusing on my own faults, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. Further, I a keen eye for the faults of others. I try not to be overly judgmental, but sometimes it's really hard to stop. We need to be able to judge safe or unsafe, useful or not useful, but it's easy to get into a habit of judging every little aspect of every little thing. Even more than baseball, I sometimes think judging others is the "Great American Passtime."

When Lief moves onto discuss the aim of this tenet, she does so succinctly:

"According to this slogan, instead of pouncing on people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, we should be providing encouragement and support for their strengths."

I already do this to a certain extent. I've embraced a philosophy of management known as Strengths Based Leadership, but this teaching is making me think I need to expand that view beyond the workplace and even beyond my group of friends. This is going to take a serious amount of thinks, since I've yet to find a consistent way to draw the line between healthy judgement - I shouldn't walk down that dark alley alone at night with a $100 sticking out of my back pocket - and unhealthy judgement. However, I know one of my own strengths is perseverance, so I'm sure I'll get it eventually.

Lief's advice for practice is going to be hard, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try:

"Notice the quality of faultfinding, which can take place on a light level or on a more going-for-the-jugular scale. When you find yourself caught in this pattern, notice your motivation. When you have difficulty with a person, can you see beyond their faults? Can you find a positive potential to build on, even if it seems small?"

The next time I get caught in the rut of judging, I'll try to bring this idea to mind.

So, that's what I'll be working on. Until next time, namaste and all that. 

Breathing and Just Being: On Not Waiting in Ambush

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I know: it's been a while. "Better late than never" feels like a hollow apology, but I'm going to have to go with that. Things get busy, and it's unfortunate but this blog tends to fall by the wayside first. But so long as I keep coming back to it, so long as I don't give up, it's okay. I really believe that.

Regardless of any self-derision, I want to move onto the new slogan:

Don't wait in ambush. 

Alternatively, according to UnfetteredMinds.org: "Don't lie in ambush." This didn't resonate as a problem for me, but I'm committed to this line of study no matter what. That means I did look further, to the brief explanatory paragraph:

"You wait in ambush because you seek revenge. Do taking and sending with the anger that drives the revenge."

I'll admit I tried to get even with people a couple of times when I was much younger, but I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting them and I lost interest in the idea. So I turned to Tricycle. Once again, I found myself grateful for Judy Lief's insight:

"This slogan is about scheming mind, the mind that never forgets a slight or an insult. Instead it keeps eating away at us, sometimes for years, and even decades." 

I may not seek revenge, but I have been known to hold a grudge. I work to forgive, and frequently am able to do so, but it's rare that I forget. And then, towards the end of her short piece, I found something even more resonant:

"Those remembered insults we hold onto so tightly have taken over our mind. By working with this slogan, we can free ourselves from that unhealthy pattern." 

And all I could think of was the stereotypical little kid, like Agnes up there, holding onto their breath like it's going to change anything. Really, the only person it harms is the child. And holding onto past hurts, whether I seek revenge or not, is only going to hurt me. I need to learn to stop holding my breath. I need to learn to breath and just let things be. That's why, even though the slogan itself didn't seem relevant, Lief's advice for putting it into action did:

"In the present, notice your response when somebody insults you. What is the physical sensation and what thoughts arise in your mind?

Looking back, do a grudge survey.  How many grudges have you been carrying with you, and for how long? How does it feel to carry a grudge, and how does it feel when the grudge softens or dissolves or you consciously let it go?"

I've done it before. I remember how good I felt when I realized I'd let go of my anger about my divorce. If I can forgive and forget that, I can forgive and forget anything. I will need to work on it, but I know I can do it.

So, that's what I'll be working on. Until next time, namaste and all that.