Tag Archives: Thich Nhat Hanh

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an expression of self

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The way you support yourself can be an expression of your deepest self,
or it can be a source of suffering for you and others.

Thich Nhat Hanh on Right Livelihood – The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching

OK.  I’ve written and deleted this post three times because life has been intervening and offering new perspectives on the practice of earning a living.  It started with an early morning phone call from the nursing home where my mother has lived for four and a half years.  Vascular dementia has painfully eroded her capacity to discern between threat and safety resulting in raging violence when her caregivers try to give her a bath or cut her nails.

The phone call was a variation on that theme with a twist.  Mum was having severe chest pains that had begun the evening before.  When I showed up she was in full rant, most of it unintelligible because of her aphasia.  But occasionally a word or exclamation would bellow out unmistakable in its intent both to frighten us off and to summon help.  “You’re killing me!”  “Whore!”  “Dirty woman!”  You have to understand that my mother is 4′ 11″, 93 years old, and not much heavier than a load of groceries – with a right hook to shame a heavyweight boxer.

We needed to change “everything,” the care givers told me.  Clothing, bed covers, blankets, everything. I was the drone: hold her down here, turn her over and HOLD!  Now turn the other way, flip, pull, tuck the sheets in.  The two women patiently explained every step to my mother.  She watched them intently as they stroked her cheek and said: Julia, we’re going to…  Now we have to…. Julia, I need to…  Then, as they proceeded to do what had to be done, she screamed words at them I don’t think any mother should know.  In the melee, one care giver took it in the temple (right on her bar bell piercing – that must have hurt like hell!).  The other caught a glancing blow on her cheek.  I think I escaped but there’s a soreness on my upper arm that wasn’t there before.  Working swiftly the three of us managed to undress, wash, and dress her; then we managed to change the bedding and the blankets.

When it was over, Mum stroked the cheek of one of the care givers, allowed herself to be tucked in and, Frank having tentatively returned to the room, took his hand in what he said was a bone crushing grip.  Drifting in and out of sleep, she turned and asked me, “How is your Mummy, dear?”

I started this post quoting paragraphs about the indeterminacy of Right Livelihood, about earning a living in ways that may be damaging to others, about doing what must be done even if it violates the precepts.  There are many words and analyses dissecting Buddhist principles, ethics, and skillful living.  I deleted them all in the end because I don’t think they capture the practice of Right Livelihood as powerfully as two women did that morning, doing what was clearly distressing to them and doing just what needed to be done.  They seem to embody Thich Nhat Hanh’s term “supporting” oneself which offers more than just the idea of an exchange of services with an eye out for bad karma.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

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are you sure?

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This should be an easy post to write on Right Thinking, the second practice on the Eightfold Path, but I keep getting my neural pathways mixed up.  Developmentally, I suppose you could say I grew up as a cultural Buddhist and a spiritual Catholic.  It wasn’t a bad mix behaviourally; I seem to recall being opportunistically evangelical and it worked like a charm on most of the adults, which in my childhood seemed over-represented by priests, nuns, monks, and the occasional saint.  As a result, my thought patterns were some screwed up variation of life-is-suffering-what-does-it-matter-even-if-you-go-to-confession-you’re-gonna-go-to-Hell.  That being a well-worn neural path, on some days, those thoughts still feel like the truth.

I’m not surprised that I gravitated to cybernetics, cognitive science, and eventually forms of therapy that relied on challenging our thinking process.  Equally unsurprising is the fact that I only developed faith in the capacity of Cognitive Therapy to be useful and beneficial because I tried it on myself.  (Thankfully, I didn’t become a psychiatrist specializing in electro-convulsive therapy.)  Why wouldn’t I?  Can you imagine telling someone “Look, you need to let go of that thought about being a loser and just challenge it with a question like ‘What’s the data that I’m a loser?'” with no idea of how hard it is to do that?

It’s not impossible.  It can be done.  But until I actually sat with this rampaging bull of a mind and tried to get it to turn right when it was careening left, I didn’t have a clue what it took.  For a period in my life, I remember creating a little template with five questions that I hauled out and asked myself every time the bull started thrashing around.

What was the Behaviour?
What Affect are you noticing?
What Sensations?
What Imagery?
What Cognitions?

This B-A-S-I-C is a template from a researcher named Arnold Lazarus whose concept of cognitive appraisal dove-tailed with the rising theories on stress in the 70’s.  Even when the surge of Cognitive Theories and Therapies hit psychology, I stayed loyal to Lazarus’ theory of how we generate suffering for ourselves by interpreting situations as catastrophic when other perspectives may be more useful.  It seemed so… well… Buddhist.  And besides, it made sense.  And, it had strong backing from Buddha to Marcus Aurelius to Shakespeare.

Recently, I’ve started using Thich Nhat Hanh’s four practices for Right Thinking (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching):

Are you sure? It’s easy to mistake a rope for a snake, a friend for a foe, a helping hand for an ambush.  I’m good at these thought twisters.  Asking myself if I’m sure of what I perceive is a checkpoint on the road to suffering.

What am I doing? Unfortunately, when I ask this question of myself, it sounds a bit panicked!  The intention is to be – right here, in this moment.  This works really well for me when I’m chopping vegetables or doing something routine where the probability is greater that I will be caught up in discursive thought.  Thich Nhat Hanh writes that the initial thought is not the problem; it’s the developing thought that can run us down paths that are judgemental and unpleasant.

I’m relieved to read this because there are too many mindfulness teachers spouting “Thoughts are not facts” and really confusing folks about the obvious: thoughts help organize facts.  Fact or not, “She’s probably mad at me” is not the problem.  Expanding it into a three-part mini-series of betrayal and vengeance is – all the more so if she really is mad at me.

Here you are, my Habit Energy.  Neural paths are easy to lay down and hard to avoid once entrenched.  There is safety in habits: taking the same route avoids getting lost, eating the same food avoids disappointment, sticking to the same relationships avoids risk of rejection.  I’m a creature of habit but I’m starting to push that edge of comfort out of curiousity, adding colour to my palette.

Bodhichitta.  In The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh doesn’t really dig into the practice of cultivating the mind of love as a part of Right Thinking.  I can see some obvious connections: bodhichitta is a perspective of relating with compassion to all beings which requires a form of non-preferential thought, non-judgemental mind.  It is linked with Right View as cart to ox, pulling along together in the rutted road.  I have to work on this one.  Really work on it because the initial thought I get with some folks is likely only going to be dislodged with some high voltage current.

Thank you for practising,

Genju