Tag Archives: Thich Nhat Hanh

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tent of thorns

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We can’t work for long in a competitive environment and not begin to feel the twinges of jealousy or find ourselves measuring our worth by external factors.  I should probably say, “I” though I suspect few of us escape the poisons of greed, resentment, and delusion/confusion on this count.

One of my patients calls it an “emotional brownout.”  We feel all those tight icky sensations in the pit of our stomach, vision is murky, and balance is wobbly.  It’s as if there isn’t enough juice in the veins to get ourselves out of a very familiar spiral into disappointment, self-criticism and even despair.  And as the years go by, I find it harder and harder not to feel that spiral tighten into a steeper slope when I’m confronted with “things not done” or “things not unfolding.”

All this came became more of a foreground discussion between Frank and myself after a class we taught on the bhrama viharas: equanimity and compassion, lovingkindness and resonant joy.  We divvy it up in pairs as a balance between healing practices and nourishing practices, respectively.  Lovingkindness and Resonant Joy are the nourishment in a relationship.  The keep us healthy and build strength, like vitamins.  Equanimity and Compassion play a role as relationships struggle with the typical strifes and sufferings of just being humans in full contact.  The four together form a health regimen that attends to building resilience and care giving.

In the class, we talked about the challenge of feeling joy in the achievements of life situations of others.  You have probably read this bhrama vihara as Sympathetic Joy or Altruistic Joy.  Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that may be too limited in its vision.  Feeling joy for another is not possible if we cannot feel joy ourselves.  He teaches that joy must include joy in ourselves as well and is only possible when we feel peace and contentment.  In other words, the joy we feel has to have some resonance with the other and that resonance is only possible when we feel a level of contentment in ourselves.

One of the obstacles to feeling a resonance in the joy of others arises out of our tendency to measure our worth and the worthiness of others by external means.  And in that mismeasure of our true nature, feelings of resentment rather than contentment arise.

I’ve been noticing what that lack of contentment feels like each time I’m faced with something I think I deserve but didn’t get or when someone has access to something that I feel they don’t deserve.  Judgments all, I know.  That’s my particular take on it; your storyline may vary a bit.  Nevertheless, when it is one of those autopilot stances to events, it’s like building a tent of thorny branches and taking refuge under them.  For a while that may work to keep the hurt out.  Build it thick enough (and I’d have to, given the huge number of events that happen in my day!) and it’s hard to find a way out from under the pile without getting even more scratched up.

This stack are the dead branches from the climbing roses.  It didn’t take long to accumulate.  In order to cut those branches, I had to reach deep into the bushes and lop them at the root.  My forearms look like they’ve been in a cat fight – and doesn’t that just sum it all up.  Resentments arise because, when the event happens, we reach deep into parts of ourselves that deliver irritation and hurt.  The parts that feel “less than,” personally affronted, or judgmental about our own capacities and accomplishments.  In other words, the only person we end up in a cat fight with is ourselves.

(Thanks to Adam Johnson, Mickie B., and Steven Hickman of UCSD’s Center of Mindfulness for offering great insights to this topic!)

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participating in happiness

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I’ve been scouring reams of published scholarly papers on spiritual wellbeing for my Chaplaincy final project.  There’s a comfort and – dare I say it? – familiar happiness in reading these articles, contemplating the implications of the various findings on the relationship between spiritual and mental health, and percolating the possibilities for future investigations.  Of course, what makes me happiest are the elegant statistical models and the anticipatory delight of long afternoons playing with data sets from our studies of spiritual and mental wellbeing.  Now the idea of statistical analyses may not tickle your fancy but if you ever want to make me happy, give me a data set.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s third factor of practice is to find happiness in our life.  It seems a simple enough task: find what makes you happy and just do it.  But, data sets notwithstanding, we each have a different view of what happiness is about.  In sangha, someone asked what it meant to find happiness in the moment, especially when the moment is filled with sorrow, loss, and uncertainty.  An equally important question is a cautionary one: how do I know that the search for happiness in this moment is not a denial of the reality of my life?  In psychology, it’s called “flight into health.”  In spiritual practice, it’s called a “spiritual bypass.”

Although we tend to believe that happiness is about feeling wonderfully pleasant sensations most of the time, happiness is actually not related to the intensity of pleasant feelings.  People who rate themselves as happy report more time feeling pleasant emotions even if they also feel unpleasant emotions.  So, the quest for peak moments of pleasant emotions is futile to experiencing happiness.  In fact, that quest is the very thing that creates dukkha.

Brickman and Campbell in 1971 defined this drivenness for pleasure as the “hedonic treadmill.” They pointed out two really important ways our craving dams up the potential for true happiness.  When we achieve or acquire something that makes us happy, we habituate to the feelings and set higher expectations.  This “new-toy-gone-old” combined with “more is better” is a potent mix that drives the addiction.   Now, here’s the scary part: we also adapt to the dissatisfaction we feel so we no longer are bothered by it to the same degree!  Put the two together and we find ourselves stuck in “hedonic neutral.”

Happily, there’s a way out!  Temperament and the ability to adapt our expectations to the event make a difference in how we experience events.  Staying open to the ever-changing features of our experience and the nature of the objective event also helps shift the flavour of our experience; this is mindfulness of the objects of mind. 

Certainly it’s a strong argument for continuously attending to what is present, to see that process as a constant invitation to take a new stance.  And what is present for me right now are twenty-five articles published in five erudite journals with delicious pedigrees, one cup of chai, sixty minutes of unfettered time, and two awesome analyses to bend my delusional mind around.

Find something you love.

And do it.

Even if only for a second.

Thank you for practising,

Genju