We live in extraordinary times. The news recently has often been devastating bad, prompting feelings of shock, anger, grief, enough to take our breaths away. With these continual onslaughts, our first action needs to be the fresh intake of breath - breathing through it. Guy Armstrong urges stopping and breathing right after we’ve been exposed to shock of bad news, spending a few minutes right then in that moment experiencing, processing what we’ve read, heard, seen.
At the same time, there is surprising goods news. I haven’t yet quoted Paul Krugman or Heather Cox Richardson (HCR) in these pages but there is a first time for everything. HCR wrote this morning: "In fact, as Krugman notes, solar and wind are unstoppable. They produced 15% of the world’s electricity in 2024 and account for 63% of the growth in electricity production since 2019. Green energy will continue to grow even if U.S. policy…” “Solar and wind are unstoppable.” How amazing.
In addition, there are more resources than at any time in the history of the world to support us, to help us manage the barrage of news and the emotions that arise with it. Ever since Covid sent us all indoors, mindfulness and meditation resources, teachers, courses, retreats have exploded on-line.
Fifty plus years ago, our leading meditation teachers travelled to India, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka at no small personal cost to sit with the masters of Buddhist meditation. These travelers returned home and started the great retreat centers we have today. Suddenly, western meditators could travel to retreat centers without leaving the country. And they did.
Nevertheless, a meditator from Minnesota or Missouri might not even hear of these retreat centers or have the means to leave home to sit for 10 days at a center across the country.
Now, since Covid and the rise of Zoom, the sincere meditator is faced with a plethora of choices - in person or on-line retreats and courses, sitting groups and study groups, marathon weekends of 20 or 30 distinguished teachers in a survey of health, wellness and resilience practices or a single teacher you’ve never heard before who has been quietly teaching advanced practice after years of study with great, but lesser known masters. If there is internet, there is access to a vast dharma library.
All the different traditions of Buddhism which developed in so many different countries began rubbing elbows with each other. Joseph Goldstein wrote about this in his book One Dharma examining the great and awe-inspiring mingling of teachings in the West that flourished in far distant regions for 2500 years, but also the perplexing and contradictory views on ultimate and conventional reality, whether enlightenment is impermanent or not, that these teachings presented when they collided here in the West.
Never before has the meditation student been faced with so many opportunities for practice - and so many traditions to practice with. Never before have meditators been able to choose their own paths toward freedom. Some may start out in Zen, move to Insight meditation (Theravadan), and eventually sink into Dzochen (Tibetan) or any combination of the three. Even our most esteemed teachers have found their own personal practices conjoining different traditions and perhaps only then finding more of the whole of the Buddhist teachings.
That which was split apart is being patched together in a new way, different for each culture, each region, and each student.
It can be bewildering and exciting, but also disappointing and frustrating. A boon when the sincere curiosity of the student finds fulfillment in different teachings, different teachers or simply an extension of our habits of grasping and attachment if the student is continually distracted by a new and more famous teacher over here, a different teaching over there.
In this, as in everything else, where ever we go, there we are.
So we are left with the same dilemma we’ve ever faced. In the welter of opportunity, how to find the best resources without being led astray by our own desires and aversions. The answer is always to start with ourselves. Learning how to be happy is an inside job. The key is listening to our own hearts.
The practices of the Brahmaviharas can become trustworthy companions on all our journeys. Cultivating loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity towards ourselves and others can ground us in our own deepest being - nourishing, healing, encouraging, and steadying our hearts in this very moment so that we can experience the next with all possible resources.
These lines from Free and Easy, a Tibetan Buddhist spontaneous song, point the way. The full poem is below:
Don’t search any further
looking for the great awakened elephant,
who is already resting quietly at home
in front of your own hearth.
Nothing to do or undo,
nothing to force,
nothing to want,
and nothing missing –
Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself.
Full poem here:
FREE and EASY
A Spontaneous Vajra Song
By Venerable Lama Gendun Rinpoche
Happiness can not be found
through great effort and willpower,
but is already present,
in open relaxation and letting go.
Don’t strain yourself,
there is nothing to do or undo.
Whatever momentarily arises
in the body-mind
has no real importance at all,
has little reality whatsoever.
Why identify with,
and become attached to it,
passing judgment upon it and ourselves?
Far better to simply
let the entire game happen on its own,
springing up and falling back like waves
without changing or manipulating anything
and notice how everything vanishes and reappears, magically,
again and again, time without end.
Only our searching for happiness
prevents us from seeing it.
It’s like a vivid rainbow which you pursue
without ever catching,
or a dog chasing its own tail.
Although peace and happiness
do not exist as an actual thing or place,
it is always available
and accompanies you every instant.
Don’t believe in the reality of good and bad experiences;
they are like today’s ephemeral weather,
like rainbows in the sky.
Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,
you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you open and relax
this tight fist of grasping,
infinite space is there –
open, inviting and comfortable.
Make use of this spaciousness,
this freedom and natural ease.
Don’t search any further
looking for the great awakened elephant,
who is already resting quietly at home
in front of your own hearth.
Nothing to do or undo,
nothing to force,
nothing to want,
and nothing missing –
Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself.