Zen Farmer

The best way to help others is to forget about yourself.  When you strive for enlightenment, the promise you make is to deliver all sentient beings from suffering. Then you begin your focused practice trying to become enlightened so that you are better able to help others. As you practice helping others you benefit immensely. As you try to bring peace to others, you feel peace.  As you practice generosity and give to others, you feel wonderful. When you practice loving others, you feel joyful.

In order to help others, you have to help yourself.  You can’t help it.  Helping others helps you.  If you are concerned about yourself though, you will have difficulty helping others. If you give to be thanked, you will not find satisfaction. If you loved to be loved in return, you will often be frustrated.  If you try to bring peace to others in order to pacify your own mind, that is still a good idea.

It is sometimes necessary to help yourself in order to help others. If you plan to help yourself now, so that you can better help others later, then you should practice compassion. If the only person you can feel compassionate for now is you, then practice that. When you are able to, widen your circle and practice feeling compassion for others. When you forget about yourself, you will be a great help to others. You will also feel peaceful, wonderful and joyful.

Zen Masters can behave abusively toward their disciples. They will hit them with sticks. They will give them impossible questions and tell them that they will get hit if they answer one way and hit if they answer the other.  They will belittle them.  They will assign their disciples humiliating tasks.  They will kick them out of the monastery. The Zen Masters, who are masters of the mind, will use every mind trick available to assault the egos of their followers.  They perform these horrific acts as acts of compassion.

The disciples submit to this abuse because they know that their egos cause them more pain than the abuse of the Zen Master. They are working with the Master to try to rid themselves of ego. As long as ego exists, the treatment feels like abuse. When ego disappears, the treatment is seen as skillful means and compassion.  There is no greater compassion than to deliver somebody from their state of delusion.

You should not use these ideas to keep you stuck in an abusive relationship. The Zen way to deal with actual abuse is to get out, however possible. You should also not use these ideas to excuse your own abusive behavior toward others. To learn from the Zen Master-disciple relationship, you can use the problems you encounter in the course of your daily life to practice isolating your ego.  A problem is only a problem because of your reaction to it. If you don’t worry about how things impact on you, they are only events.  Your reaction reframes events as problems.

Learning to see your problems in relation to your ego, and learning to be mindful of your reactions to life’s events, will help you develop great compassion for yourself and others.

We are constantly having an experience. This experience is the most important thing in the world. Often, we don’t like the experience we are having. When we don’t like the experience we are having, we turn away from it.  We turn to our minds.  In our minds we have an endless source of experiences.  We can remember anything from our past. We can imagine anything in the future. We can remember our happiest times and we can imagine our wildest dreams. Such is the capacity of our minds.

We don’t always go to these happy places when we are not enjoying our current experience.  Such is the power of the present. When we are feeling a negative feeling, that feeling fills our imagination. We see the past as creating that feeling and we see the future as a continuation of that feeling. Our limitless imagination is not readily available to us. Although we are mired in the present feeling, we are also trying to escape the present. This does’t work. If we are feeling negative feelings, that is our experience. That is all we have. We have to recognize that and surrender to the experience. We give ourselves over to the power of the present. Then, we get insight into the experience.

As we notice ourselves trying to cover up pain with pleasure, we have an opportunity to turn and face the pain. Only the pain can teach us how to make it stop. Children can run to their parents, that works for them. That is where the habits starts.  As we grow, we learn to stop running away.  We turn toward the pain. Our experience will let us know that we can handle anything. Our minds are vast.

Becoming beauty, is deeper than putting on makeup, but it is the same thing.  Beauty is more than our appearance, so just decorating the surface is not enough. Your daily ritual of preparing your face for the world, making yourself beautiful, or presentable, can be part of your practice of becoming beauty. If you are preparing to go out, you may try on a few outfits, look critically at yourself in the mirror and judge, judge, judge what you see.  You may hurl numerous unspoken insults at your body while you appraise yourself and how you appear.  There is no need for that when you are becoming beauty.  When you become beauty, you connect with beauty in everything, as a reflection of the beauty in you. Then, preparing your appearance for the public is more like an artist’s experience, delighting in the medium, and revealing the obvious.

Beauty is not just prettiness and pleasantries, it is your essence.  Becoming beauty, is only being yourself, becoming you.

The problem with negative feelings, is feeling them.  I happened to find myself in a bad mood this afternoon. I feel the bad mood in my stomach and up into my solar plexus, generalized around that area. Needless to say, I don’t enjoy the feeling. I do appreciate the feeling though, it keeps me honest.

When I feel the pain of the bad mood, the worry about the future, the hurt of a perceived slight against me, I suffer.  In my suffering, I think of others suffering and remind myself about how they feel. This is how I build my capacity for compassion. I pay attention to my suffering so I can see how it feels. I pay attention to my thoughts while I suffer, to see what story I’m feeding myself. I go about my day.  It’s not all good, it’s a mood.

The universe feels itself through us. It feels itself through everything, but we humans have a special awareness of these feelings. We think about thinking and feel about feeling.  Dogs just feel and do. 

Dogs have an incredible sense of smell compared to us.  They don’t spend their time sniffing roses though.  They sniff shit. Poop has such a strong smell that dogs love it. It is intense.  The universe is like a dog sniffing itself through us.  It doesn’t care if it is sniffing poop or roses, it just likes to sniff.  When we feel horrible, the universe is inhaling through us and delighting in life. It doesn’t really mind that we are not enjoying the moment.  The universe also loves it when we are feeling intense joy. In those times we agree with the universe.  Sniff, sniff, sniff.

We don’t really have a choice about what we feel.  If we start to have shitty feelings, all we can do is feel shitty. When we are feeling shitty, we can remember that we are not the shit, not the feeling, but the sniffer. If we inhale deeply, again and again, we align ourselves with the universe, sniffing, feeling life.

Sometimes, I think we have it backwards. We spend our efforts trying to create a better future for ourselves. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually created a future.  I know for certain that I have created a past.  Everything I have ever done is right there behind me.

Time is like the wind.  You can’t see it, but you can see its effects.  Things change. As we create a past we position ourselves in relation to the wind, and we are able to adjust when a gentle breeze turns into a gale.

As we create a past we can remember fondly, our future will come gracefully and be full of wonder.

Don’t get stuck looking for happiness. Its really a great waste of your time and energy. You might as well seek Bigfoot.  Seriously.  If you went looking for Bigfoot, you would find happiness.  Happiness is like that.  If you are looking for happiness, you are mostly running from sadness, angst, and loneliness.  The trouble is, you’re running in the wrong direction. Also, you’ll never be able to stop.  When you stop, the sadness, loneliness and angst will be there waiting for you.

Nobody has problems finding sadness, angst and loneliness. Nobody looks for them, yet they find you, and engulf you. Happiness can do the same thing. If you stop running, and feel the ugliness, you can relax a bit because you are no longer running. Then, when you are a bit relaxed, you can explore the feelings you are experiencing. They reveal their secrets and teach you things.  You stop thinking of grander and more elaborate ways of generating happiness, and then happiness finds you. It will find creative and fantastic ways to surprise you.  When that happens, you probably won’t bother looking for your sadness.

Go look for Bigfoot. Wander out into the woods and sit quietly and watch. You probably won’t see Bigfoot, but you might feel happy. If you do find Bigfoot, explore your fear.

Many of you expertly use tumblr to transform your pain into compassion by blogging about what hurts you and getting support from the community around you.  If you are not comfortable blogging about your pain, but have pain that you would liked transformed, you can go to my ‘?’ page and I will transform your pain into compassion.  No problem.

You’re bound to both worry and be happy.  Don’t try to hard to be at one end or the other, just be where you are.  If you are worrying, worry.  If you are happy, be happy. You won’t likely feel both together, but will surely feel each in its time. The more you feel what you are feeling, the faster each feeling will make way for the next.  Happiness tends to linger longer if you are not pretending to be happy when you are not.  Feel what you feel. Worry, then be happy.