Transformation

Spirituality without Dogma or Superstition

The following piece is an excerpt from my book The Unbound Heart: Spirituality Without Dogma or Superstition. I hope my words bring you a sense of peace.

“If you let go a little, you’ll have a little happiness. If you let go a lot, you’ll have a lot of happiness. If you let go completely . . . you’ll be completely happy.” – Ajahn Chah

It rather terrifies me to think about where I would be today if I was never introduced to vipassana, or insight meditation. It has been and continues to be central to my life. Every moment of every day, I try to make it my practice. The quality of attention it cultivates determines the quality of everything else I do. It determines the quality of my life. It shapes my words and my actions. It shapes my attitude and experience. It shapes my relationships, my work, and my art. It holds my entire life with a loving, tender, and caring attention.

I first encountered the practice around the age of twenty-two, after being diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). For the decade prior, I had struggled with suicidal ideation, with a growing intensity over the years until, finally, I hit rock bottom in my first year of law school. Nearly every day, I would find myself on top of the law school building, seven stories up, waiting for the impulse that would send me plummeting to my death.

My thoughts became so frequent, intense, and aggressive that I got to the point where I didn’t sleep for three days straight. Every time I came close to falling asleep, an electric shock would ripple through my head, sending my heart and mind racing. Something had to break.

It did. On the fourth night of no sleep, as I laid in bed, I fell into a wake-initiated lucid dream, or a WILD, something that was entirely unknown to me at the time. But there I was, suddenly in front of an old, leafless tree, with many thick branches stemming from its center. The sky was dark and cloudy. It felt extremely cold. I was shivering uncontrollably. And there, on a branch, hung a noose. I turned away from the tree to look around and saw only darkness. But when I turned back to face the tree, there was my entire family, standing with their eyes closed. Suddenly, in unison, their eyes opened, which glowed pure white. And again, all at once, they pointed to the noose.

There it went—the electric shock moved violently through my head and dropped down into my heart. I jumped up immediately and began to puke all over my sheets. I spent the rest of the night in my bathroom, some 1,500 miles away from my family and friends, dry heaving.

The next day, I was able to get into a psychiatrist, who introduced me to something that would transform my life—vipassana, or insight meditation. At the time, though, she didn’t introduce it as such. Rather, she presented it as a kind of stress ball to calm my thoughts, which was great. It really did help to settle my heart and mind. It helped me to step back from the cruel bombardment of thoughts.

But the real transformational power came only after I put the full philosophical and historical context behind the practice. For the next few years, after marrying the philosophy to my practice and really putting in the work, the suicidal thoughts slowly faded, along with their intensity. They never disappeared completely. But the practice gave them the unconditional space they needed. It allowed them to arise without forcing my “self” onto them. It allowed them to be here, without struggle. Even now, they arise from time to time. And that’s okay. Whenever they do, I simply say, “Hey, old friend. It’s been a minute.” I don’t need to fight them or be annoyed that they are here. I can simply wish them well. I can love them unconditionally. I can still dwell in the divine abodes.

In any case, as my practice continued to strengthen and my conceptual and experiential understanding continued to deepen, behind that dark cloud of thoughts opened a clarity and spaciousness, as well as an immense gratitude and thirst for life! My mind continued to reach profound levels of peace and joy. My heart remained open. My eyes wide and interested. Everything within and around me became brighter and more vivid. New levels of concentration and mindfulness led to an incredible sense of rapture and joy in my heart and mind. I felt lighter and more alive. It’s like I got to experience the world as a child again, with the same kind of play and wonder, but with the intelligence of an adult.

I remember vividly, in the early years of my practice, when I would smile naturally, the mindfulness was so bright and vivid that it would create a ‘hall of mirrors’ effect—I would notice the smile with that polished attention, and so the smile would grow bigger, which I noticed, and so it grew even bigger. Even the experience of stubbing my toe was profound and uplifting. To have the mindfulness present at the moment I stubbed my toe, and to not react or become identified with the pain, felt so rewarding and encouraging. I couldn’t help but smile. Once, after ten 18-hour days of vipassana and another three days of metta practice, I felt a gratitude for my parents that was so intense I thought my body was going to explode. It was pushing outward on every wall of my being, choking me as it moved up my throat, trying to escape.

The practice, I came to quickly understand, was much more than a stress ball. It provided a door into the deepest insights of my true nature. It radically transformed who I took myself to be, which in turn transformed my direct felt experience in profound ways. The transformational power of mindfulness is simply astonishing. For the rest of the book, then, I would like to explore the Buddha’s greater philosophical framework in which vipassana is but a piece.

The Truth of Suffering

Essentially everyone who steps foot on a spiritual path discovers the need for a profound personal healing. A wise spiritual practice asks us to discover the depth of our wounds, to address the pains and conflicts in our lives, the breaks and fractures, so we can tend to them with loving awareness. As the Thai Forest Master Ajahn Chah said, “If you haven’t cried deeply a number of times, your meditation hasn’t really begun.”74 The Buddha himself was quite explicit that he taught only suffering and its end, which is expressed in the Four Noble Truths, the indispensable foundation embraced by all Buddhist lineages, no matter how far their metaphysics and methodologies diverge.

That brings us to the Buddha’s First Noble Truth—life is made of suffering. At first glance, this may seem both obvious and, at the same time, too strong. I’m sure I don’t need to convince you that suffering exists and is a part of the human condition (and even the whole of conscious life). You are likely intimately familiar with it. But you might hesitate to concede that all life is composed of suffering, that suffering is an essential mark of existence. And I think you’d be right. So, let me take a step back and clarify my terms here.

The word “suffering” is a translation from the Pali word “dukkha,” but to translate dukkha as merely suffering would be misleading and incomplete. Dukkha encompasses much more than suffering alone. The problem with the translation here is that modern English words can be too specialized, too limited, and too strong. So, we can’t capture the full meaning of dukkha with a single word. We’ll need to call in some other concepts to help point us to the actual felt experience of dukkha itself. From here you can then begin to build out your own direct understanding.

If we look at the word etymologically, we can break it into two parts: the prefix “du,” which means “bad” or “difficult,” and the root “kha,” which generally means “empty” but can more specifically mean “the empty axle hole of a wheel.”75 So, if we put these two words together, we can begin to feel more viscerally what is meant by dukkha—just imagine riding in a cart that has a poor fitting axle. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. We can think of dukkha, then, as the bumps and agitations, the ups and downs, the felt experiences of our journey through life. This dramatically changes and enlarges our understanding of the First Noble Truth.

But let’s not stop here. Let’s look at the more general meaning of “kha,” empty, to add another dimension to our understanding. When we look at dukkha from this angle, we can think of it as anything that is ultimately empty of lasting satisfaction. We can translate dukkha more generally, then, not as ‘suffering’ but as that which is ultimately unsatisfying or unreliable, which is all things in a world of constant change.

“Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering…” – the Buddha

Now that we hopefully have a clearer understanding of dukkha, let’s consider how it is applicable to our own lives. Perhaps the first thing to say is, we can’t be freed from dukkha until we witness directly the dukkha in our own life so that we can transform it. Understanding dukkha, as a matter of direct experience, is not only the gateway to liberation, to freedom, to the highest peace, but it is also a direct path to compassion—the heart-felt desire to free ourselves and others from suffering. It is precisely our deepening understanding—that is, our deepening felt experience—of dukkha that opens and moves us to compassion.

So, how can we start opening to dukkha? With mindfulness. It is mindfulness that allows us to open to life, to dukkha. It is mindfulness that allows us to get close to it, to let it in. It is mindfulness—the wide open and all-encompassing heart of awareness—that listens to dukkha, that tries to understand it, that strives to love it. It is mindfulness that opens us to the direct experience of the First Noble Truth.

Let’s start by listening to the obvious dukkha, the obvious pain and suffering we experience in our lives, like breaking a bone, getting hit on the head with a stick from your Zen master, living with a physical disability, chronic illness, etc. This kind of pain hurts, full stop. The way we relate to this pain, however, determines whether we add unnecessarily to it. When asked to describe how a wise person responds to pain, the Buddha gave an analogy of someone shot by an arrow:

When an ordinary person experiences a painful bodily feeling they worry, agonize, and feel distraught. Then they feel two types of pain, one physical and one mental. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, and then immediately afterward by a second arrow, and they experience the pain of two arrows.

I’m sure you know what this feels like. We experience some pain, and then we experience more pain from thinking about our pain. Sometimes our thoughts get so overwhelming that our original pain has subsided, but our thoughts are still piercing us, one arrow after the next. You may have seen this with a young kid who falls and scrapes their knee or something. Often, if you simply watch without interacting, the kid will get up and be on their way. But if a parent freaks out—“Oh my god! Are you okay?”—then the kid, seeing their parent’s reaction, immediately gets pierced by the second arrow. The pain gets extended by this stream of thoughts. We adults are not much different.

Sometimes, the mere anticipation of pain, the mere thought of it, is enough to make us suffer. I see this all the time with the cold—one of my greatest teachers. When I turn the shower to the coldest setting in the morning (a mental practice I do, which is also showing some promising benefits for physical health),78 I often immediately contract, even though the cold water hasn’t hit my skin. When I can drop the story, though, and enter into beginner’s mind, it is much easier to be with the changing sensations we call “cold.” Just consider kids’ relationship with the cold versus us adults. Adults have created an incredibly strong conviction, a story, around the cold. We closed ourselves off to it long ago. Some of us wake up and see the snow outside and we’re immediately struck by arrows, even though we’re still in our warm bed. My kids, on the other hand, go out into the snow in their undies without the slightest bother. They remain open and receptive to what is here, not collapsed into their thoughts about it.

Now, of course, the cold is unpleasant. We don’t need to deny that. The Buddha himself said that a wise person will still experience the first arrow—pain is just a part of the deal when you have a human body. But he adds:

When a wise person experiences a painful bodily feeling, they don’t worry, agonize, and feel distraught. They feel physical pain but not mental pain. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, but a second arrow didn’t follow it, so they only experience the pain of a single arrow.

In other words, the wise person stays mindful. They experience the pain clearly, seeing it as an impermanent and ever-changing pattern of energy in the body, recognizing the arising and fading of the unpleasant feeling tones. But they don’t collapse into stories about the pain, perpetuating and magnifying it. They don’t make it personal. So, the difference is in how we respond to pain, not in whether we can make the pain go away. Again, by the Buddha:

Having been touched by the painful feeling [of the first arrow], an ordinary person resists and resents it. They harbor aversion to it, and this underlying tendency of resistance and resentment toward that painful feeling comes to obsess the mind.

You’ll have to explore this in yourself, of course, but from my own experience, it is no doubt the resistance I have toward pain that leads to true agony. On the other hand, when I am able to open to the pain, to feel into its fluid and ever-changing nature, and then meet it with love, kindness, and tenderness, it’s much easier to remain at ease. There’s a spaciousness and a support that makes the pain more bearable.

It’s important to remember, however, that there is often a message contained in our pain which requires us to respond—to go to the doctor, to remove ourselves from a situation, to take appropriate medicine, etc. When we’re bit by a poisonous snake, we don’t just sit there noting, “pain…pain…pain.” No, we take the steps necessary to keep ourselves healthy. Joseph Goldstein captures this in his book The Experience of Insight, where he says that elephants would often be walking down the road as he and his fellow meditators, in India, were going to town. “When we saw the elephant coming down the road we did not just stand there saying ‘seeing, seeing,’ we moved out of the way. Use the thought process when appropriate.”81

At other times, however, when we experience pain, there isn’t any action we need to take. It is common among meditators to experience what is called “dharma pain.” Dharma pain comes to us when we start to sit still with ourselves and open to our bodies. Each of us, over the years, carry habitual tensions in certain parts of our bodies—our jaws, back, shoulders, fists, forehead, etc.—from all the many stresses and traumas we have faced. We create energetic knots that need to be untied. So, with this kind of pain, we simply need to learn to open to them, to accept them, to relax into them.

For some people, it takes years for these knots to unwind. And that’s okay. The more we practice, the lighter our bodies will become. Now, of course, this isn’t a perfect upward trajectory. And there is no guarantee, especially as we age, that our pain will unwind. But the equanimity we build in our mindfulness practice allows us to be with our pain with a bit more patience and ease. We learn to not contract around the pain.

So, how do we know if it’s dharma pain? Well, to know whether we are experiencing dharma pain or a pain we need to respond to, we can often just get up and move around. If the pain subsides, it’s probably dharma pain. If it lingers, we need to readjust our posture, take a break, walk around, or maybe even see a doctor if necessary.

Another form of dukkha to explore is our emotional trauma. Unacknowledged and unhealed traumas from our lived experiences of abuse, abandonment, or neglect, or even from our own mistakes, become powerful forces in our lives—habitual energies that repeat themselves. Very often, these harmful habits, or energetic imprints, show up in our relationships. It’s especially important, then, to look out for this form of dukkha in our lives so that these habits don’t hinder us from connecting with our loved ones, as well as ourselves. Very often, this will require the help of a spiritual teacher or licensed therapist since many of these habits are so deeply entwined in our being that we may not be aware of the full impact they have on us. In any case, as we open to this kind of dukkha in our lives, it is extremely important in the healing process to cultivate compassion, patience, and respect for ourselves. It’s important that we allow ourselves to be human, to be imperfect and vulnerable and afraid, without judgment… even of our self-judgments. It’s important we learn to hold ourselves with loving awareness.

Unfortunately, this is not a norm we have established in many of the world’s cultures. In the West, for example, particularly in the U.S., we are taught to repress our emotions and vulnerabilities. We are taught that we are weak or even sinful for having them. So, we beat them into submission. We build up our inner critic, that nasty voice in our mind that tells us we are not good enough or worthy enough, that voice that shames us or denies parts of ourselves. It is this same voice that can keep us addicted to drugs or alcohol or sex and that also projects itself onto others, seeing only the bad and ugly in everyone and everything.

Sadly, this attitude stems largely from many of our spiritual traditions, which believe the physical human form itself is evil or sinful. To take an example, the protestant reformer John Calvin said:

For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle … The whole man, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, is so deluged, as it were, that no part remains exempt from sin, and, therefore, everything which proceeds from him is imputed as sin.

Protestants and Evangelists have carried some version of this for centuries now, heavily impacting U.S. culture. Catholics too have their own version of “Original Sin,” which has impacted the rest of the West. And even my parents’ faith, the Mormon Church, holds a similar disdain for what they call “the natural man.”

In 1989, at one of the first international Buddhist teacher conferences, the Western teachers brought up the pervasive problem of shame, unworthiness, and self-criticism that they were seeing not only in their students but in themselves as well. The Dalai Lama and other Asian teachers didn’t understand. It took the Dalai Lama ten minutes of talking with his translator to even comprehend the concept. Then he turned and asked how many teachers experienced this in themselves and in their students. Essentially all of them said they had. Genuinely shocked, the Dalai Lama replied, “But that’s a mistake. Every being is precious!”83

In Buddhism, there is no equivalent concept of sin. As you’ll discover shortly, when we move into the second noble truth, Buddhism teaches that we suffer not because we have sinned but because we remain asleep to our selfless, interconnected nature. There is no blame put on us. The idea of blame is totally incoherent against the truth of emptiness. Agency, or freewill (the notion that we could have done otherwise), no longer has a place. The mind, the body, the world, each abide by natural laws. This does not make the world devoid of meaning. Nor does it relieve us of responsibility. In fact, quite the opposite.

When we witness that we are not-two, when we see both our empty, selfless, interconnected nature, as well as our personal, immanent, felt experience, then love and compassion are the natural responses. Meaning comes into the world not through the plan of some omnipotent male creator but through each of us—how we understand ourselves, the world, and our place in it. As I said at the beginning, everything unfolds from understanding. Understanding is the cause and condition for love and compassion to arise.

When we see ourselves in everyone and everyone in us, all held together and composed of the same tapestry, we naturally begin to approach our difficulties with a tenderness and openness of heart. This is how healing takes place, by understanding, not by controlling, suppressing, or manhandling our shadows, wounds, and vulnerabilities. The more awareness we bring to ourselves and our connection to the earth and all its creatures, the more love and compassion will arise. Mindfulness, then, is essential to the healing process since it is mindfulness that leads to love and wisdom.

Let me note, however, that in the early stages of our practice, it may seem like suffering increases or is intensified. But this is because we no longer hide from our shadows, we no longer try to push away the unpleasant dimensions of our experience. Again, sadly, this approach stands in stark contrast to our culture’s typical strategy of avoidance and distraction. Just consider how many of us find it damned-near impossible to sit still with ourselves. The moment we are forced to wait in line, stop at a traffic light, or pause even for a second, we reach into our pocket and start scrolling through social media, checking our email, or whatever else people do on their phones. We constantly distract ourselves with food, music, shows, movies, drugs, alcohol, endless activity, and even pointless conversation. And we do all of this simply because we can’t be with ourselves. We are too afraid to look under the bed because we think that’s where the boogeyman lives. But really, what are we so afraid of? What is it we think we’ll find when all the distractions are stripped away? Boredom? Remorse? Fear? Death? Emptiness? What?

Avoidance and distraction simply don’t lead to a life of peace, meaning, and freedom. Avoidance and distraction are counter to wisdom. Wisdom, remember, is the project of aligning ourselves with truth, with reality, with nature. And the truth is, life is full. Pain, suffering, grief, and sorrow are all a part of it. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.”84 So, if you are hoping to find a spiritual practice that skips over your wounds and difficulties, good luck. But you’ll find no quick fix here, no pill to swallow that will remove all your suffering.

Again, a genuine spiritual path does not avoid difficulties or mistakes but holds them with the transformative power of heart. When we set out to love, to awaken, to become free, we are inevitably confronted with our own human limitations. The Tibetan master Lama Trungpa Rinpoche, who suffered from alcohol addiction, said that spiritual progress from the ego’s point of view is “one insult after another.” If we frame this instead as “one mistake after another,” we can view spiritual practice as one opportunity after the next to show humility, learn, and grow. To live life, to be human, is to be imperfect. When we really understand this, we can be more forgiving to ourselves, allowing a sense of ease to settle in. We can learn to be patient with and laugh at ourselves, to not take ourselves so seriously, and to provide the grace for others to be human as well.

The Cause of Suffering

Once we start opening to dukkha, we begin to see that it, like everything else, is brought about by causes and conditions, which brings us to the Second Noble Truth—grasping is the cause of dukkha. The Pali word for grasping is tanhā, which is more directly translated as “thirst,” but can also be thought of as desire, craving, longing, or identification.

No matter how you’d like to think about it with concepts, tanhā happens when we lose sight of the selfless, ever-changing, inter-connectednature of experience. Now, if you’ve ever practiced meditation, you’d know how often this happens, even over the duration of a few breaths. Suddenly, we find ourselves behind our face, looking down at the breath or out at the world of seemingly concrete things, grasping at or hooked onto an object of experience, identified with some thought or emotion. Awareness collapses into its objects, and so we lose sight that it is—that we are—entirely whole, without border, shape, or boundary.

This grasping is like reaching your hand into a river and trying to grab onto it. We try to grasp onto our youth. We try to grasp onto our health. We try to grasp onto our life. We identify with our body and senses, with our beliefs and worldviews, with our likes and dislikes, with our prejudices and biases. We hold onto our grief, pain, and sorrow. We cling to lust, cling to anger, cling to material possessions. We get snagged by our comforts and expectations. But if we try to hold onto something that by its very nature changes, we will inevitably suffer.

So, rather than clench our fist, holding tightly to the world of ostensible things, rather than stand in opposition to the way the world is, we can instead hold everything with an open hand. We can let the bird land on our palm and stay as long as it likes, while we take a loving interest in it. We all know what this feels like, when everything is running along smoothly, without effort. We may be lost in our art or work, we might be playing sports, or listening to music. There’s no grasping at or controlling experience. There’s no bumps or agitations. There’s no struggle at all. Everything is simply unfolding on its own. We’re in a natural flow.

If you open awareness to the breath right now, you can see this—breathing is happening all on its own. There’s no need to control it. There’s no need to make it a certain way. You can simply receive it. The same is true for sounds… and sensations… and feelings… and emotions… and even thoughts, which include our volitions and intentions. Pay close attention, and you will see that you are not the author of your experience. Everything is simply arising and being known all on its own and in its own place. You aren’t producing any of this, and you’re not producing your awareness of it either.

Now, to get a taste of dukkha, notice what it’s like when you try to focus on the breath. Notice how this efforting arises from time to time as you try to remain mindful. Notice how you lose the flow. Everything becomes bumpy, scruffy, jagged. It’s like you are leaning into the next breath, trying to capture it, instead of being settled back and simply receiving it. The energy is frenetic. It’s tight, closed, contracted. The little thinker in our heads, the meditator, feels like it has to do something in order to be aware of the breath. It feels like it has to work so hard to live this life. This subtle contraction around the breath is dukkha.

Again, if you pay close attention to your moment-to-moment experience, you will see that you are not the author of your experience. Everything is arising and being known all on its own and in its own place. You aren’t producing any of your senses, thoughts, feelings, or emotions, and you aren’t producing your awareness of them either.

So, rather than thinking about the cause of dukkha as grasping, we can also think about it in terms of delusion, since it is only when we are deluded, when we are not seeing with wisdom, that we mistakenly identify ourselves with objects of mind. We mistake ourselves, or some part of ourselves, as the flame, forgetting that we are the Everlasting Fire.

To see this mistaken identification, in Buddhist training, as well as in wisdom traditions like Advaita, we intentionally and continually put our identity under scrutiny, discovering a closet full of many masks we put on, until finally they dissipate through the gradual and systematic training of mindfulness. We also see this in the contemplative traditions of Christianity with monks like Thomas Merton, who said:

Learning to be oneself means learning to die in order to live. It means discovering in the ground of one’s being a ‘self’ which is ultimate and indestructible, which not only survives the destruction of all other more superficial selves but finds its identity affirmed and clarified by their destruction.

Now, of course, as both Buddhist and Western psychology recognize, it is natural to develop a sense of self, and even important to develop a healthy one. We need it to maintain self-integrity, to hold and defend certain values, and to have aims and aspirations. Our identity, which is closely connected to our motivations, allows us to coherently organize our minds. Without an identity, it would be impossible to know what to think, what to value, or what to do in any situation. We would be chaotic, unpredictable, and destructive. To have any purpose or meaning, to live an intentional life, we must know who we are and what we are in service to.

What’s interesting, though, is that none of us have a single identity. Like I said, we put on many masks—employer, employee, parent, child, sibling, friend, spouse, lover, teacher, student, athlete, meditator, citizen, artist, musician, Democrat or Republican, patient, customer, neighbor, philosopher, Buddhist, spiritual practitioner, etc. And we shift back and forth among these masks depending on the circumstances. To live healthy, happy lives, we need to be able to wear each of these masks with full awareness and compassion. Where we run into trouble, though, is when we cling to any one of them, when we are not able to let them go. The boss needs to drop her role as boss when she is with her friends. The teacher needs to drop his role when he is with his husband and kids, who need a spouse and dad, not a teacher. And so on. We can be free only if we can remember who we truly are underneath all these temporary roles, which is entirely open and free. As the Buddha reminded us, make sure to always keep one hand in reality.

Another aspect of our experience in which we cling to or identify with is our shadow parts—fearful parts, lustful parts, ashamed parts, judging parts, critical parts, doubting parts, angry parts, cruel parts, perverted parts, etc. What is so difficult about these parts is that they are so entangled in our being that we don’t realize how identified with them we really are and, therefore, how much they control our lives. So, the first step or challenge is to simply name them when they arise. We need to bring them to our mindful, equanimous attention.

When anger arises, for example, we simply note, “This is a mind filled with anger.” Note how it feels narrow, tense, and closed off, like a clenched fist. Note how thoughts continue to feed it, how they play with and shape the emotion. Note all the unpleasant feeling tones that arise and fade. And note too the pleasant feelings, if any, like the pleasant feelings associated with thoughts of justice, redemption, or revenge. Simply watch all this with our loving attention until it fades away. In this spacious, non-reactive, and fully awake space of awareness, understanding grows naturally. As we become more familiar with each part, we can notice what brings it about and how to respond to it more skillfully, ultimately unlocking and freeing the valuable energy that is bound up in it.

This has been practiced across cultures since ancient times. Shamans learned that when we name our difficult parts, when we name what we fear, we can begin to work skillfully with them. The Sufis call these parts Nafs. The Christian Desert Fathers of ancient Egypt and Syria called them demons. In Buddhism, these inner forces are traditionally personified as Mara, the god of delusion, and are also called the hindrances—desire, aversion, restlessness, lethargy, and doubt. In some Hindu traditions, the ego is viewed as working for the god Maya, whose goal is to keep us chasing material things and sensual pleasures. She is considered a temptress like the Christian Satan, who keeps us attached to the external world of illusion.

Today, however, Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems86 has become a popular and skillful model for working with the various pieces of ourselves. IFS thinks of each human as a family composed of many different parts or members, each of whom are trying their best to protect us. So, rather than think of them as bad or evil, we simply need to bring all the hurt, scared, ashamed, embarrassed, and angry members out of isolation. We need to let them know that we—loving awareness—are here for them, that we see and support them. We need to thank them for working so hard to protect us, no matter how misguided their efforts may have been. And as we gain their trust, we need to let them know that they can let go of the heavy burdens they carry—the emotions, memories, and responsibilities created from past traumas. We need to let them know that we, loving awareness, are okay.

There are many different protectors, each shaped by our trials and traumas. Some are constantly on guard, keeping watch for danger, to the point of exhaustion. Some make us believe we have to work tirelessly to avoid losing our money, car, and home. Some puff up their chest, act hard, and are easily angered because they don’t want us to appear weak and vulnerable. Some make us take downers like alcohol and narcotics or cause us to dissociate to make sure we don’t feel physical and/or emotional pain. Some ruthlessly criticize us and push us to perfection because they want us to be worthy or admired. Some make us think that, to be beautiful, we need to be skinny, so they cause us to binge or starve ourselves. Some parts make us repress and hide any flaws because our families believe they need to present the perfect image to the outside world. This one is a huge in Abrahamic and Hindu cultures, and even in Hollywood and the Woke Left culture. Another common part of us that often stems from the world’s religions is the part that shames us for our sexuality, in all its forms. It constantly reminds us that we need to stay clean, pure, virtuous, or else we will not be worthy of god’s love.

If you have any of these protectors from past traumas, I highly encourage you to work with a licensed psychotherapist who is familiar with IFS. And if you prefer to explore these parts on your own, I suggest you read two of Schwartz’s books—Introduction to Internal Family Systems and No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with Internal Family Systems Model. I also highly recommend the psychotherapist and meditation teacher Loch Kelly’s meditation app Glimpses. But in the meantime, just see if you can start to note the different pieces of yourself as they arise. How are they trying to serve you? Why do they feel they have to protect you? What do they fear would happen if they didn’t? Recognize your own non-dual nature—the limitless love that you are—and, from here, hold these precious pieces of yourself as you tell them they will always have your unconditional support. Your true nature is always okay—it is unborn, undying, untainted, undisturbed, entirely at peace.

Okay, well, another way to think about the cause of dukkha is in terms of desire. This translation, however, can be a bit tricky. In English, we sometimes use the word “desire” to simply state our intention to do something (e.g., I desire to study astronomy in college), which is not tanha or grasping. Desire in this way is not the root of suffering. In fact, it’s necessary. We need desires to move us through the world. We need desires to live and learn and grow. You wouldn’t be reading this now if you didn’t have some desire to do so. “Desire” in a Buddhist context is narrower. We must look deeper into the desire to see if it is rooted in greed, hatred, or delusion or whether it is rooted in generosity, loving-kindness, and wisdom.

Now, this too can create some confusion, so let me take a quick detour and briefly share some relevant aspects of the Buddha’s own journey. As a young prince, Siddhartha Gautama (the pre-enlightened Buddha) enjoyed all the worldly pleasures of a prince. But after encountering sickness, aging, and death one day in the streets of his kingdom, Siddhartha realized that worldly pleasures were unstable and unsatisfying, and so he left home in search of the end of suffering. For years, he studied with the ascetics, who believed they must renounce everything to become enlightened. Eventually, though, after having grown weak and fallen ill, Siddhartha realized that this was not the way. So finally, he came upon what he called “the middle way”—avoiding the extremes of indulgence and asceticism.

I share this story to make the point that it is okay to eat and enjoy a piece of cake. It is not selfish to do so. There is a middle way between self-indulgence and self-mortification. So, when I say we need to look deeper into our desire to see if it is rooted in greed, hatred, or delusion, I am not suggesting that every act we do for ourselves is selfish. Remember, equanimity harmonizes the self with other. So, a useful reframe here, which comes from Goldstein, is to look at our desires in terms of addiction. Which desires can we simply enjoy in the moment, without grasping at them? And which desires imprison and compel us?87

To explore where desire shows up in your own life, the Buddha created three useful categories to explore: (1) the desire for sense pleasures, (2) the desire for existence or becoming, and (3) the desire for non-existence or non-becoming. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

With the desire for sense pleasure, it’s important to first note that, in the Buddhist frame, the mind is considered the sixth sense. So, all mind-states and emotions are included here as objects of our desire—rapture, excitement, concentration, calm, thinking, daydreaming, fantasizing, planning, etc. Now, if you take a moment to think about where you find gratification in your life and in the world, I bet you will discover that most of your time and effort is spent seeking gratification here, in the realm of sense pleasure. This is certainly true of most people. It’s been the standard operating procedure for some time now. We constantly try to fulfill ourselves through sex, food, movies, shows, music, esteem, drugs, and even ‘peak’ spiritual experiences. Many people go their whole lives seeking one hit of pleasure after the next, and then they die. This road has been tried and tried with little success, yet where do so many of us continue to seek our own gratification?

I’m certainly not immune from this. This is largely because we have been given no alternative. The Buddha himself said that, even if we see the drawbacks of chasing sense pleasures—their fleeting and, thus, ultimately unreliable and unsatisfactory nature—the mind will still chase them if it is not given an alternative. So, what is the alternative?

As our mindfulness grows with practice, as we get better at watching desires arise and fade without reacting to them, it is important that we pay close attention to the quality of mind as the desire subsides. What is this transition like? Does it feel as if you have been let out of the grip of something? Does the fiery, frenetic energy of desire turn into a soft, open, easefulness? Again, see for yourself, of course, but I bet the more you pay attention to this transition, the more naturally you will move toward the peace of renunciation, a mind without clinging.

Now, you may hear this and think, “No thanks! Renunciation does not sound peaceful. It sounds terrible. It reminds me of things like repression, lack, deprivation, and scarcity.” I hear you. Many of us, especially in the West, naturally meet it with resistance. But again, what we’re really trying to capture is living without addiction. The Buddha called the blessing of renunciation a cleansing of the mind. It’s like going to rehab or fasting to clear the body of toxins and contaminants. Renunciation brings a purity, clarity, simplicity, and contentment to the mind. It releases all the noise and clutter, the constant nagging of desire and lack in our everyday life.

What sense desires do you find yourself chasing in your daily life? And how hard, I wonder, would it be to let each of them go? To widen your lens, let me throw a few out there for you to consider. In addition to habits around food, sex, masturbation, alcohol, drugs, movies, and music, also consider your habitual desires around comfort, work, wealth, power, cleanliness, and control. What about your phone, email, and social media? Can you put those down? What about the desire to please everyone all the time or to be the peacemaker? What about moods, mind-states, or emotions? Are you addicted to calm, excitement, rapture, or even to fear, the thrill of watching a scary movie or going to a haunted house? Are you addicted to your meditation being a certain way? Do you get grumpy if it’s interrupted or if you’re not able to fit it into your schedule? Can you renounce proliferating thoughts, particularly thoughts of I, me, or mine, and instead come back to the simplicity of the moment—to the interconnected and ever-changing field of sounds, sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and emotions? Also consider if you’re addicted to wanting itself. Do you find yourself scrolling through Amazon or Etsy, or walking through Target, though there’s nothing you need? You’re not alone. We all find enjoyment in wanting. The wanting is what gives us a hit of dopamine.

Again, look at your habitual patterns for the day—your email, social media, phone, coffee, and emotional habits—and see what it would take to change those habits. You might be surprised at how hard it is to skip your hot shower, say, or your morning coffee. But go ahead and practice letting it go. See if it opens some space in the mind. As Goldstein says, renunciation aerates our lives and our habits. It allows for the biodegradation of those habits that no longer serve us, clears the space, and provides the energy necessary for new growth.88

The wisdom of “no” that we explored in Chapter 4 is also applicable here. When we say no from a place of love and wisdom, we’re not being oppressive or avoidant. We’re not pushing things away or denying their presence. We’re not casting judgments or having aversion to what’s arising. With the wisdom of no, we are discerning skillfully, with clear comprehension, what leads onward to peace and what leads to suffering. We turn away from those things that add to suffering, not out of hate but out of love. It’s like saying “no” to our kid who is about to do something harmful. It’s a “no” of care and concern. Again, as Goldstein reminds us, each of us at times needs to be a parent to our inner two-year-old.89

Let’s move on now to the desire for existence or becoming. This dimension of craving is a strong one in the West. There is so much pressure in our culture to become someone, to do something great and meaningful with our lives. It’s as if our worth is entirely dependent on what we produce, on who we become, on what titles we acquire, on what job we get, on what car or house we buy.

It’s always go, go, go, do, do, do. And so, we often get stuck in the planning mind, where we obsessively plan and try to control and map out everything. We obsess over future versions of ourselves, we obsess over our projects, and so we are never really able to arrive here, in the moment. It’s as if we are always leaning into the next moment, the next experience, the next feat, the next thing.

Goldstein calls this “the in-order-to mind.” We are with this moment in order to get to the next. I’m going to school in order to get a well-paying job. I’m at this job in order to get a nicer car and home. I’m going to church or following these rules in order to get into heaven. You can also think of it as the if-then mind. If only I had this much money, then I’d happy. If only I had a better body, then I’d be satisfied. If only x, y, or z, then I’ll be complete. Can you see how this is a problem? We can’t hang our happiness out in front of us, always just out of reach, like a carrot tied to a bunny.

On the other side of the desire for existence, we also experience the desire for non-existence, which can be thought of as aversion—a pushing away from something or wishing that it would go away, that it would not be. We see this, for example, when we experience certain moods and emotions like loneliness or depression—e.g., life is so lonely, I don’t want to be alive. But what is important to note here is that this kind of desire is still rooted in the sense of self. The ego builds itself up by identifying with or attaching to the unpleasant. Look closer, though, and explore who or what is experiencing these unpleasant feelings. Is there someone on the other side of these fleeting sensations and feelings? Who or what is it that doesn’t want to exist? Now, of course, it’s important to tenderly and affectionately acknowledge painful feelings and emotions. We need to take care of our precious human hearts. With grief, for example, when we lose someone dear to us, it’s as if we have lost a large piece of ourselves. And often, we don’t want to let go of the grief since it is, in some sense, all that remains of that person. So, we cling desperately to it. It’s a constant battle, drowning in the grief at times, coming up for a moment of air, and then sinking right back down. In times like these, the best we can do is be patient with ourselves.

To finish the chapter, I just want to say that we are alive at a crucial moment in history. We, as an entire culture, seem to be united in grief. With our technological power, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, rapid spread of misinformation, as well as the population explosion, climate change, and the rapid decline of forests and biodiversity, the need for a critical mass of Self-awareness has never been so urgent. The Earth herself is hurting. And though she continues to give us signs that she is not happy or healthy, many of us are too disconnected to hear her, to feel her viscerally, even though we may have some vague feeling that something is wrong. It’s time we start to listen. And that begins by listening to our Self, discovering within ourselves our interconnected and interdependent nature.

May you truly be at peace,

John