by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, November 9, 2003
As part of my summer reading a few months ago, I came across the following "Recipe for Unhappiness", by Fred Moramarco (slightly adapted):
Take 1 cup what is, and mix with:
1 cup inability to accept what is
3 Tablespoons complaints
1 teaspoon light whining
Whisk together and let sit until brooding and sulking set in. Add:
1/4 lb. alternate scenario (preferably unattainable)
1 pint idealized worldview
2 teaspoons vision of perfection
4 sprigs envy, minced, for garnish
Although we might not want to admit it, we each do a fair amount of cooking with one or another of the countless variation on this theme. My own most frequently-used recipe calls for less envy, but adds a generous handful of judgment, two teaspoons of second-guessing and varying measures of freshly-chopped worry. It also always includes at least a cup or so of guilt, because I know that every time I use the recipe, I'm cheating on the spiritual diet I've committed myself to. Many of you are on the same diet. It consists of any spiritual discipline that helps us pay attention to our lives, become more gentle with ourselves and increase our compassion for each other. The spiritual diet requires us to give up our recipes for unhappiness, or at least use them more sparingly, and learn to substitute healthier fare. But most of you cheat on your diets as often as I do, and in the secret corners of our interior kitchens, we go on stirring up our pots of unhappiness.
The two readings I chose for this morning are framed in a more sober tone than Moramarco's recipe for unhappiness, but they are trying to point us in the same direction. We know the truth that both Pema Chodron and Surya Das write about. We know that as the ups and downs of our lives unfold, how we greet or deal with them is going to count for a lot in how happy we are. But our authors for this morning are carrying it further than most of us dare to carry it. They are saying that no matter what our life circumstances, we have an enormous power in our hands-- that whether we live in comfort or hardship, when it comes to the large human work of becoming wise or enlightened beings, the circumstances really don't matter. What counts is how we choose to cook the stew: whether we use one of the thousands of recipes for unhappiness, or choose a different sort of nourishment.
For most of us, that's not a claim we can accept on faith. Does it really not matter, whether we're riding high with money to burn or living in the dark because we can't pay an electricity bill? Is it irrelevant, whether we're sitting in comfort in a new sanctuary in Hamden or cowering at the sound of gunfire in Palestine? Does it really not matter whether we're a handsome, healthy athlete, or struggling for the next breath in a hospital bed?
Of course it matters, if we're looking honestly at the scale of human hardship. Laboring under a heavy burden of pain or loss takes its toll, and can leave a person with barely enough energy to look up, much less marvel at the stars. But these two thinkers whose words are my catalyst for this morning are not living lives of elitism or material comfort, and they are not free from hardship themselves. They are compassionate people who have devoted their lives to the question of how human beings can move through life more attentively and with less suffering. So it's worth pushing past our first response of skepticism to listen to what they have to teach us. And what they are trying to say is that most human suffering arises not from what happens to us, but from the stories we build up around what happens to us.
One of the teachings that is attributed to the Buddha himself is one in which he calls the suffering caused by the stories in our minds "the second arrow". He said that when some sort of pain comes into our lives, it's like an arrow that's been shot at us. Our ordinary response is not just to feel the pain or grief, but to react against the arrow. We rage and lament, wring our hands and beat ourselves up over what we should have done or what ought to have come to pass. The Buddha said this habit is as though, on being shot with the arrow, we immediately jab ourselves with a second arrow as well, making our suffering much worse than it needed to be.
It's that second arrow that nags at me. The first arrow is completely inevitable and will come to every life more than once. It comes in the form of failures, illness, loss and death, and in a hundred other forms that cause us pain. There isn't anything we can do to duck the first arrow. But the second arrow is optional. We're so used to feeling its sting that it can be hard to grasp the truth that it is in our control, and that the wound it causes is actually self-inflicted. But that's what Pema Chodron, Surya Das and countless other teachers from many traditions have long tried to show us. The second arrow is made up of our struggle against what happens in our life. It's created by the story we tell, both about what happened and what it means. And the way we stop getting stuck by that second arrow is to learn to pay attention to the story we're telling, and stop telling it.
That's not such an easy thing to do. It's part of human nature not just to see our world, but to shape a narrative about it. That's how we hold together the meaning of our lives.
Poet Mary Oliver writes,
It is our nature not only to see that the world is beautiful
but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light…
saying over and over, 'what does it mean,
that the world is beautiful -- what does it mean?
It is our nature to ask for the meaning, and we answer our own question by telling a story. It's that lovely, creative element in who we are that makes our poetry and our music, that lets us learn from our history, that lets us link one thing with some other very different thing and learn a new truth. Even our religions, and our most profound spiritual teachings, are stories about our lives. So our problem isn't in the story-telling itself. It's in what kind of story we choose to tell, and in our strange ability to confuse our story with the reality of what has happened.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is an author and medical professional who has become known mostly through his medical work in helping people who suffer from chronic physical pain. He defines "pain" as having three dimensions: physical, emotional and cognitive. As an example of how to separate out the elements, Kabat-Zinn writes, "Let's say you've got a chronic pain in your back. You can't lift your children; getting in and out of the car is difficult…Maybe you can't even work. That's the physical component. But you're having to give up a lot, and you're going to have feelings about it -- anger, probably, [frustration, grief] and depression. That's the emotional response. And then you have thoughts about the pain -- questions about what caused it, negative stories about what's going to happen. Those expectations, projections and fears compound the stress of the pain…There is a way to work with all this….Whether or not you can reduce the level of sensory pain, the emotional and cognitive contributions… can be lessened."
All of Kabat-Zinn's work is built around the truth that what actually happens to us is only one element in our suffering. The rest of it is made up of the second arrow: resentment and regret, anger and fretting and alternate scenarios we yearn toward, and we feed these by the story we tell ourselves about what has happened and why.
Sylvia Boorstein is a Buddhist teacher who often describes herself as a chronic worrier, so she has a lot to say about the power of our mental narrative to warp our experience. In one of her books she tells about an encounter she had many years ago when she stayed for a month in a Mexican resort town. Boorstein was staying in a high rise hotel, but on her walks along the beach she came to know some of the people who stayed in a ramshackle trailer park.
She particularly befriended a young single mother who was there with a baby and a four-year-old, and this mother became the focus of an endless stream of worrisome thoughts for Boorstein. She worried about the heat and whether the water was clean enough for the children, she worried about the beach and the strangers who might pass by, and a dozen other things. Meanwhile, the young mother herself seemed to be having a fine, relaxing time of it.
Then one night there was a terrific thunderstorm with massive downpours of rain, and Boorstein spent most of the night staring out of her sixth-floor window and worrying about how the young family was going to cope. She imagined them huddled in their rickety trailer, the baby wailing and the four-year-old terrified while the mother anxiously watched the water rising.
So in the morning Boorstein hurried to the beach where she found people slowly picking up from the storm, which had washed away things outside but had not after all caused too much damage. She found the young mother sweeping up, and asked her, "How was the storm?" The woman beamed at her and said enthusiastically, "It was great!" "Did you have any problems with the children?", Boorstein asked her anxiously. "Oh, no", the mother replied. "The baby slept right through it, and John would have slept through it too, except I woke him up so he wouldn't miss it." Boorstein writes, "I was stunned. I thought to myself, 'there is another way to do life!' I completely got it that she and I took the same data and saw it through different filters. I came out with a catastrophic story, and she came out with a thrilling story. I wanted to change filters with her."
We don't get the option of changing filters with someone else, but we do have the option of altering our own filters. What it takes is the willingness to see that there is a filter, a story we're telling, that is not objective reality. This is one of those spiritual lessons of life that I have slowly come to recognize is the practice of a lifetime. It isn't so easy to see our stories and recognize them, because we're telling them absolutely all the time. Marshall McLuhan said, "Our mind is a magazine with a new edition every four seconds."
When we start to pay attention we can see that the endless running commentary of our minds is separate from the actual events that unfold around us. And yet every day, and usually many times a day, we get caught up in the story and mistake it for the real thing.
This past week I was just sitting down to meditation here in the sanctuary at mid-day with a colleague of mine who also meditates. Just before we rang the bell to start, the door of the sanctuary opened and a workman came in, screwdrivers and drill in hand, and started to work on one of the doors. So I got up and went over to him and explained that we were just about to start a period of meditation, to which he replied, "Oh, go right ahead, it won't bother me a bit!" I tried again to explain, and he assured me that he'd be finished in a jiffy and that we wouldn't even know he was there. So I decided to hope this would be true -- though it seemed unlikely -- and my colleague and I settled down to meditation and rang the bell.
The workman was actually done with the doorknob in about two minutes, but then after short break he went to work on the next one, and then the next one, first on the inside of the sanctuary and then the outside. It wasn't a huge noise he was making, but compared to the silence we wanted it seemed huge, as the room echoed with the knocking of metal on metal and the rattling of the knobs as they shook loose.
What to do? My friend seemed able and willing to go serenely into his meditation, and from my pose it probably looked as though I was doing the same. But in fact, I was furiously cooking away in my interior kitchen on a double batch of my best recipe for unhappiness, loaded with extra measures of judgment, resentment and angst. In my personal edition of the endlessly published magazine, the storyline was a very irritated one, about a workman without a shred of consideration, a precious hour of meditation ruined, and a colleague irked and frustrated by my inability to control the meditation space.
And then there was a moment when, like Sylvia Boorstein in her encounter in Mexico, I suddenly got it that I was using a particular filter in that moment, telling a particular story. I didn't try to switch stories; I just started noticing the story I was telling. Then something amazing happened: for a rare and marvelous little span of time, there was no story in my mind at all. There was just breathing quietly, hearing the squeak of the screwdriver and the rattle of the door handle. In an instantaneous shift, I moved from being tense with resentment to being so amazed and amused that I nearly laughed out loud.
That's what I think Pema Chodron means when she says, "Whatever you're given can wake you up or put you to sleep." What story will we choose to believe? Or what recipe will we follow in our interior kitchens? It makes all the difference in the world.
Almost eight centuries ago, the Sufi poet Rumi, who seemed to know a little about these things, wrote:
Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire…
There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination loves to watch.
But it's a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight.
Stay here at the flame's core. AMEN