THRIVING IN DIFFICULT TIMES

© Rev. Doug Kraft 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
January 12, 2014

Imagine a pre-human ancestor - a furry, lemur-like creature living furtively in the primeval forest. He sees something desirable - food or a potential sexual partner. A wired-in instinct focuses all his attention on it and prepares his body to move toward it. Then he sees something undesirable - a predator. The primal instinct focuses all his faculties on it and prepares his body to get out of there. This instinct gives him an evolutionary advantage. To be effective, the instinct must be fast. To be fast, it must be simple. To be simple, it doesn't figure out what to do about the food, mate or predator. It merely says, "This is good, figure it out," or "This is bad, figure it out." Notice it directs attention outward onto the food, mate or predator rather than inward onto how he feels about them. If he gets absorbed in how good it feels to see her, she may move on before his DNA gets a chance to reproduce. If he wastes time examining his fear of the predator, he and his DNA will get eaten. So this instinct is the opposite of introspection: it directs attention "out there" rather than "in here."

We humans have such an instinct. I don't have scientific evidence for its evolutionary origins. But it behaves as if these speculations are true: it is fast, simple, pre-verbal, non-conceptual, directs attention away from itself and narrows the scope of awareness to the object. We have many names for it: "desire," "attraction," "attachment," "fixation," "craving," or "repulsion," "fear," "anger," "disgust," "uptightness." It's the feeling that generates the thought, "I like it," or "I don't like," "I want more" or "Get me outta here." But the instinct itself is pre-cognitive. It arises so quickly that we can't control it. It just happens. It arises uninvited out of our neural wiring. So better labels for it might be "getting hooked," "having my buttons pushed" or even "the devil made me do it."

A Tibetan word for it is "shenpa." Those familiar with the writer Pema Chodron may have heard it. In the earliest Buddhist texts, it is called "tanha." Tanha is the Second Noble Truth that says the root of our experience of difficulty is this instinctual tightening. The Third Truth says we can release it and know well-being regardless of our circumstances.

This morning I'm interested in the question, "How do we thrive in difficult times?" The question isn't, "How do we survive, get-by, or manage difficulty?" It's how do we thrive amidst adversity - how do we navigate rough waters in ways that deepen our lives and open our hearts. I believe tanha - this instinctual tightening - is the key. Since it directs our attention away from itself, it can be deceptively difficult to see. So this morning I want to first talk about recognizing the tightening itself. Then we'll look briefly at dealing with what triggers it. And finally, we'll look at the most crucial aspect: releasing it and relaxing until our lives feel enriched even during hard times.

We'll start with simply recognizing it. Searching for this instinctual tightening is like my boys searching for Easter eggs when they were little. They'd run out into the yard and look under flowerpots, beneath rocks and behind wooden boxes and find nothing. My wife and I had hidden the eggs in plain sight: a yellow egg in a bed of yellow flowers, a brown egg on the root of a tree, a blue egg on a blue toy truck in the sandbox, a green egg in a tuft of grass. They were all visible but placed where they'd blend in with the yard. In their excitement, my boys missed the obvious. But once they learned they were in plain sight, they stopped and looked more carefully and began to see them everywhere.

The instinctual tightening is like that - it's always in plain sight but its nature diverts our attention away from it. However, when we stop and look carefully, we begin to see it everywhere:

• A car swerves in front of you. Your hands tighten on the wheel and you're tempted to hit the horn.

• You're in a gentle, free-flowing conversation with a friend. Then her eyes cloud over and turn away. "Did I say something wrong?" you ask. She responds curtly, "No. But I have to go!" You've witnessed the unnamed tightening in her.

• You're talking on a cell phone as you cross the street. Without thinking, your eyes turn and look up and down the street as you continue the conversation. The instinct directed some awareness to check for traffic danger.

• Complaining is always accompanied by inner tightening.

• I approached the grocery checkout lines with a dozen items in my cart. All the lines were long except one. A woman with an overflowing cart headed toward it. My body tightened slightly as my pace picked up. I got to the empty lane a moment before the woman.

• I was considering going to bed when my wife said she was going to turn on the computer in the bedroom to check her email. I said, "I'll stretch out in the other room." She said, "That's okay. I don't want to push you out. I'll check tomorrow." This may sound like an open exchange. But had you been there, you would have noticed that my voice was a little pouty and my wife's was a little irritated. We were both a bit contracted in tanha.

• I picked up a ream of computer paper off the shelf in the office supply store. Then I roamed the aisles looking for something else to buy. "Maybe I need some pens ... no, I have plenty. How about labels? ... no I've got more than enough. Maybe ..." Then I recognized tanha as a vague urge to find something pleasant to buy. I relaxed, smiled and headed for the checkout counter.

• The Dali Lama described being driven from a hotel in Los Angeles to a conference center. Each day the route took him past blocks of electronic stores. He said, "Looking out the car window I wanted things without even knowing what they were." He was feeling tanha.

This tightening feels like an urge, drive or tug that focuses our thoughts and awareness outward. It's uncomfortable. It gets our attention by creating tension and pushing us to do something. If nothing to do, we're left with an edginess begging for resolution. The instinct may have helped us in primal situations or in a situation that can resolve quickly. It's less helpful in complex, nuanced modern life. By narrowing our attention, we can get hooked on a detail rather than seeing the broader context. To a greater or lesser degree, this instinct colors much of human experience.

Let's turn from how it feels to what triggers it. There are many triggers. Some are obvious: relationship breakdown, job loss, job insecurity, disease, death of a loved one, children's difficulties, economic insecurity, political inanity, war. Some are less obvious: loneliness, annoyance, quiet worries, loss of meaning, purposelessness. And some are subtle: yearning to have something or to be rid of something.

What are some of the causes of stress, strain or discomfort in your life or the lives of your loved ones?

The question is, "What do we do about these?" Remember, the tightening focuses our attention outward into the world. Sometimes this is wise. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition emphasizes dealing with the world, not withdrawing from it. We're not monastics. We embrace the interdependent web. We like to deal with issues on their own terms when we can.

So if we're sick or injured, rather than just hoping and praying, we go to a doctor or health care worker or consider diet, rest and exercise or find some way to help our body on its own terms. If our job is in trouble, we to talk to the boss, send out our resume, advance our education, network. If a relationship is on the skids, we talk to the person, consult with a wise friend, find a counselor, seek a support group. If the problem is something we want, we see if there is some reasonable way to get it. If this resolves the problem, great. We cure the disease, find a new job, resolve our kid's obstreperousness, buy the music we wanted, or find some way to resolve the problem triggering the discomfort.

But there are times when there's no solution. We do what we can, but the difficulty lingers. When I first moved to Sacramento a dozen years ago, my youngest son, Damon, was about to start his senior year in the charter high school he'd helped found and had poured his heart into. So he and my wife stayed in Massachusetts that year. I came out alone. Mostly it was okay. I missed them, but I was busy getting to know a new congregation and knew my family separation was temporary. Still, Friday nights were hard. Fridays had been family time. We played board games, went to movies or just hung out together. So as the twilight settled in on Fridays, my chest ached. I talked to them on the phone. But that wasn't the same. Sometimes the pangs of loneliness seemed intolerable.

Some difficulties resist being fixed. The disease may not have a cure. There may be no jobs around. We may not have the power to solve the political scene. The loved one who died isn't coming back. Our child's problems have no easy resolution. These are truly difficult times. What do we do then?

There are three popular strategies for dealing with unsolvable problems: grab something, push something away, or space out. Let's look at each.

The first strategy is to grasp for things or become needy. Unresolved tightening can feel like hunger, thirst or emptiness. We look for something to fill that void. When I broke up with a girlfriend in college, I was upset and didn't know what to do. So I bought a Simon and Garfunkel record album: Bridge Over Troubled Waters. It was comforting. Many people get into a pattern of shopping to feel better. Or they look for experiences to distract them.

When I was in Sacramento that first year, sometimes I'd go to a movie to get through an empty evening. A variant of this strategy is to get other people to do things for us. We try to control others as a way to handle our inner discomfort. Sometimes this strategy is soothing. We relax. But if it doesn't address the true hunger, it has no lasting benefit.

The second strategy for coping with intractable problems is the opposite: rather than grasp for things or experiences, we push them away. We become irritable or angry. We've all seen this in others and felt it ourselves. We snap at people more easily, become less tolerant of foibles, lose our temper, criticize more readily. Things that used to roll off our backs get under our skin. Expressing this irritability may bleed off some of the tension. But if it doesn't solve the real problem, it doesn't lead us to wellbeing.

The third strategy is to space out. "There is nothing I can do, so I just won't think about it." We stay busy or medicate ourselves with alcohol or just don't pay attention to how lousy we feel. We numb out. This too can have short-term benefit and manage a short-term situation. But for long-term issues, it's disastrous.

When I was a therapist, most of my clients had been using these strategies until they stopped working. So my job was to listen carefully and help them find more effective ways to deepen their lives. When I heard their stories, it didn't surprise me that they felt messed up. What amazed me was that they weren't locked up on the back ward of a psychiatric hospital. If we listen to what most of us have lived through as children and adults, it's amazing that we are as healthy as we are.

The human spirit is incredibly resilient. It's amazing the depth of pain and suffering we can experience and come through with our hearts and minds open, supple and alive. But the thing that brings us down most quickly is isolation. When we aren't alone, our natural wisdom, compassion and kindness flow even in difficult times.

There is one person whose good attention we need more than anyone else's. It's the one we spend the most time with day and night: ourselves. When we are busy grasping for things, being irritated with others or spacing out, we're not truly present with ourselves. We've abandoned our hurt, loneliness, fear or grief. We've abandoned ourselves.

So if we want to thrive in difficult times, it is critical to learn to be present with ourselves more and more. I remember one Friday night in my apartment. I talked to Erika and Damon on the phone. Then I thought about going to a movie, but that felt empty. I could have called someone in Sacramento, but that would not have been the same as family. I put on music that both soothed and stimulated my loneliness. I began to pace around the apartment feeling more and more frantic knowing there was no way to assuage the aching I was feeling. There was nowhere to run. So I stopped in my living room and stood still. I realized that at that very moment there were millions of people around the planet feeling as lonely as I. There were hundreds of millions grieving the deaths of love ones. There were countless people worried about their children, concerned about how they were going to make ends meet, frightened by a disease or cowering before the threat of violence.

Most of us weren't doing anything wrong. Things don't always work out in life. We all die eventually. Our society does us a disservice in reassuring us that we are captain of our ship, director of our fate, controller of our future. That's nuts. We have influence. But bad things happen to good people all the time.

Standing alone in my living room I thought, "Oh yeh. Right. This is how life is sometimes. I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm not bad for feeling bad. Stuff happens." I stopped running from the loneliness. I sat down in a chair and just felt it. I didn't try to talk myself into or out of anything. I was just present. You know what? It didn't feel good. But at least I had myself. At least I had one attentive friend in the room: me. With this, the loneliness softened. It didn't go way, to be sure. The tightness spread out. The heaviness lightened because I wasn't fighting it any more. And I began to feel moist, poignant, and life-filled rather than dry and barren.

So if we want to thrive in difficult times, it's important to learn to recognize this instinctual response on it's on terms. It's not a thought. It's not a concept. It's a wired-in, pre-verbal, per-conceptual biological reflex: a mental, emotional or physical tightening. It focuses our mental faculties on finding a solution out there. The instinct is simple and not very discriminating. If there's no solution, it doesn't let go. We can lie awake at night worrying about our child, our job, our health, or relationship - in an endless loop of repeating thoughts.

So it's important to learn to see the inner holding directly. As we see if fully, it tends to relax. Or we can gently invite it to soften. It's like being with a child waking out of a nightmare. We don't try to talk the child out of the dream. We're just present in a heartful way. We don't try to stop the swirl of emotions or thoughts. We just stay present.

It's very simple: we just notice the inner tightening. But it's very difficult, because this runs counter to the instinctual push to focus out there. So it's important to be kind and gentle and patient with ourselves. As we relax this inner tautness, we won't start thriving over night. But without that tension, the spinning emotions, thoughts, and feelings start to run out of gas. They begin to slow down a little. With this, something deeply mysterious and deeply human begins to emerge. We notice a poignant well-being that's not dependent on fixing anything. We touch a wholeness that isn't based on things we can't control.

Many people call this well-being "God" or "The Divine" or "Spirit." Others call it "Human Essence" or "Buddha nature." It makes no difference what we call it because it is pre-verbal and pre-conceptual. We just note the elusive holding, open to it in a friendly way and relax into it. This doesn't make us transcend the world or space out into a different realm. But it does give us the courage, heart, patience and intelligence to come back into this world and our lives more completely, doing what is reasonable for ourselves and our fellow creatures and being with how things are. We find we aren't the small self we thought we were. Without the instinctual tightening, the sense of self lights up. With this, we are truly on a path toward thriving even when the times are difficult.

Let's close with a few minutes of silence. I invite you to close your eyes and let your awareness focus inward. See if there is any tightness: tension in your body, edginess in your emotions or holding in your mind. If so, don't try to change anything. If your thoughts are rambling or your attention is wandering, let them ramble and wander. Just notice any tightness. And invite it to soften. If there is none, that's great. Just notice the peace, well-being and spaciousness and let it radiate naturally from you.

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