This dharma talk was recorded at InsightLA on October 13, 2013. It was part of a daylong retreat I taught about how to work with our questions in a way that can help us live from our truest intentions. You can listen here:
I was interviewed recently by Vincent Horn, founder of Buddhist Geeks, and we talked about how to work with questions in your practice. Unanswered questions, intractable situations often appear to stand in the way of living from our deepest intentions. We might feel blocked even from knowing what our true priorities are. But if we take time to turn inward with a spirit of patience and inquiry, instead of requiring the dilemmas to go away, or insisting on immediate resolutions, we can discover the resources that we need. Internal dilemmas contain a rich source of insight; learning to live with them brings about a radical shift that opens the door to clarity and equanimity.
You can click on the image below to access the podcast. I hope you enjoy it!
Taking Refuge in This Moment
Saturday, March 15, 9:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Led by Lisa Ernst
Please join us for a day of sitting and walking meditation at a beautiful, wooded site in rural West Nashville. True refuge is turning toward our experience and finding freedom in the way things are. This silent retreat will focus on cultivating a quality of compassionate presence that embraces our experience with kindness and insight.
Led by meditation teacher Lisa Ernst, the retreat is suitable for both beginning and experienced meditators; it will include sitting and walking meditation, practice instructions, and a dharma talk.
Cost: $50, plus dana (donation) to the teacher. A deposit of $50 will reserve your space and is due by Friday, March 7. Paypal is available here. If paying by check, please make it out to One Dharma Nashville and send to: 12South Dharma Center c/o One Dharma Nashville, 2301 12th Ave. South, Suite 202, Nashville, TN 37204. Please include your email address. Directions and additional information will be emailed prior to the retreat.
For questions, email onedharmaretreat@gmail.com
White Egret in Open Sky
photography by Lisa Ernst
I often encourage practitioners who are struggling, tied up in knots and feel stuck with nowhere to run, to surrender and put their heads in the mouth of the demon. Its one of my favorite teaching metaphors because its so vivid and unambiguous. From some this image draws stunned silence or a wince; from a few others a slight smile and a nod. Even though many practitioners reach an intellectual understanding, I’ve found that only a few fully experience the liberation that comes from an intimate view inside the demon’s mouth
This metaphor arises from an anecdote about the Tibetan yogi Milarepa. Here’s the story from Tara Brach in her book, Radical Acceptance:
The great Tibetan yogi Milarepa spent many years living in isolation in a mountain cave. As part of his spiritual practice, he began to see the contents of his mind as visible projections. His inner demons of lust, passion, and aversion would appear before him as gorgeous seductive women and terrifying wrathful monsters. In face of these temptations and horrors, rather than being overwhelmed, Milarepa would sing out, “It is wonderful you came today, you should come again tomorrow … from time to time we should converse.”
Through his years of intensive training, Milarepa learns that suffering only comes from being seduced by the demons or from trying to fight them. To discover freedom in their presence, he has to experience them directly and wakefully, as they are.
In one story, Milarepa’s cave becomes filled with demons. Facing the most persistent, domineering demon in the crowd, Milarepa makes a brilliant move—he puts his head into the demon’s mouth. In that moment of full surrender, all the demons vanish. All that remains is the brilliant light of pure awareness.”
Most of us have ingrained responses to painful and difficult challenges. Usually these patterns involve resistance and struggle, which worsen our suffering. As the noose tightens, the problems may grow into unfathomable monsters that we must avoid at all costs. We create an “other” out of our suffering or we create an “I.” Either way, we start to view these conditions as problems we must solve or personal afflictions we must vanquish.
As committed practitioners, over time we become more skilled at meeting these challenges. Gradually we’re less fearful of our demons, at least some of the time. We have the space to explore them with less reactivity, maybe inviting them in for tea once in a while. The intensity of our suffering diminishes and the demons disperse. Yet at other times, a particularly menacing demon may return, bearing down on us with full force. At moments like these we may feel that nothing can save us.
The demon is staring us in the face and we’ve got nothing to stop it. We’re sure the demon will devour us if we don’t find a way to protect ourselves or escape. Fear consumes us. At this juncture I’ve found that the full act of surrender, of putting my head in the mouth of the demon is the true way to freedom. It’s not really something I do as something I let go of. I release my need to survive, to protect or preserve the idea of myself in any form at all. I’m willing to let what I dread devour me.
Although this might sound scary, ultimately it’s the opposite. The moment I let go, when the demon has entered me and I have entered it, the demon dissolves into open space. I dissolve into open space. There’s nothing inside or outside, only the sweet, unobstructed stillness of this moment. Gradually wisdom arises out of this emptiness. The situation reveals itself; the delusion dies.
There’s an important place for compassion in this process. Sometimes we’re just not ready or able to move closer to the demon or even invite it in for tea. Taking a step back and offering lovingkindness to ourselves and to the fear, even the demon, can soften us. When we’re truly not ready to meet the darkness directly, we need to soften our hearts and minds into kindness and compassion. Then gradually we’ll find our way to the next step, of giving all of ourselves to the demon. At last we see it’s all a grand illusion and the demons of suffering and fear transform into equanimity and openness.
this world
is full of needles and thorns …
yet lotus blooms
Kobayashi Issa
Frozen Water with Reflection
All beings by nature are Buddha,
As ice by nature is water.
Apart from water there is no ice;
Apart from beings, no Buddha.
How sad that people ignore the near
And search for truth afar:
Like someone in the midst of water
Crying out in thirst.
– Hakuin
Bubble freezing in the midst of popping!
Photography by Lisa Ernst
Diamond Sutra
So you should view this fleeting world
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud
A flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream
Saturday, February 15, 2014
9:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m., Nashville Friend’s House
Led by Lisa Ernst
Still Lake with Clouds
Photography by Lisa Ernst
Please join us for a day of contemplative writing and meditation practice. We will cultivate writing inspiration through meditation and exercises that help us open our hearts to the truth of what we most want to express. These practices will also help us to communicate more eloquently from our authentic voice, both in written and verbal form. In addition, we will have an opportunity to share our writing in an atmosphere of compassionate support. This workshop is suitable to beginning and experienced writers and meditators.
Cost is $75 – $100, sliding scale. Two reduced fee spots are available in the case of financial need. Your fee reserves your spot and you can pay by PayPal here using the “donate” button.
Lisa has been meditating for 25 years in both the Zen and Vipassana traditions. She is the founder and guiding teacher of One Dharma Nashville. In addition to regularly teaching meditation classes and retreats, Lisa has written numerous articles for magazines, newspapers and newsletters. She was the technical editor for the current edition of Meditation for Dummies. Her blog includes many essays and poetry: http://www.thelotusbloomsinthemud.com.
For questions email onedharmaretreat@gmail.com
Many people, myself included, come to Buddhism because we can’t find an escape from our suffering. Full of fear and uncertainty, we find that Buddha’s Four Noble Truths provide some mental relief. There is suffering. There is a cause to suffering. There is an end to suffering. The is a path out of suffering (the Noble 8-fold path). As we learn to walk this path, to let go of our resistance to the endless arising and passing away of conditions, we begin to experience this moment just as it is and we see our suffering diminish. The path opens up, we see that Buddha’s teachings are applicable in our own lives. The dharma works. But the mind is a tricky little fox and soon the very path that was leading us to liberation may become yet another thing to cling to, something to keep us safe from the inevitable storms of life. We probably don’t even see this subtle shift until we’ve strayed far from the path.
A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
This is our life, we will never be protected from the tigers and the vine will whittle away until we fall to our death. No one has ever escaped death. So what is our response? If we use this practice to keep us safe, it will fail us. Genuine practice isn’t safe.
If you’ve gotten comfortable with your practice, you need to examine with total honesty the boundaries you’ve created. Has the practice become a container or bubble that keeps your heart sheltered from the darkest realms of your own existence? Has it tipped that way without your even knowing it? What happens if you burst the bubble, the boundary that you dwell in? Are you suddenly face to face with what you most fear, what you hoped would protect you from falling, from failing? Can you then, in this very moment, reach for the strawberry right in front of you and enjoy it, no matter what you fate, savoring the perfect sweetness that permeates your whole being? If so, you’ve found your true path, genuine freedom, your home.
The End of The Path
photography by Lisa Ernst
This past Sunday we completed our fourth residential retreat at Bethany Hills. Each retreat has its own flavor, its own joys and challenges. This retreat brought a unique weather situation that weaved its way into the retreat, and for several, their practice.
For much of the weekend, the temperatures hovered just above freezing. With near constant rain, this brought uncertainty and for some, anxiety, of freezing, icing and power outages. The weather was at an edge, a fine line between serious difficulty and simple wet and cold. Until Sunday the weather never hit that tipping point.
For several, learning to sit with the uncertainty of what was to come, to allow the situation to unfold in accordance with nature, was a practice in letting go. On Sunday at daylight we could see the trees and some areas of the grounds beginning to freeze as the rain pounded down. It was beautiful and many brought their cameras out during the break as the rain finally stopped. Others grew concerned about transportation and possibly traveling home on icy roads. Fortunately, though, the freeze was short lived. Worries faded as warmer temperatures melted most of the ice by mid morning. One person shared at the closing how her mind had become caught in anxiety, the “what if’s” of the weather, yet ultimately she could see her fear with some humor and let it go.
If we are practicing sincerely, we often find interior edges, places of uncertainty and doubt that limit and confine us. This is particularly true at retreats when we are spending considerable time meeting our present moment experience in its endless flux. Retreats are designed to bring us to our edges, to face the limits we imagine we have, then to find a way through those limits until they simply dissolve. But first we need to recognize the voice that tells us we’ve reached our threshold and can go no further. This awareness is the starting point. Then we can see that the narrative is composed of thoughts, not special, incontrovertible truths. As our resistance falls away, we also touch the fear and anxiety that often accompanies these thoughts.
Sometimes we do need to back off and take a break, to step away from our edge. But as soon as we find our courage and compassion, we can begin again. As we move back to our edge, letting go of our hesitation and any thoughts of doom, we begin to loosen our self imposed limits. The boundaries of our beliefs, the ideas that inhibit our direct experience of the dharma, of life itself, begin to soften. Ultimately, the “I” that holds us back dissolves into open space. This release from our false limitations liberates us, opens us to the joy of interconnection and true intimacy with this moment.
Frozen Pond
Misty Ice at Bethany Hills
The Lotus Blooms in The Mud 