Looking at Despair (Good Advice from Buddhism Connect)

Looking at Despair. Summary: There is a way of "looking" at emotions such as despair during meditation which enables us to transform painful experiences into fuel for Awakening the Heart.

A student writes: I had been studying Discovering the Heart of Buddhism and getting on with it quite well until I lost my relationship and my job, and now I am about to lose my home. Apart from feeling sorry for myself, I haven't done much else but the gift is that I want to get back into the study and maybe make it this time." Lama Shenpen replies: Good. It is very common for people to pick up the course again after difficult periods when it has just got neglected. The course has been designed with that in mind. Student: During meditation you advise us look at what ever comes up. So if you look at the feeling of despair, how do you do this? You cannot see it." Lama Shenpen: To be honest, whatever you look at you can't actually “see” it. If you look carefully it is always just gone! So it is a teaser really, telling you to look at things. It is a way to get you to focus on your experience and get a real sense of what intrinsic openness, clarity and sensitivity mean. You can't take the experience as an object of awareness actually, and that is a fantastically liberating realisation. Your experience can just open up and relax regardless of the particular content, be it despair, terror, anger or whatever. Even happiness and pleasure, love and compassion. It is all Openness Clarity and Sensitivity and quite free in itself. Despair is a whole mixture of things. Mostly it is sensitivity - deep and strong, overwhelming, mentally and physically, but it is in the heart mainly. However, if you could really turn towards the pain in the heart fully, it would be a tender sadness not different from compassion, actually. But the despair is the fear to go to that place. The despair is the cry that comes just before you touch the core of your being. It is the cry 'oh no! I cant bear it!'. Turn towards that cry and notice how it is and notice how it is not really you, but something that comes and goes with conditions. Beneath it is the sensitivity of the heart, raw and tender, that is actually indestructible. There is no question about whether it can bear the pain or not. It can bear it. It can take it because it is its own nature. Resting in that nature, letting go of thoughts such as 'I cant bear it' - gently turning towards those thoughts and letting them go, just staying with that heart feeling, gradually you will recognise it as life itself, crying out to you, pulling on your heart strings. You can bear it. Just relax and bear it. Somehow tell yourself it is like that and somehow you don’t mind. At some deep level you don’t really mind because somehow it is connecting you to life - the whole of life. The experience never stays the same for long. After a while the pain starts to change somewhat in flavour. It starts to feel different - maybe worse, maybe better, maybe sometimes worse and sometimes better. But you just relax with it and don’t mind it so much. That is what awakens the heart in the end. I hope this helps. --- By Lama Shenpen Hookham