All right,
So this morning I want to build upon what Dee brought to us last Thursday and it starts with a poem.
The resume of failures hangs in the balance of success.
Tension steadies the scale.
Humiliation teeters on one side.
Humility,
Its teacher,
On the other.
Quitting,
Shrinking,
Slinking away,
Bookends,
The acts of rising,
Carrying on,
Standing tall.
Failure makes success possible.
Fear keeps them both at bay.
Yet every morning we wake not to fail,
But to step again into the unknown,
Where both remain possible,
And walking on is its only quiet triumph.
Walking on.
That's what we're doing here together.
Walking a path so that we understand suffering.
And in understanding suffering,
We suffer less.
So I got a lot out of Dee's talk last week,
But what I've been chewing on is something that she said,
What gets fed,
Or I'm sorry,
What gets freed,
What gets freed when we fail?
When we fail.
What gets freed when things are unperfect?
When it doesn't work out according to our plans?
What gets freed?
How do we meet our life when we fail at something?
When we're not good at something?
I mean,
We can feel in our bodies when things are not happening the way that they should be happening.
You know,
The weight of failure,
We can feel that.
It's imperfect and it's not right and it's not in harmony.
Things are off and we can feel that.
We know these kinds of ways in the body and in the mind.
And it's not just a perception that we have,
You know,
In the thinking in our head.
We can actually feel the mood that kind of takes over everything.
Things are not right.
Things should be different.
So what do we do when things are imperfect?
Or do we even do anything?
What gets freed when we fail?
With practice,
Mindfulness gets freed.
Clinging frees up.
The habit of reactivity is replaced with a pause.
That's what gets freed up in me.
And awareness is the first sign of freedom.
It shows us a way to be present,
To have a way of knowing and not getting pushed around or caught up in whatever is happening.
You know,
Our mind,
Our mood,
It doesn't have to be defined by the situation in front of us.
It's kind of like,
I like this analogy,
If you've ever gone out on a boat and you're in choppy water and the boat gets,
You know,
It's tossing around a little bit and you have to find your footing.
And if you're not used to the kind of the movement of the boat,
You're also just sort of like,
Whoa,
Trying to hold on,
You know.
But after a while,
You find your footing and you can hold yourself pretty steady and your body adjusts and you're not caught up by the movement of the boat.
You're not involved in the movement of the boat.
You kind of begin to hold yourself steady.
And it's the same in mindfulness practice.
You know,
We cultivate this ability to meet what's here in the present.
And in formal practice,
We steady our body,
Keeping it still.
And sometimes the mind can follow when the body is still.
And when it doesn't,
When it doesn't,
Well,
We see what's there.
You know,
We note it.
Maybe we even greet it like,
Hello,
Calm.
Hello,
Ease.
Or hello,
Anxiety or restlessness.
Oh,
This isn't perfect.
This is not how I wish it would be.
This is not ideal.
But what we're learning is we're learning to stay steady in a relaxed way,
Even with something that we are not particularly liking.
It's like,
Oh,
This is what's happening.
This isn't how I want it to be.
I wish it could be different.
But this is what's happening.
Can I be steady and calm in the middle of this?
You can,
You know.
You can.
One Zen master taught,
To be free is to be without anxiety about imperfection.
To be free is to be without anxiety about imperfection.
So what that says is that imperfection is the given.
It's the given.
The messiness of these bodies and these emotions,
And what other bodies and emotions are doing,
That's the given.
And to be without anxiety is to not add on what,
In this Buddhist scene,
We sometimes refer to as the second arrow.
Not add on a reaction.
Not add on making it wrong or blaming.
To be free from the second arrow.
To have all the messiness,
The confusion,
The hurt,
And not add on the quality of this is wrong.
The wrongness of it.
Our practice is to cultivate this quality of presence,
So that when we're hit with imperfection,
We can just pause and not go down the road of rumination.
Kind of that locks us into feeling bad,
And locks us into somebody else being the enemy,
Or we being the enemy,
Or the whole story.
If it were easy to release anxiety about imperfection,
I think that we would already have done that,
Right?
But the habit energy that usually kicks in,
It's kind of like if we're not anxious or angry about whatever is happening,
The thing that's happening,
The mind goes to,
If I don't have this reaction,
It will never change.
That somehow our anxiety and our reaction will make it different.
We're conditioned to be so vigilant,
And we're conditioned to be aggressive,
And we're conditioned to be defensive,
And we're conditioned to be devious,
So we won't get attacked.
All this stuff,
It's conditioned.
And,
Check this out,
We're conditioned to have aversion towards our conditioning,
And be down on ourselves for it.
That too,
It's all part of our conditioning.
And here's something that I'd really like you to get.
It's taken me a long time,
I have to keep remembering this.
We cannot change the causes and conditions of our life.
It happened.
We cannot change the causes and conditions.
No matter how much we wish we can,
How much we wish it was otherwise,
But we can change how we relate to the conditions.
That's what we can change,
Our relationship to what hand we've been dealt.
So much of these teachings are about accepting ourselves,
And forgiving ourselves.
Learning to be without anxiety about imperfection.
And the cultural conditioning,
Part of our survival strategy is to be uptight.
It's kind of built in to the culture,
To be the best.
So how do we go against that?
The truth is that we can't will ourselves to let go of our anxiety,
Or our anger,
Or whatever the afflictive conditioning you may have.
Yet,
Here's what I can share from my direct experience.
The more awareness of the conditioning,
The more awareness of the energy of imperfection,
The uncertainty,
The uptightness,
The less that we identify with it.
Letting go happens spontaneously.
If we see and we don't feed what's happening inside of us,
When we just observe and feel when things are not going the way that we want them to go,
What's waking up in us is awareness.
Because we're seeing all the ways that we're at war with ourselves.
All the ways that we are not liking.
And in that seeing,
There's a shift in identity.
We start to see that we are not this imperfect self.
We begin to realize that what we are is actually awareness.
Awareness itself,
Presence.
So then we don't identify,
We're not so defined by these waves that are coming through.
It's so helpful when we can start to experience that.
That disidentification with the weather pattern that's moving through.
It's just a pattern.
It's just an energy.
It's not you.
It's not me.
You know,
The fear of failure or the fear of imperfection can be really crippling.
When we're always having to protect ourselves,
It's really difficult to relax and to be spontaneous.
And it feels very dangerous because it's so intimate to be vulnerable.
You know,
The possibility of rejection is just right there when we're vulnerable.
So how to wake up from that feeling that there is something wrong?
In one of the suttas,
The Buddha distinguishes two kinds of people.
In terms of shortcomings,
In terms of blemishes or imperfection.
And the way it's described is that he's contrasting a one-eyed person and a two-eyed person.
And he says,
It's the people who have shortcomings and don't know it.
They are the one-eyed people.
And the people who have shortcomings and know it are the two-eyed people.
So the idea here is not to be free from imperfection,
But to rather know how it is.
How are you imperfect?
What are your shortcomings?
Because if you know them,
Then you can practice with them.
If you know them,
You can practice with them.
So knowing that you have shortcomings,
Knowing that you're imperfect,
Knowing that in some way you fail.
Well,
Seeing with two eyes,
This is clear seeing.
So the practice,
And this will be familiar to you,
Is as soon as we catch on that something is wrong,
Something feels wrong,
What do we do?
Well,
You know this.
We pause.
We pause.
We stop.
We just notice.
We don't go into the habit of thinking,
You know,
Obsessive thinking.
That's a flag.
That's a flag that we are not,
We're just getting looped in to the conditioning.
Getting busy,
That's a flag.
So in some ways,
We just have to pause.
It's in the pause that wisdom and compassion can start to really surface.
It really is.
It's that pausing,
And it can be uncomfortable.
You know,
I'm not going to lie to you.
It's not comfortable sometimes to pause when you're really just feeling the anxiety and the restlessness.
Of imperfection.
So I've really gotten to see my relationship with imperfection and failure change.
You know,
I've had all kinds of.
.
.
I do a lot of creative practices.
I write,
I paint,
I make music,
I sing.
All these areas that I entered into,
I entered into really uncomfortably.
It's very uncomfortable to play guitar in front of a teacher and to sing in a group or to show my watercolors in a class of artists.
Very uncomfortable.
And part of the motivation to do these activities is to experience the discomfort.
I'm not a sadist,
It's just.
.
.
I get to look at how my identity is wrapped up and looking good.
That's the motivation.
It's like,
Oh,
Look at that.
The identity,
It wants to be perceived as good at something.
So I want to see this,
And I want to feel that ouch.
Like Gil likes to say,
There's an ouch sometimes.
There's an ouch when my voice cracks out of tune or when I mix a bunch of paint colors and end up with a blob of brown on the canvas.
Those are ouches.
And those examples aren't even high stakes,
You know?
They're low stakes imperfection.
The higher stakes are how I am an imperfect parent.
Oof,
Teenage years.
I am imperfect at this parenting trip.
I am an imperfect partner.
You know,
Seth will be the first to tell you that.
I have all kinds of shortcomings.
And I get to see them.
That's the function of mindfulness.
The clarity of knowing what's happening.
I get to work with these imperfections and practice with them.
And sometimes it's difficult.
Maybe I don't know how to do it.
Maybe I don't know how to get through something.
But you know what?
I trust this practice.
It's okay to fail,
To be imperfect.
To have shortcomings.
Because I can practice with them.
I can be at ease and relaxed about my shortcomings and my imperfections.
And so can you.
So this is what I offer for your consideration this morning.
