Zen And The Art Of Dealing With Difficult People

This course is centred around exploring the Zen phrase 'a troublesome buddha'. A troublesome buddha is someone you find difficult but can teach us about ourselves and how we relate to others. In this first part of the course, we explore how we can apply our meditation practice in those situations where we encounter difficult people - people that irritate, frustrate or anger us, when things get emotionally charged and we often find we react impulsively. Seeing difficult people as troublesome buddhas is about changing our perspective from one of trying to ignore or avoid those difficult situations to one of seeing troublesome people as people we can learn from, and those encounters with them as opportunities to learn something about ourselves.

What we find difficult about people – and how we respond to them – can often stem from old and deeply grooved patterns within our attitudes and behaviour, which are really all about how we move away from or avoid feelings of discomfort. These patterns and tendencies arise because of our past experiences and upbringing – what in Buddhism is called our past conditioning. In this second lesson we explore one of the main areas that encounters with difficult people can teach us about ourselves - our own habitual behaviours and impulsive reaction style. According to the Buddha, craving, aversion and delusion are the three underlying causes of suffering, so we can categorise our default patterns along these lines. The main point of this lesson is that it’s never too late to carve new grooves and start shifting your attitude towards difficult people - we absolutely can change our behaviour, attitudes, beliefs, and actions. The rest of this course will be about how to make those changes.

When the emotional temperature rises, it gets harder and harder to stay consciously aware of your sensations and remain able to choose how you respond. We become what's known as 'emotionally dysregulated', meaning that our habitual reactions take over and we fall back into the well-trodden grooves, habits and ways of reacting that we discussed in the previous video. Therefore, in my view, the first key skill we need to develop when it comes to dealing with difficult people and situations is remaining aware of our sensations. However, it's one thing saying it and it's another thing doing it. The stronger the emotional charge, the harder it becomes – which is why we need to practice regularly under easy conditions with low emotional charge. Awareness of our sensations gives us conscious knowledge of how the body is responding to the difficult relationship, and this knowledge allows us to choose how we respond - rather than just fall into our usual habitual reactions.

This is a simple guided body scan meditation to help you become more familiar with your internal landscape and practice becoming aware of your sensations and feelings in a quiet, emotionally calm environment.

In my view, the second key skill to develop in our difficult relationships is having the willingness to entertain, even the possibility, that you may not be right. Considering you might not be in the right comes down to intention - do you really want to learn about yourself? - do you really want to see the truth of the situation? - do you really want to be more wise and compassionate in your relationships? When looking within with honesty and acceptance, you may very well uncover a sense of resistance or unwillingness to face just how you’re feeling, especially if the feelings are unpleasant, e.g. embarrassment, regret or shame. This is where it's essential we develop a capacity to be ok with feeling discomfort or pain so we can face these emotions and learn from them. Considering that you may not be right equates to a willingness to try and see it from their side. And as we do that, we start to see beyond the behaviour to the person behind it and see that the difficult relationship takes place in the space in between, not solely in the other person.

In this meditation, I'll invite you to become aware of areas of discomfort or pain in your body and notice them for what they are - putting aside any critical, judgemental thoughts, and having a willingness to look with openness & honesty. This is a practice - a practice for real life. If we can learn to be with discomfort in the safe space of our meditation, and with ourselves, then over time that skill will spill out into our daily life and relationships.

Difficult relationships are uncomfortable and oftentimes painful. Thus, in learning to deal with the difficulty, it's first important to acknowledge the hard-wired human tendency of wanting to move away from pain, and second to learn to tolerate that discomfort or pain. For example, if you feel your blood boil, it’s really important to notice and acknowledge that your blood is boiling, rather than just ignore it or distract yourself. Once we can do that, we can start to work with the difficult feelings and start to bring more self-compassion and forgiveness to the situation. It's also important to recognise there is no ‘correct’ response to any given situation. Sometimes it's important to step back from the situation, sometimes patience and tolerance is what's needed, sometimes you must assert your boundaries. We now know what our default tendencies and habits are when faced with a difficult person, but as we become more aware of what's really happening, we can start to experiment with new ways of behaving that may be wiser and more compassionate.

In this meditation we explore the Zen koan of 'Nansen cuts the cat in two'. A koan is a question or vignette that points us towards finding a perspective of non-separation or non-duality. This koan is all about how to deal with conflict. The koan goes: Once the monks of the Western and Eastern Halls were arguing about a cat. Nansen, holding up the cat, said, “You monks! If you can say a word of Zen, I will spare the cat. Otherwise I will kill it.” No one could answer, so Nansen cut the cat in two. That evening, when Joshu returned, Nansen told him of the incident. Joshu thereupon took off his sandal, put it on his head, and walked off. Nansen said, “If you had been there, the cat would have been saved!”

Opinions are views, judgements or assessments formed in the mind about a particular matter, stored as a kind of shorthand so we don't have to continually reassess everything. That means opinions are necessarily predetermined and cannot relate to what is here and now. Opinions become troublesome when we lose sight of the fact that our opinions are just opinions - we become blinkered and stop being open to other angles and perspectives. We 'identify' with them by conflating the opinion with our sense of self. Some opinions are can be helpful, but we have to stay vigilant of even the helpful views in case they solidify into blind beliefs. The Buddha taught that clinging to one’s view of things only acts to confine us and leads to suffering, conflict and potentially very troublesome relationships. Dealing with troublesome opinions involves examining how we relate to them. We can explore the nature of change or impermanence when it comes to our opinions, and ask whether there is there a sense of fluidity with them. How willing are we to update our view when new information comes along?

A helpful metaphor when it comes to thinking about yourself in relation to your difficult people is that of a mountain range. When it's enveloped in cloud, you only see the mountain peaks. This represents our conventional perspective, where we perceive everyone as separate and distinct, and is the world of duality and discrimination. Discrimination is important, but it comes with a price because we think “I am different from you”. Imagine now, in the mountain-range metaphor, that the clouds clear away revealing the valleys that connect all the different mountaintops in one mountain range. This represents the understanding that you and I are not as separate as may seem. In Zen is referred to as our seeing our buddha nature. Shunning our troublesome people or getting angry with them arises from the perspective of separation or duality - that “I am different from you”. However, from the non-separate, non-dual perspective, we see the wisdom of being compassionate and having patience and tolerance toward our difficult people. This isn’t easy - that's why we practice all the things we've mentioned so far: stillness, awareness, reflection, deep listening, and most of all establishing our intention to want to learn about ourselves and how to become wiser in our relationships.