Practice Can Help Us Ease Despair

In this dharma talk, we explore the way that the practice of coming into the present moment can help with feelings of despair. Despair is a story about our lives, and seeing through that story to what is here right now can ease emotional pain.

Transcript

Tonight,

I'd like to talk about what is so much in the air now,

Which is this sense of discouragement,

This sense of despair.

It seems to be something in my life that we start every conversation with these days.

How are you feeling?

How are you feeling about the world?

How are you feeling about your life?

And so,

As we did this weekend at Sashin,

Tonight we read the selection from Joan Tollefson from her book,

Nothing to Grasp,

About awakening to discouragement.

Again,

She says part of waking up is becoming sensitive to how we become discouraged,

How we close down,

And where we go for false comfort.

All of us have had these times of discouragement,

Which is a milder term,

Or of despair,

Of just the sense that there's no hope,

Nothing to do.

And of course,

Our practice is a practice of turning toward rather than turning away.

There are so many ways to reach for false comfort,

And we know that many of us do that.

Reaching for substances to cloud the mind,

Reaching for all the different things to which we can become addicted as a way not to feel the discouragement,

The despair.

A friend today was telling me he has a roof that's falling in,

A daughter who is in financial trouble,

A mother-in-law who is suddenly dizzy and falling down with no explanation.

And he said,

I don't think I can handle a visit from any more crises.

And so what do we do?

How do we practice when the practice tells us not to turn away,

Not to go for false comfort?

But do we simply drown in our despair?

Of course,

The first thing we do when we sit with it is we notice,

Where does it live in the body?

Where is this thing I call despair?

Do I feel it in my stomach?

Do I feel it in my head?

What happens to it?

And then,

Of course,

We look at the story that we tell,

Because the feeling of despair always comes with stories.

The demon who sits at the foot of my bed at 3 a.

M.

And tells me stories about my life,

The hopelessness of it,

All the wrong turns and mistakes.

And what practice asks us to do,

Even in the midst of this great discouragement,

Is to notice the stories we tell.

As Joan Tollefson was saying,

Notice the story of the person who can't do it right.

And of course,

The other truth that we see on the cushion is the truth of impermanence,

That this despair that I feel at 3 a.

M.

Most often is not there at 7 a.

M.

,

That impermanence is a fact of our emotional lives,

And it is a fact of the stories we tell,

As with everything else in the universe.

There's an interesting research study that illustrates this.

One thought to do a study of the people who tried to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco,

People who wanted to die.

And the question that the researcher asked was,

What happened to the people who didn't die?

What happened when their lives continued?

And what he found,

To everyone's astonishment,

Is that more than 9 out of 10 of those people who were sure they wanted to die and jumped off that great bridge,

More than 9 out of 10 lived into old age and died of natural causes.

And what that says is the truth of impermanence,

The truth that even the sense of despair that tells me I can't go on,

That changes.

So the other pointer from practice is that as we sit in the midst of the despairing feeling,

As we sit in the midst of the despairing stories,

That we widen the container,

That we don't push the despair away,

But we simply notice what else is here.

The sound of the airplane over my head right now,

The feel of the cushion on my butt,

Breath going in and out of my body miraculously without my doing anything.

And that word miraculous comes up whenever we widen the container,

Whenever we see what is not despairing,

What is not wrong,

What is here that is good and nurturing even in the midst of all that is difficult.

And finally,

We remember our vow as bodhisattvas to take care of all beings.

And so when we can rouse ourselves,

We find compassion for others.

And in taking care of others,

We lose sight of the me that's in despair.

There's a very moving story of a nurse who contracted COVID at the beginning of the pandemic.

And she was in the hospital with the illness.

And she chronicled her illness.

She took videos to show the world what was happening.

And she showed this to the world,

Even as she began to understand that she was dying,

That she was not going to get better.

Such a bodhisattva vow to take care of others in the world,

Even as she was losing her life.

And so we turn to the world because right now the world,

As it always is,

The world is burning.

The Buddha said it 2,

500 years ago,

And oh,

The world is burning now.

And it can seem as though this is the ultimate.

The world has never been in such chaos.

There is such reason to despair.

And I find I go to the place of giving up,

Of saying,

The world is falling apart,

Nothing will get better.

And then what I come to see,

As I practice with it,

Is my own delusive certainty.

When I am so sure of all that's falling apart,

And that it will never come back together,

I begin to understand my clinging to the certainty that I know what the future holds,

Rather than coming back to beginner's mind,

Not pushing away my terror at what's happening in the world,

But realizing that I don't know what's going to happen.

That my certainty about climate change,

My certainty about the Middle East,

All that is delusive.

And so again,

The invitation is to expand the container,

To notice what else is here.

And even expanding the container by reading history and noticing all the times when the world was about to end,

And then it didn't.

When the worst was about to happen,

And then something else happened instead.

Not turning away,

Not mustering some false optimism or false enthusiasm,

But simply knowing the importance of holding on to possibility,

Of holding on to beginner's mind.

Remember Suzuki Roshi's famous saying,

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities,

In the expert's mind there are few.

So the invitation in the midst of despair is to come back to beginner's mind.

And here as well,

We come back to the Bodhisattva precepts and come back to our intentions.

As I sit here in despair,

Whether it's about my life or about the world,

What are my intentions?

Can I hold on to the intention to relieve suffering,

Even as my heart tells me I want to give up?

And so when we come back to our intentions,

We come back to the four vows that we're going to make in a few moments,

As we do at the end of every evening.

These impossible vows where we vow to save all beings,

Where we vow to enter every Dharma gate,

Where we vow to end all delusions,

All stories,

And we vow to embody the Buddha 24-7.

Impossible vows,

But vows that we make over and over to return us back to the ground of just this.

And when we're here at the ground of just this,

What then?

What do we do?

Just being awake to the present moment as it is,

And seeing clearly what is happening,

This is transformative.

We are simply awake,

Here and now.

Thank you.

So now.

.

.

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