Turning the Mind into an Ally

It seems we all agree that training the body through exercise, diet, and relaxation is a good idea, but why don’t we think about training our mind? Working with our mind and emotional states can help us in any activity in which we engage, whether it’s sports or business or study—or a religious path. I’ve been riding most of my life, for example, and I love horses. When riding a horse, you have to be awake and aware of what you are doing each moment. The horse is alive and expecting communication, and you have to be sensitive to its mood. To space out could be dangerous.

Once when I was staying with friends in Colorado, I took one of my favorite horses, Rocky, on a trail ride through some back country. I had ridden Rocky before, mostly in the arena. He was very intelligent, but he didn’t know how to walk a trail. This was a new situation. I was leading the group, and that also made him a little nervous. I coaxed him over certain rocks and shifted my weight to indicate to him to go around certain others, but he kept stumbling.

We came to a narrow place in the trail. On one side was a steep shale cliff and on the other, a long drop into a river. Rocky stopped and waited for my direction. We both knew that one wrong move would plummet us into the river below. I guided him toward the gorge, subtly shifting my weight toward the high wall of shale. I thought that if he slipped, I could jump off and save myself.

The moment I shifted, Rocky stopped cold and craned his head around to look at me. He knew exactly what I was doing. I could tell that he was shocked and hurt that I was planning to abandon him. The look in his eye said, “You and me together, right?” Seeing how terrified he was, I shifted my weight back. He swung his head forward in relief and we negotiated the trail together with no problems.

On that ride, Rocky and I created a synergistic bond, a wordless rapport. It’s that kind of connection that I think we can all have with our own minds. In shamatha meditation—“peaceful abiding”—we train our minds in stability, clarity, and strength. Through this most basic form of sitting meditation, we discover that we can abide peacefully. Knowing our natural peace is the basis for any spiritual path—the beginning and the ground for anyone courageous enough to seek true happiness. It is the first step to becoming a buddha, which literally means “awakened one.” We all have the potential to awaken from the sleep of ignorance to the truth of reality.

Training our mind through peaceful abiding, we can create an alliance that allows us to actually use our mind, rather than be used by it. This is a practice that anyone can do. Although it has its roots in Buddhism, it is a complement to any spiritual tradition. If we want to undo our own bewilderment and suffering and be of benefit to others and the planet, we’re going to have to be responsible for learning what our own mind is and how it works, no matter what beliefs we hold. Once we see how our mind works, we see how our life works, too. That changes us.

That’s the point of talking about mind and meditation. The more we understand about ourselves and how our mind works, the more the mind can work. The Tibetan lesu rungwa means that the mind is functional. My father used to sometimes translate this as “workable.” It means that we can train the mind to work in order to use it to do something particular. For example, if we want to generate compassion and love, that’s work.

There is an old saying that bringing Buddhism to a new culture is like bringing a flower and a rock together. The flower represents the potential for compassion and wisdom, clarity and joy to blossom in our life. The rock represents the solidity of a bewildered mind. If we want the flower to take root and grow, we have to work to create the right conditions. The way to do this—both as individuals and as people in a culture in which the attainment of personal comfort sometimes seems to be the highest standard—is to soften up our hearts, our minds, our lives. True happiness is always available to us, but first we have to create the environment for it to flourish.

We might have a deep aspiration to slow down, to be more compassionate, to be fearless, to live with confidence and dignity, but we’re often not able to accomplish these things because we’re so set in our ways. Our minds seem so inflexible. We’ve been touched by the softness of the flower, but we haven’t figured out how to make a place for it. We may feel that our ability to love or feel compassion is limited, and that that’s just the way things are.

The problem for most of us is that we’re trying to grow a flower on a rock. The garden hasn’t been tilled properly. We haven’t trained our minds. It doesn’t work to just throw some seeds on top of the hard ground and then hope for the flowers to grow. We have to prepare the ground, which requires effort. First we have to move the rocks and hoe the weeds. Then we have to soften up the earth and create nice topsoil. This is what we’re doing by learning to peacefully abide in sitting meditation: creating the space for our garden to grow. Then we can cultivate qualities that will allow us to live our lives in full bloom.

A society of hard and inflexible minds is a society that is incapable of nurturing the flowers of love and compassion. This is the source of the dark age. We tend to question our goodness and our wisdom. When we question these things, we begin to use seemingly more convenient ways to deal with our problems. We are less ready to use love and compassion, more ready to use aggression. So we have to continuously remind ourselves of basic goodness. If we want to help alleviate suffering on our planet, those of us who can make our minds pliable must plant a flower on the rock. This is how we can create a society based on the energy we get from experiencing our own basic goodness. In Tibet we call this energy lungta, “windhorse.”

It is important to look at what actually works, what inspires people to meditate, to study, and to put the teachings into effect. As a lifelong student of meditation, I have a deep respect for its profundity as a spiritual path. I am interested in what people can really use in their life, and how to prepare people to truly hear the potency and depth of what an enlightened being like the Buddha has to say. I am grateful to my teachers for passing these teachings on to me, and grateful for the chance to share them with you.

The teachings are always available, like a radio signal in the air. But a student needs to learn how to tune in to that signal, and how to stay tuned in. We can begin the process of personal development now by including short periods of meditation as part of our everyday lives. Tilling the ground of our own minds through meditation is how we begin to create a community garden. In doing so we are helping to create a new culture, a culture that can thrive in the modern world and can at the same time support our human journey in an uplifted and joyous way. Such a culture is called enlightened society. Enlightened society is where the flower and the rock will meet.

The simplicity of that environment made it so clear that this is what most of us are doing: traveling from one place to another, searching for a lasting happiness. There’s an element of emptiness that we keep trying to assuage. We want to find something that feels good and makes sense, something solid that we can use as a permanent reference point. Wisdom might tell us that we’re seeking something we won’t ever find, yet part of the reason we keep looking is that we’ve never quite been satisfied. Even when we feel great happiness, there’s a quality of intangibility, as if we’re squeezing a watermelon seed. Yet day in and day out, year after year, and, according to traditional Buddhism, lifetime after lifetime, we don’t think beyond accomplishing the immediate desire to find the missing piece, the one that will bring us real happiness.

Since I’m a Buddhist, the Buddha is my role model for an enlightened being. He was a strong person with a healthy sense of self—a caring, clear-minded individual in harmony with himself and his environment. He saw how much suffering was present in the world, and he wanted to help. After following many different spiritual paths, he developed the strength, confidence, and motivation that he needed to meditate and rest in wisdom. This is how he awoke to the deepest meaning of reality and was able endlessly to help others do the same. He was a bodhisattva warrior—one who cultivates compassion and wisdom, who has the courage to live from the open heart. His journey shows us that we too can arouse our open hearts as a way to realize the meaning of being fully human.

The Buddha was born a prince. Because he seemed to have a spiritual bent, his father decided early on that it would be better for him not to get too curious about the world outside the walls of the palace. He didn’t want his only son going out to seek his spiritual fortune, which was a popular thing to do in India back then. So the king kept the world within the royal walls humming with all kinds of entertainment, activities, and sensual delights. The Buddha grew up with everything he needed, all within the walls of his own private world. When he was older, there were dancing girls and later a wife and baby. For a long time, he didn’t get to know the world beyond the walls. But then one day he rode out with a servant and saw sick people, old people, dead people, and a wandering ascetic. This completely changed his view. No longer could he live to simply take delight in the entertainments of the royal world, where his father had managed to keep from him the facts of life. His father’s worst fears came true, and the Buddha left the kingdom immediately. Dissatisfied with maintaining an illusion, he wanted to understand his life—and life itself. Just like the Buddha, most of us also would like to learn some basic truth about our lives and get a bigger perspective about what’s going on. The path of meditation offers us this possibility.