Had a great day out at Whittier Narrows Park on Sunday celebrating Vesak….

see the full collection of pictures over on Google+

Kristopher Freedain – Google+ – Had a great day out at Whittier Narrows Park on Sunday…..

Training the Untrained Mind – An Excerpt from The Misleading Mind by Karuna Cayton

Training the Untrained Mind

An Excerpt from The Misleading Mind by Karuna Cayton

Mind training is essential to Buddhism. In essence, it is the path the Buddha advocated in his Fourth Noble Truth. And yet, as I’ve said, mind training is not necessarily a religious or spiritual practice. It does not rest on accepting certain religious beliefs or adopting particular terminology. It can be used successfully as an entirely secular practice, or it can be incorporated as a deliberate spiritual practice within any religion, whether you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or something else. You can be a businessperson, schoolteacher, or a stay-at-home mom or dad and still practice mind training. Naturally, the ideas behind mind training, or the explanations of mind the Buddha presented in his first three Noble Truths, are equally essential no matter our place in life. Training and theory go hand in hand. So, as you read the rest of the book, keep practicing the mind training methods this chapter describes, and as you practice, keep reading to steadily improve your understanding and success.

As we begin, I want to share a wonderful and amusing historical anecdote that captures what the practice is all about and how transformative it can be. From the seventh century, Buddhism flourished in Tibet, but in the ninth century, it declined as a result of a ruthless Tibetan king who aimed to destroy Buddhism in his country. Then, in the early eleventh century, Tibetan Buddhism began a regeneration. This was marked by increased travel between Tibet and India, as key Tibetans traveled to India for instruction, and many Indian masters were invited to Tibet. Foremost of these Indian masters was Lama Atisha, a well-known scholar and practitioner who was one of India’s principal teachers of mind training. Lama Atisha was invited personally by the current king to spearhead the reestablishing of Tibet’s rich Buddhist cultural and religious tradition. Initially, Atisha committed to staying in Tibet for three years, but he was so well-loved by Tibetans that he remained for a total of twelve years, finally passing away in Tibet.

One reason for Atisha’s long initial commitment was because travel from India to Tibet was not easy. You had to negotiate hot, disease-infested jungles, eighteen-thousand-foot Himalayan passes, and inhospitable tribes and bandits. The trip took months to prepare and months to complete, involving dangers and hardships we can barely imagine today. Among the party traveling to Tibet was Atisha’s personal cook, who was known as a very difficult person to get along with. And indeed, the Tibetans found him rude, crass, and unfriendly. But even worse, the cook’s terrible behavior did not merely extend to the Tibetans but even to Atisha himself. The Tibetans just could not understand why Lama Atisha would keep such an unsavory person as his cook. Wasn’t travel hard enough?

However, Atisha never showed any sense of intolerance, anger, or embarrassment over his cook’s behavior. Then as now, traveling can sometimes bring out the worst in people, and the Tibetans were impressed that Atisha showed only affection for the cook.

Finally, though, they couldn’t stand it, and they asked Atisha why he did not fire the man and send him back to India. Lama Atisha replied, “He is not just my cook; he is my teacher of patience.”

With that one simple statement, Lama Atisha demonstrated to the Tibetans and to us the entire concept of transforming one’s inner experience through mind training.

Embracing Our Problems

It would be a mistake to interpret Lama Atisha’s remark as a glib attempt at humor. He was not making the best of a bad situation. Atisha was speaking the truth: he regarded the cook as his teacher, and he deliberately chose to keep this difficult man close to him. Amazingly, Lama Atisha chose to make his life harder than it needed to be.

This exemplifies the first aspect of mind training. Rather than being another way to avoid or escape problems, mind training freely embraces problems. Not only that, as Lama Atisha indicated, we must actively seek and engage our problems, rather than wait for them. Only in this way can we learn how to avoid suffering. In his case, Lama Atisha’s “problem” wasn’t the cook; it was his own feelings of anger or frustration stimulated by the cook’s behavior. In his response to his Tibetan traveling companions, Atisha did not deny that the cook was insufferable. Instead, he was indicating the primary thrust of mind training: it is a method of handling any emotion that disturbs us so that we retain our balance and sense of inner peace.

There are numerous techniques to help us do this, but they revolve around a few basic principles: training our mind not to be “attached to” or “influenced by” our emotions, desires, or perceptions, and learning to transform negative emotions into their positive counterparts. In Lama Atisha’s case, through his cook, he was practicing replacing anger with patience.

An important distinction with mind training is that it is not “reframing” or just a faith-based feel-good trick. Therapists, for ex-ample, use reframing as a common technique in therapeutic practice, and sometimes it can be quite helpful for the client. Looking on the bright side, seeing the glass as half full, identifying the beneficial lessons in an otherwise hurtful relationship: This can be a good, positive approach. But this is not mind training, and “reframing” has limited long-term usefulness. Oftentimes, reframing can feel contrived. Someone, some other, higher authority or code of belief, tells us how to feel, and so we try, even if we lack real conviction. Reframing can sometimes be illogical; it denies the truth of one’s experience. We may be asked to imagine that a person who deliberately hurt us didn’t really mean to hurt us. In mind training, the intentions and motivations of others, although relevant, are not the primary focus. We are concerned with our point of view and its accompanying response.

Similarly, when a terrible accident occurs, we are sometimes asked to see it as “God’s will” or “punishment for our sins” or the workings of “karma.” Not only does this fail to explain events, but it overlooks the real problem: how we should deal with our feelings of grief, rage, and disbelief. I consider it “reframing” when we are asked to take the goodness of the universe on faith. Don’t get me wrong: faith is important. Indeed, the reasons for events often escape human understanding, and the world is unpredictable. Ultimately, these difficult, existential truths are what mind training helps us to cope with. Ultimately, in Buddhism, mind training is a spiritual practice in the sense that its goal is to awaken our inner potential.

However, that is not where the beginner starts. Instead, we start by accepting the counterintuitive notion that we must use our problems to solve our problems. Problems provide the resistance that helps us exercise our minds. When problems appear, instead of avoiding them, we confront, understand, and eliminate all of those unhelpful emotions and thoughts that arise because of them and that have run our life since the day we were born. In truth, we are merely “retraining” the mind. Just the idea that we can change and transform our everyday existence is quite encouraging by itself. It is in this way that, in training our mind, we become our own therapist and are, by my definition, spiritual practitioners. When we work with transforming our mind at more advanced levels, we actually look forward to confronting our problems, just like Lama Atisha. Why? Because we understand that the problematic conditions of the world will never go away. It is simply the nature of life. All we can do is get better at handling them. We understand that even if we are calm and happy today, something will happen tomorrow to challenge us and throw us off. Perhaps it will be an unexpected bill, or a medical problem, or a painful buried memory lying under the surface of our conscious mind that arises at the drop of a hat…like a rear-end collision that comes out of nowhere while we sit at a red light. The rather unconventional, “in your face” Buddhist approach of mind training is to courageously confront all of our dirty little secrets and difficult emotions whenever they come up until we’ve changed the nature of our relationship with them. Then, instead of being bossed around by our worst tendencies and disturbed emotions, we become the boss of our own mind.

KARUNA CAYTON, psychotherapist and author of The Misleading Mind, spent twelve years working with Tibetan refugees in Nepal and studying with Buddhist masters. His Karuna Group practice applies Buddhist psychology to individual and organizational clients. He lives in Northern California. Visit him online at www.thekarunagroup.com.

Printed with permission from New World Library.

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I am currently reading ‘The Misleading Mind’ by Karuna Cayton and can tell you this, so far, it is a great book. It seems like the author will be able to reference real life scenarios for the 4 Noble Truths, and I have hopes he will lead that same process into the Noble Eightfold Path; something that seems rare for non-monastic authors these days. High hopes for the rest of the book!

I plan on my own review as soon as I am able to get through the rest; life has not been allowing me to read as much as I would like to lately. I will do my best to post the review soon.

Guys night out with my best buddy

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Momma had ladies night out with a few friends last night, so Ian and I went and had some fun at Boomers.

First up, a round of mini-golf. We both got a hole-in-one on the 12th hole!

Next was a race on the cart track. Definitely favorite part of the evening with Ian screaming “this is like real life Mario Kart!!!” as we raced around the track. Even with another car tailing us, we came in first place. Even lapped two other single drivers.

After that, dinner. No comment on the food, but good conversation.

Lastly we finished the night with video games (of course).

Fun times!

Buddha Vacana ~ a highly recommended app for your smartphone

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88. And how do disciples conduct themselves towards a teacher with love, not hostility? Concerning this, the compassionate teacher teaches the Dhamma to disciples, seeking their welfare, out of compassion, saying: “This is for your welfare and happiness.” His disciples listen to him, lend an ear, prepare their minds for profound knowledge, they do not turn aside or move away from the teacher’s instructions. Thus do disciples conduct themselves towards a teacher with love, not hostility.
Therefore, conduct yourselves towards me with love, not hostility, and it will be for your welfare and happiness for a long time. I shall not treat you as does the potter damp clay. Repeatedly admonishing I shall speak, repeatedly testing. One who is sound will stand the test.

Majjhima Nikaya III.117-118

Shared via Buddha Vacana for Android
www.buddhavacana.net

This is from an app I have enjoyed for years on my iPhone and am very much enjoying on my Droid as well. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Dharma.

Equanimity

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Sitting at the park today while the little man plays with a couple of kids he just met. I’ve always found it completely wonderful how children have this ability. At the same time, I can’t help but be baffled by how as adults, more often than not it seems, we somehow lose this ability. There is an old saying that goes something like ‘put kids in a sandbox and they’ll play together regardless of race, gender, religion, or anything. It’s not until outside influences come in do they begin to care or see differences.’

Our children can re-teach us a lot about equanimity.

Resolutions and the precepts

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The following is an article I wrote for the recent issue of Buddha’s Light Magazine of Los Angeles. BLMLA is a bi-monthly newsletter available at Hsi Lai temple that I am fortunate to be involved with.
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As we celebrate the end of 2011, many of us will work to try and make New Year resolutions. At times, these can be beneficial, and others, we add a layer of unnecessary stress and worry to our lives. Statistically, we as humans do not have a great track record of keeping these resolutions. I have read that upwards of 80% of those that attempt New Year resolutions fail.

When we take a step back from all of this as Buddhists, one realizes we can look to our precepts as resolutions that help us year-round. Upon accepting the 5 Precepts, one makes the commitment to:

The First Precept Is to Refrain from Killing
The Second Precept Is to Refrain from Stealing
The Third Precept Is to Refrain from Sexual Misconduct
The Fourth Precept Is to Refrain from Lying
The Fifth Precept Is to Refrain from Consuming Intoxicants

As Venerable Master Hsing Yun says:

“Observing the five precepts is a lifetime undertaking, and not something one does for only twenty-four hours. The five precepts can be undertaken and observed all at once or done so in stages. We can select the one or two precepts that are the easiest to observe, according to our own situation, and then we can practice the precepts more diligently with three or four, till we gradually reach the full five precepts.”

I think it is crucial to note a key point Venerable Master Hsing Yun makes in this statement, “according to our own situation”. When I took the precepts, I worked to observe all five of them at once. This was years ago, and it is still something that keeps my practice going, and something that needs constant work.

In the simplest of terms, the precepts can even mean:

Instead of killing that spider in your bathroom, catch it and let it outside.
Before taking the last helping of a meal, ask others in your household if they mind.
Staying true to your partner and not looking for love elsewhere.
Being truthful about accomplishing what one needs to do around the home.
Not having a drink when others may be during dinner.

Over time I have understood they can be observed differently according to your life. They may even change how you practice them when your own life changes. But, when practiced with diligence and sincerity, the 5 Precepts are really steps on the path to freedom for our delusions. What better resolution can you take than working towards that.

Pinewood Derby

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This past weekend, the little man had his Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby race. This is an extremely fun event that we’ve looked forward to since last year. Each year, he draws out his plans for the shape of the car, then using a saw and a Dremel (borrowed from my friend Tony) we work on cutting out his racer:

Next is a lot of sanding. He does all of this by hand. I feel it is really important for him to do a lot of the design and work, part of the experience is learning to take pride in the work you put into something. If he designs and helps build a car, then sees his own creation race down the track he can see the results of his own effort.

Next, the little man paints his car. His latest ~~obsession~~ love is LEGO Ninjago, so of course he designed a paint job around that theme. It turned out great too.

Last, he and I work on the wheels and axles. I’m not going to give away any trade secrets here, but let’s just say it is all about ensuring the least amount of resistance when speeding down the track.

Here is a great shot of him and Momma on our way to the races.

Weighing in, adding just the right amount of weight to ensure maximum speed

Ready to check the car in. Once it’s checked in, the pit crew can no longer touch the car!

We had a great time watching his car speed down the track. He won every race he was in!!! Watch him leave the competition in the dust

After round 1, he was a very happy man

We enjoyed watching each race, seeing his efforts continue to speed past other racers. And, at the end of the rounds, he had 1st place in his age group!