How accepting impermanence can end the struggle to “fix” your life

I am a Zen practitioner, and I'm an ordained Zen priest, and I'm a Zen teacher

I'm actually a Roshi, a Zen master. And so I meditate every day

I teach meditation here in the United States and actually internationally. It's a big part of my life

And what I find is that it is an enormous benefit in terms of how I think about my own life, other people's lives, how I think about my research, how I think about working with patients

Everyday Zen, mindfulness, impermanence and compassion. Zen emphasizes community. community. It's called Sangha in the Buddhist language. And it's really the idea that we

practice learning about ourselves and each other by being in relationships with each other

both during meditation sessions and out there in the world. So we practice with whatever comes up

for us. So if I get annoyed at my friend, I practice with that. I notice the annoyance. I

feel what it feels like in my body and in my brain. And I notice what I do with annoyance

And then I notice how my friend reacts to me when I'm annoyed. All these things are part of this

kind of deep dive into what is my experience like of being in a relationship? What's joy like

in a relationship. One of the principles of meditation is that if we really look at our own

lives, our minds are messy and chaotic, and we're not always proud of what we feel or what we think

and we come to accept all of that as just part of being human. And then what we realize is that

everybody is having the same experience. Everybody's minds are messy and chaotic, and

everybody has thoughts they're not proud of and impulses they don't like. And when we realize that

we come to have a lot more compassion for ourselves and for other people. There's a lot

more acceptance. The idea is that we move from a place of wanting the world to conform to what we

like and don't like. We move from that place to not needing other people to be different from who

they are, realizing that each of us is just showing up in the world as we are, and that's

something to be celebrated and accepted. Well, the main explicit goal of Zen is nothing

Zen is a practice. Now, the side effect of practice is waking up. Waking up really means

understanding more deeply the truth of what it means to be alive. The truth, for example

that everything is constantly changing, including me. That even the things that look like they are

fixed and stable are always in a process of continual change. That's really helpful because

often we try to fix things. We try to hold on to things and make them stay the same. And we suffer

a lot when we do that. So learning about the truth of what we call impermanence

relieves a lot of suffering that we inflict on ourselves. I would rate the concept of impermanence

as number one, as the greatest hit of Zen Buddhism. Basically, the idea of everything

constantly changing means that Bob has no fixed self or identity. Bob is always fluid. I am always

in the process of change. And I'm always connected with other people and other things in the world

that are themselves changing. And so there's nothing fixed. There's nothing to hold on to

in the deepest sense. And that on the one hand, that can be scary. On the other hand

it can be an enormous relief because we tell ourselves so many stories about who we are and

who we're supposed to be and how the world is supposed to be. And when we really know the truth

of impermanence, we let a lot of that go. One of the things that impermanence helps us understand

is the ebb and flow of all of our experience. So when we really get that everything arises and then

passes away, that means that my annoyance at this other person is only temporary. It's not going to

stay the same, no matter what. All you have to do is watch an emotion for long enough, and you'll see

that it changes. That's helpful when we're caught in the middle of some unhappy relationship

some unhappy argument or something going on with another person where we can fall back on that awareness that it is not going to feel this way forever In fact it probably not going to feel this way an hour from now

certainly not a day from now or a week from now. And keeping that long-term perspective of impermanence

can go a long way to make us feel more accepting of the ups and downs

of a relationship in any given moment. The Four Noble Truths are perhaps the most iconic teachings of the Buddha

They're translated in many different ways, but they start with the Buddha's statement that life is suffering

or better translated, I think, life is unsatisfactory, that there are always aspects to life that we don't like

and that that's an inevitable part of being alive. And then the second teaching is that the source of suffering is known, that it is greed and aversion or hatred and ignorance, that suffering can be relieved

That's the third truth. And the fourth truth is that there is a way of life that the Buddha called the Eightfold Path

that can help relieve all this suffering in life. It's often said that the Buddha was teaching that

you could get to a point where you never suffer anymore. Zen does not teach that. Zen does not

teach that anybody finally arrives at a place where we don't ever feel pain, where we don't

ever feel worry or unhappiness. Rather, what we can do is learn to be with what's unsatisfactory

in life, learn to be with unhappiness, even be with pain in a way that makes it more bearable

in a way that doesn't layer on optional suffering, the optional suffering being the stories we tell

about how unfair it all is, for example, that I have back pain, or how unfair it is that I've got

a cold today, that all of these things are workable. But Zen teaches that unsatisfactoriness

is always there in life, and that we do have preferences, that we're never going to completely

give up our preferences, but that what we can do is learn to cling less tightly to our preferences

In other words, to insist less that the world be a certain way. I mean, think about in relationships

how much we try to insist that someone else be a certain way that we want them to be

and how much less we suffer if we let that go and just assume that that person is allowed to show up

in the world as they are, and we're allowed to show up in the world as we are. So this idea of

relieving suffering is in Zen the idea of being able to face towards suffering, looking at it

and living with it in a way that hurts less. Buddhism talks about the idea of attachment

And it doesn't mean attachment in the way we normally think of it, like just being connected

to somebody or something. It's really about holding on tightly to a fixed view of something

So I'm attached to the idea that there's one true religion or one true political party or one true

anything. There's a wonderful teaching in Zen about beginner's mind. Beginner's mind being the

idea that we let go of all the stories we tell ourselves that we're so sure of, that, you know

we become an expert in life and an expert in ourselves. Shunryu Suzuki was a Zen master who

had a saying that I love. He said, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities

In the expert's mind, there are few. And what he meant by that is when we can remain open

to many possibilities, rather than narrowing everything down and being so sure that we know

what's what, that we become open to surprise, open to new ways of experiencing ourselves and the world

that make us suffer a great deal less than when we are so-called experts. And the older I get

and the more people call me an expert, the more aware I am of how little I know

Having a beginner's mind really helps in relationships because it allows us to be curious

It allows us to say, okay, there's so much I don't know about this person

Let me watch closely. Let me notice what I haven't seen before about this person

Let me find new ways to interact with this person And that brings a kind of freshness and openness to relationships that can otherwise easily get stale The best definition I know of mindfulness is simple It paying attention

in the present moment without judgment. So it's really just paying attention to whatever's here

So right now for me, that's talking with you. That's the feel of the chair on my back

It's the feel of the air on my skin. It's the sound of my voice kind of reverberating in my head

All of those things. And simply being open to all the experiences that are here right now

Not just the little thoughts going on in my head. And so mindfulness asks us to be more expansive

to open our awareness beyond thinking to everything going on in the world

You can work on it right now. You can work on your mindfulness right this moment

by simply paying attention to whatever stimuli are reaching you. It might be your heartbeat

It might be your breath. It might be the sound of the fan in the room

the traffic outside, anything, and simply letting yourself be open and receive whatever is here

right now. And you can do that in any moment. You can do that when you're sitting in a meeting. You

can do that when you're waiting for an airplane at the airport. You can do that when you're driving

your car. In fact, being mindful could be really useful when you're driving your car

when we really know what it feels like to suffer, to be in pain, to be unhappy, to be scared

We're better at knowing what's coming from inside, from me, and what's coming from outside

Many times we mistake those two. I come home and I don't realize that actually my knee hurts

and I find myself more irritated at my partner. And so one of the things that being really mindful

about my own experience does is it makes me a little less likely to blame other people

for what's going on in me. And that can be hugely helpful

when we talk about harmony in relationships. The other way that being mindful about my suffering

can help in my relationships is it helps me realize, oh, everybody suffers in this way. If I'm more irritable when I'm not

feeling well, that must mean that everybody's more irritable, most people are, when they're

not feeling well. And it allows me to remember to cut people slack when they're not feeling well

right, instead of just being annoyed that they're a little short with me. So there are these ways

that knowing about my own discomfort and what I do with it can be a huge help in being empathic

toward other people. There's a concept of metta loving kindness in Buddhism, and there are a

couple of different ways that it's talked about. One is an explicit skill that we can cultivate

You can do a loving kindness meditation where you think about another person and you meditate

on that other person and you say to yourself, may you be peaceful, may you be happy, may you be at

peace. And you do that over and over again and you come to feel differently about the other person

including about people you don't like very much or you're angry at. So there's that way of

actively cultivating a skill. There's another way, which is simply by becoming more and more aware

of your own pain, your own anxious, angry thoughts, your own difficulties. Because what happens when

we become more aware of that through meditation, for example, is that we become much more empathic

toward other people. And naturally, that kind of loving kindness arises where we see an angry person

and say, oh, I wonder if that person is having a terrible day

rather than immediately reacting with our own anger. That's a different way to cultivate loving kindness

but it happens pretty reliably through meditation. There's a lot of talk about enlightenment

It's a concept that's very old in Buddhism, but also in other spiritual traditions

and it can mean so many different things, but in my Zen tradition, it really refers to waking up to

the truth of what life is and to some of the surprising aspects of life that we don't normally

see most specifically the interconnectedness of everything the essential oneness of everything that yes on one level everything exists separately I exist separately from you And this chair exists separately from me And at the deepest level

none of it is separate. All of it is completely interconnected and always changing. That is

awakening to the truth of life. Now, enlightenment is often held out as a thing that we can get

And in fact, you can read accounts of people sitting in long periods of meditation, sometimes

on retreats, where they essentially have these amazing experiences. Sometimes they feel like

out-of-body experiences, and they can write elaborate descriptions of what these are like

and sometimes people feel like, well, if I just have those experiences

then I'm enlightened. And if I had those experiences once, I want them back

So I wanna try to get them back again. What we teach in Zen is that that's actually dangerous

that nobody lives in a kind of unusual, altered state all the time

Most of us never do. And if we have unusual experiences, it's very brief. An experience of, for example, complete interconnectedness and oneness cannot

last. In fact, one Zen teacher did a set of interviews with people who had had enlightenment

experiences, and he put them into a book, and the title of the book was After the Ecstasy

The Laundry. And what he meant by that was that no matter what kind of unusual experience we

might have of waking up, of enlightenment, we always go back to needing to do the laundry and

needing to brush our teeth and needing to go to work, that that is just how life is. So although

most of us, myself included, wish that there were a way to get enlightened and stay that way

to get to a place where it's always blissful and we never suffer, I have never met a human being on

this earth who gets to that place. And Zen teaching is that that's not possible. That in fact, we move

in and out of states of being more awakened or less awakened. That no matter how evolved you are

as a spiritual practitioner, you're going to have times when you're just all upset about stupid

stuff, when you're just deluded, as we say, and then you move back into periods where you see life

more clearly. That's important for me because if you meet people who hold themselves out as an

ultimately enlightened person, be very suspicious of that. Be very suspicious of anybody who claims

to be a perfectly evolved, enlightened human being. Shunryu Suzuki, a very important Zen teacher in the United States in the 20th century

was famous for saying that there's no such thing as an enlightened person

There is only enlightened activity. And what he meant by that was that no person is finally, fully, and forever enlightened

There is only this moment's activity. So if I do something that is kind, that pays attention to my interconnectedness with everyone and everything, that is enlightened activity

If I do something that's selfish, if I do something that destroys the planet, that is unenlightened activity

And so the idea of pursuing enlightenment really is not pursuing a self-improvement project

It's pursuing a way to be as compassionate as I can in each moment, to pursue enlightened

activity in as many moments as I can string together in my life

That's the goal. One fact about enlightenment is that it can't be permanent

If we really know the truth of impermanence, then why would enlightenment be permanent

when everything else is not. So clearly enlightenment has to come and go just like

everything else. Striving for enlightenment is a self-improvement project. And what we talk about

in my Zen tradition is that we don't want to embark on a self-improvement project. We want to

strive for greater kindness and harmony in the world, rather than being lost in the delusion

of an isolated, permanent self. And so really what we want to strive for is enlightened activity

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