From Leo Babauta - How to Become Open to Life

I really liked the following article and hence sharing it here:

How to Become Open to Life

Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.’ ~Taisen Deshimaru

Post written by Leo Babauta.

In many ways, I close myself off to life in all its fullness. I close myself off to others, as a form of self defense.

It happens to all of us. When you left yourself open in the early part of your life, you likely would get hurt from time to time. That pain taught us to close ourselves off in different ways: don’t let others in, use humor to keep some distance, hurt others before they hurt you, back away from anything new, and so on.

I close myself off, and miss the world. I miss out on life when I do that.

And so I’m learning to become more open. It’s a slow process, but in many small ways I’ve learned a lot, and am much more open now than I’ve ever been.

What does it mean to be open? It means that I accept more of life without judgment, and am happier no matter what comes. It means I judge others less, criticize less, accept others more, and learn more about their wonderful particularity.

It means more than ever before I am fully experiencing life.

I’ll share a little about becoming open to life, and to others, in hopes that you’ll find it useful.

1. Judge less, accept more. It seems natural to judge others, but in doing so we close ourselves the truth about these people. The same is true when we judge all the things around us — we close ourselves to finding out more. If judgment is automatic, we should get off autopilot and be more conscious. When we notice ourselves judging, instead, pause, seek to understand, and then to accept. And then to love, and to ease suffering. We should let go of our expectations of everyone around us, and of the world around us, and accept people as they are, and see them as they really are. Does accepting mean we never change things? No, it means we don’t get upset, irritated, frustrated when things aren’t as we’d like them to be, but instead seek to ease suffering.

2. Let go of goals. Many of you know I’ve been experimenting with having no goals, but not everyone understands why. One of the biggest reasons is that when we set a goal, we limit the range of possibilities, because we are setting a fixed destination (the goal). For example, if you say, “I want to run a marathon in six months”, then you will focus your actions on the things it takes to get to that destination (marathon training). But what if someone asks you to go surfing when you’re supposed to do marathon training? Or a new race opens up that you didn’t realize would be there when you set your marathon goal — and it’s even better? If you remain fixated on your goal, then you’ll close yourself off to the surfing, or the new race. This is only one example — it becomes much more subtle (and less clear) when the goals are work goals, because the possibilities are so much broader and wide-ranging. I’m not saying you should never set goals (though that’s a possibility), but you should develop the flexibility to let them go depending on the changing circumstances of each day, each moment.

3. Recognize defense mechanisms. The defense mechanisms we build up over the years in response to painful experiences are many and varied. More importantly, we don’t realize they’re there most of the time, so they are automatic and thus powerful and hard to beat. So learn to recognize them. When you find yourself not doing certain things, ask why. Maybe it’s because you’ve had a bad experience in the past. When you find yourself hurting people, ask why. When you find yourself shutting people or experiences out, ask why.

4. Be like the sky. Suzuki Roshi had a great metaphor … the sky has substance (gases, dust, water), but it is open to accepting everything. This “empty sky” allows other things, like plants, to grow into it. Our mind should be like the sky — accept things as they are, not discriminating. By saying, “this is beautiful, this is not beautiful”, we reject some things. Instead, we can be empty. We can treat everything like it’s part of our big family. We can treat anything as if they were our hands and feet.

5. Watch your fears. Fears are the basis for our automatic defense mechanisms, and similarly, they have power when we don’t know they’re working, when they lurk in the backs of our minds in the dark. Fears close us off to others, to the world, to experiences. Watch your fears, by learning to be quiet, by listening to yourself talk in that quiet. Pay attention to the fears, shine a light on them, and they begin to lose their power. Then you’ll be freed to be open to new things, to anything.

6. Let go of control. We constantly strive for control — of others, of ourselves, of the world around us. Goals, planning, measuring our work, expectations and more — we try to control things in so many ways. Of course, we know that control is an illusion. It’s also a way of shutting out most of the world: if we can control the world, and the future, we are fixing the course of events … and shutting out other possible courses. What happens if we let go of that control? The possibilities open up.

7. Open hands. Walk about in the world with open hands. It’s a simple practice. Your hands are open, and they are empty, ready to receive the world and all that comes, as it is. Your hands aren’t closed,

‘Walking along the edge of a sword,
Running along an ice ridge,
No steps, no ladders,
Jumping from the cliff with open hands.’
~Zen verse

Satsangam

Satsang is usually the word used when people gather to hear a talk by a Swami / Swamin (what do we call a woman swami, besides 'mother'?), or a regular meeting of people reading / discussing religious / spiritual texts and matters. The word 'satsangam' means 'associating / union with good / truth' (sat + sangam). 

- There are some people with whom each moment spent or thought about is a satsangam. 

- One could feel, think and act in ways such that, as much as possible, it is satsangam for others to be with one. 

- This means that one needs to practice, practice and practice some more! 

- Sage Patanjali spoke about how such a practice should be in his Yoga Sutra (स तु दीर्घकाल नैरन्तर्य सत्कारादरासेवितो द्रुढभूमि: ।  - Practice, (which is the constant and repeated effort to remain with the object of focus) sustained for a long uninterrupted duration with the right mental focus and with conviction and devotion carried out in a proper manner becomes firmly established. (Verse 1.14)

- When such a constant and unyielding practice towards an ideal of satsangam is carried out, then it could be called satyagraha(!) which means 'holding onto truth'

The above were some of the thoughts that have taken some space since yesterday because we had a sudden satsang, and what a satsang it was. Swami Tyagananda is someone who is near to the truth of matters and even a short duration spent in terms of physical time space with him becomes timeless. I still remember an earlier satsang several years back when something he had said just stuck to me, and I had written about it in the introduction to this blog. 

He spoke a few powerful words yesterday, despite being jet-lagged and tired. They just have to be recorded somewhere and so here they are: 

1) Since he met my 10-month old daughter, the conversation naturally turned to children and growing up. So he shared this anecdote: A child is asked how old he was and he said that he was 5 years old. He was then asked how old his parents were, and he said "5!" much to the questioner's chagrin. Well, "they weren't parents before I was born, so they are 5-year old parents". As much as the child is new, the parents are new too!! This was such a new way of looking at the world from a child's perspective. 

2) He spoke of a book called Zen mind, the beginner's mind while talking about what it is to look at everything freshly, like a child. How many of us can look at that road, or the car on it, and look at it as if we are looking at it for the first time? How many of us can look at the same thing every time for the first time? Imagine, for that child, that car is altogether a new thing, she is looking at it freshly. Can we do that? 

3) Looking deeply into things led him to pointing at the table and asking, "what is this?" So we look at him dumbly, perplexed, and thinking, "Table, but of course! What about it?" Then, "isnt table a name and a form given to God? Isnt anything in the world a name and a form to identify it? What if we remove the name and form, dont we get God? This is knowledge blinding us. When we first see the table, God stands before us, however after that nanosecond, our knowledge puts the name and form on it and blinds us." This was a double whammy. 

So, what if we were to imagine all our categories as names and forms, and lump them all into one category called God, or Eternal bliss, or Light, or Self or Highest Source or whatever it is that one wants to call it. And teach students based on this category. What would we get?