An edited and expanded version of a Dharma talk given at Eugene Buddhist Priory, January 2024.

For those of you who are familiar with my talks and writing, it won’t be a surprise to you that I am going to begin with the eight worldly conditions, or ‘worldly winds’ that we find in the Pali Canon. They are gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and disgrace, and praise and blame. Know that these worldly winds come with the territory of being human—they are non-negotiable. We tend to go through our lives pushing away/avoiding pain, for example, and grasping onto pleasure; seeking after praise and avoiding blame.

The end of suffering begins when we can understand that pain (and blame and loss and disgrace) are not aberrant conditions in need of transformation or redemption. Suffering arises when we want things to be different from how they actually are, when we are unable to embrace the completeness of our life—joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain—as one. We are not going to get rid of our pain, yet do we need to suffer? In fact, the goal must not be how to get rid of the pain in our lives, but rather how to be curious about it. How do we carry our pain and what does that tell us? How is this particular story painful? Where does the pain reside?

What prompted me to look at this with fresh eyes is Megan Devine’s book, It’s Okay that You’re Not Okay: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand. Devine calls out the ‘culture of blame’ that is key to our Western understanding of the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain. For example, some believe that if your prayer is not answered, if you are not cured of a disease or protected from harm, then you are not blessed by God (usually due to bad behavior). It is your fault, the blame is ultimately on you.

We may pride ourselves as Buddhist and say, well, we don’t do that, there is no punishment from a God. But look more closely. Victim blaming is pervasive in Western Buddhism as well. This arises from what Devine calls “the current cult of positivity fueled by New Age thought, yogic misunderstanding, and misinterpreted Eastern religion.”

I have heard myself say more than once that we cannot control what happens in our lives, but we can choose how we respond, that the response is what’s important. I believe there is truth to this, and yet hidden inside what seems like encouraging advice to take charge of your emotions and of your life is that same culture of blame. It’s the avoidance of pain clothed in positive, pseudo-spiritual speak: “You create your own reality.” “It’s intention that matters.” “It’s okay, suffering helps you grow.” “See it as a gift.” “View your pain as an opportunity.” (Any of this familiar?) It is coming back to, maybe oh so subtly, the idea that if something is wrong in your life, it’s because you’ve done something wrong or that you are engaging in deluded thought.

Devine calls this the ‘tyranny of positivity.’ It is your responsibility to put a positive spin on things no matter how painful they are—frequently in terms of, “This will help you grow.”—and if you are unable to do that, then you haven’t delved deeply enough, or don’t truly understand the Teaching. Again, the blame is on you.

Sadness, grief, pain do not mean that you got it wrong. They mean that you are alive. They do not mean your Buddhist practice is shallow and inadequate. Sometimes life is painful. Things happen that are horrific. There is loss and the grief that comes with loss. No need to put some kind of happy or growing or spiritually-evolving spin on it. It’s the avoidance of pain, doubt, discomfort, loss that brings suffering. One of the meanings of ‘spiritual bypass’ is to put an intellectual, pseudo-spiritual spin on things so that you can bypass the inherent difficulties of being this being, in this body, at this particular time. We bypass reality for some imagined ideal. Spiritual bypass at its core is to pretend that things are different than they actually are.

Devine says this beautifully when she writes:

We’ve got this idea that being a ‘spiritual’ or ‘evolved’ person means we aren’t upset by anything. We hide out in claims to be above pain, or decide we’re skilled in Eastern ideas of ‘nonattachment’; therefore it’s unevolved to be upset about anything worldly. Remaining calm and unaffected in any situation is a sign of our spiritual and emotional development.

We’ve got this idea that spiritual practices, in and of themselves, are meant to take away our pain and put us in a place of equanimity. We believe that’s what those tools are for: to make us feel better.

It’s a misuse of so many beautiful teachings to force them into roles they were never meant to play. Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They’re meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That’s not at all the same thing as making your pain go away…

The way to get through the pain of being human is not to deny it, but to experience it. To let it exist. To let it be, without stopping it up or holding it back, or in our newer, more modern forms of resistance, by claiming it isn’t ‘evolved’ to be in pain. That’s garbage. It’s elitist. By the same token, you don’t ‘allow’ pain so that you can go back to a normative baseline of happiness. You allow pain because it’s real. Because it is easier to allow than to resist. Because being with what is is kinder, softer, gentler, and easier to bear—even when it rips you apart. Because bearing witness to pain, without shutting it down or denying it, is enlightenment. Your emotional resilience and intelligence have to be quite secure to be able to hold your gaze on the reality of loss.

Whatever faith or practice you claim, it shouldn’t force you to rise above your pain, or deny it somehow. If anything, practice often makes you feel more intensely, not less. When you are broken, the correct response is to be broken. It’s a form of spiritual hubris to pretend otherwise.¹

This is so, so important because many of us, including myself, add to our pain by believing that if we were spiritually mature, we wouldn’t feel like this, we wouldn’t suffer loss or grieve. We would somehow be unmoved by our experience. Who says that? Who believes that? More importantly, who would want to be that person?

The life we have is transitory and fleeting, ever-changing: light and darkness, joy and sorrow are born together. Kobayashi Issa, Japanese Buddhist and poet (1763-1828) speaks of this in his haiku written after losing three infants to disease:

This dewdrop world,
is a dewdrop world,
and yet, and yet.²

Yes, Issa is saying, I do understand the transitory nature of existence, and yet. Everything is held by this and yet. All the spiritual acceptance and understanding in the world cannot eliminate and yet—the and yet of sorrow. It is with us. And yet underlies our interdependence, carries with it compassion and generosity, and grounds us in what it means to walk the Earth as a living, breathing human being.

How do we hold the suffering of the world? With equanimity, without turning away, without casting it out or philosophizing it away. We tend to think of equanimity as being perfectly calm, undisturbed by what is around us: there are no waves in the ocean. I believe this is a misunderstanding. We are not blank slates, cannot be blank slates even if we wished to—sitting in meditation, reflecting the world as if a mirror, yet not of the world. We are of the world. Then, how do we view it?

Koun Franz of Thousand Harbours Zen in Nova Scotia has an interesting take on this. He asks, “What does holding the suffering of the world mean in terms of equanimity?” Franz goes on to speak of the idea of congruence. That is, there is no gap between the kind of person you want to be and the way that you act. In Franz’s view, congruence is the antithesis of defensiveness—things are as they are and we join them without defending the self. Or put another way, equanimity is present when your actions are in accordance with the Precepts.

I feel moved, know profound joy and profound sadness when there is no resistance between self and the Precepts. If we let go of this idea of what equanimity might look like, I think it looks like congruence, it looks like the antithesis of defensiveness. It isn’t that we aren’t touched, it is that we are. Our hearts are broken, completely. What makes it equanimity is that we don’t fight that. It is the fight within ourselves, the question of can I take it, can I handle this, should I be pulling myself together? – that’s when equanimity is lost. That’s when we are thrown off balance. We step back from what is authentic. We step back from what is real. Can we learn as a bodhisattva to come to the world in all its complexity and all of its pain without anything to protect in ourselves, without any resistance to being there? How do we hold the suffering of the world with equanimity? We say yes to the suffering of the world. We agree to it. We let our hearts be broken.³

Devine, a psychologist and grief counselor, and Franz, a Zen Buddhist priest and teacher, end in the same place: let your heart be broken. That may be where suffering and authentic practice come together.

Notes

1. Devine, Megan, It’s Okay that You’re Not Okay: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand. Sounds True: Boulder, CO, 2017, pp. 49-51. Note in particular, Chapter 4: Emotional Illiteracy and the Culture of Blame.
2. MacKenzie, Lewis: The Autumn Wind: A Selection from the Poems of Issa, Kodansha Amer Inc; 1984.
3. Franz, Koun, Thousand Harbours Zen, Zen Nova Scotia, Talk n. 242, Equanimity and Congruence, available as a podcast.