How to Practice, Part II: Courage & Grace

If mindfulness begins with training our attention, what’s the recipe for its other components, courage and grace?

For me, it begins with stillness. I get quiet and sometimes lovingkindness shows up. But sometimes what appears is a parade of horribles: anger, jealousy, greed, and their buddies. And all I can do is cringe.

When that happens and I can stay put, it’s because of courage: that moment of feeling cringy, knowing I’m feeling cringy, and looking anyway. And staying with whatever the cringy thing is (anger, fear, sorrow) – dying to it, as Pema Chodron instructs. And in doing that, reinforcing and strengthening courage. And over time and with practice, porting that courage into the larger, tumultuous moment. 

That’s courage, and then there’s the attitude I’m trying to do all of that with, which is grace. Which is maybe just another name for love. Which means here’s my recipe, for right now: sit, look, cringe, keep looking anyway, love, repeat.  

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call #512. I hope you had a good Thanksgiving weekend. I especially hope you found a moment to summon whatever gratitude was available, and share it with whomever you could. Ours was a sweet time – we had two of the three kids plus their families, with my daughter’s family at the moment consisting of these two, great, big, gorgeous Husky-mix pups who brought a lot of joy and playfulness into the house and holiday. 

Before we looked at gratitude last time, and at “Why Practice” the time before, we’d been exploring the Eightfold Path, which is the fourth of the Four Noble Truths, and we’d been looking at Wise Mindfulness, the second step. The eight steps, you probably remember, are the three Samādhi steps that help us to cultivate stillness, attention, and love; the three Sila steps, about how to live an ethical life; and the two steps of Panna, or wisdom.

We’d been looking into how to practice Wise Mindfulness, working through the mindfulness definition of present moment attention, courage, and grace. We’d looked (briefly! – this is a huge and wonderful exploration in & of itself) at how to cultivate present moment attention through the Four Foundations of Mindfulness - mindfulness of the body, feelings, mind, and formations of the mind. Now let’s look at how to cultivate courage and grace.

Before the “how” about courage, I just want to say, courage is necessary. I don’t know about you, but when I sit down, 35+ years into my practice, I still see plenty of evidence of unskillful states of mind: greed, grasping, and clinging, by various more socially acceptable names and constructs; and hatred, too, often framed (by this mind) in more socially acceptable ways like as irritation or frustration. But they’re all the same graspy and aversive states of mind, as opposed to simply being with what is. Maybe they’re not the solid blocks of fire and ice they once were, but they’re present. 

So courage is required. Because otherwise we couldn’t bear it, or I couldn’t. I’d want to turn away or run away or jump off my cushion. There’d be an inner dialogue that ran something like, “Really, Judi, after all this time?” It would be easy to get discouraged - dis-couraged - that, yeah, yikes, here they are again, my old frenemies, greed and hatred. 

Knowing they might show up, or will show up, though, I can have my choice ready. I can get swallowed by those states and the thoughts that support them. I can not get swallowed but still hate that they’ve arrived again. Or I can follow Pema Chodron’s instructions and die to them. Really see them, acknowledge them, and agree that yes, here they are: here’s greed, again; here’s hatred, again, and not try to wish they hadn’t arisen or ignore them or hate that they’re there or fuel them. But that last choice requires courage.

In some ways it’s the difference between bravery and courage. Bravery is when we act without fear. We’re scared to death but we either deny the fear or stuff in our backpack or bury it in the yard, and then we draw our sword and charge. Soldiers are taught to be brave. Lawyers are, too. 

But where does it get us, all this not-attending to how things really feel, all this turning away from or denying the existence of our own afflictive emotions, feelings, sensations? Numb, in all directions, is where it got me, I can say. Not to a good place, I’d say. To a kind of auto-pilot life, because of course turning away from whatever is present is just turning away from whatever is present – it becomes a habit and then we turn away from everything: our anger and fear but also our joy. We kind of know this. Our practice points this out, if we’re paying attention.

Courage, on the other hand, is being terrified but knowing we’re terrified (or furious or shaken to our core) and deciding to see what’s arising in the moment – the fear, the sorrow; and then deciding to care, because, yikes, those moments of being with, of continually dying to whatever is present, can feel super challenging. And in my experience anyway, we can only learn to do that by doing it, over and over – being with whatever afflictive emotions, thoughts, sensations arise. Being with, being with, being with.

What Pema means, I think, and James has taught me, and I’ve heard in many different other ways, too, is that we do this by seeing and being with – we do this by summoning the courage to see and be with, and that it’s both as simple, and as profound, as saying, over and over, “this moment is like this.” I give in to this moment because it’s simply like this. It’s not other than this and it never can be other than this. 

And here’s the thing: when I’m sitting, in silence, in stillness, taking the opportunity to investigate what’s happening, I can feel safe. No one is there to read the thought bubble above my head or to criticize or chastise or hate me because I have hate, or greed. And so I can get used to being with these states, these sticky, uncomfortable, states, in those few safe moments. And this is training in courage. It’s not that I’m getting used to these states in order to encourage them to persist – part of the training is to abandon them, and I’ll say more about that in another Wake Up Call – but in learning, over and over, day after day, to be with my sticky, uncomfortable states, and surviving those moments – in dying to those moments – every day I’m creating a little more freedom from wanting things to be other than they are. I’m building courage (or you could also call it resilience) that then comes along, out into everyday life. So that when I look at the news, for example, I have the courage to be with the horror or fear that arises. When something happens at work, I can sit, look, and be with whatever or whoever is feels so challenging.  Courage becomes portable and enables me to bear the world because every day, I’m practicing bearing the microcosm of “world” that arises and passes away on my very own cushion in my safe little space. So this is the training in courage, as far as I can tell.

Training in grace is not a different thing; it’s just the next step. Training in grace is deciding how to relate to the things I summon the courage to see and be with and die to. And so on the cushion in a safe spot at home, I remember – as often as I remember to remember – to say to myself, “Since this moment can only be what it is, it’s beautiful just as it is, and so am I.” So maybe the word isn’t only grace; maybe it’s also love.

So that’s what I’ve got for how to practice: present moment attention, courage by learning, over and over, to be with the truth of what is, and grace, or really, loving whatever and whoever is part of the truth.