The Buddha Walks into a Bar . . .: A Guide to Life for a New Generation

INTRODUCTION

This isn’t your grandmother’s book on meditation. It’s for you. That is, assuming you like to have a beer once in a while, enjoy sex, have figured out that your parents are crazy, or get frustrated at work. It’s a book that doesn’t put Buddhism on some pedestal so that you have to look up to it. It’s about looking at all the nooks and crannies of your life and applying Buddhist teachings to them, no matter how messy that may be.

Do you have to become Buddhist to like this book? Hell, no. Whatever wisdom lies within these pages is a result of excellent instruction on the part of my teachers and my own process of trial and error. The Buddhist dharma, or teaching, is not meant to be looked at as some obscure tome that needs to be dissected and analyzed. It is meant to be lived. So don’t feel like you have to be Buddhist to get into this thing, you just have to have lived a little and be willing to look at your life from a new point of view.

Next question: Do you have to change your life to live the truths of this book? Hell, no, again. This book is for anyone who has ever said, I’m spiritual, or If I’m anything, I’m Buddhist. It’s about taking these traditional teachings that have been tried and tested over thousands of years and saying, I am going to try to live my day with a bit more compassion, or, I’m going to slow down a bit and enjoy my life. You don’t have to change you. You are great. This book is just about how to live your life to the fullest.

In it we explore the four dignities of Shambhala and the three yanas, or vehicles, of traditional Tibetan Buddhism. I’ll offer what I know, but the rest is up to you. It is you who has to go out and live your life with mindfulness and compassion. You already know this. After all, true wisdom comes from within you. What this book provides is a series of tools to access that wisdom. We’ll get into simple practices, advice, and teachings that can help you align yourself with your personal moral compass, the dignity of your own heart.

So if you want to be more in the now, read this book. If you want to change the world, read this book. If you want to be a meditator and still enjoy a good drink, read this book. I wrote it for you. When you’re done, drop me a line. I truly want to hear what you think.

Lodro Rinzler

June 2, 2011

PART ONE

FIRST, GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER

1 / YOUR LIFE IS A PLAYGROUND

If you have not tamed the enemy of your own anger

Combating outer opponents will only make them multiply.

Therefore, with an army of loving-kindness and compassion,

To tame your own mind is the practice of a Bodhisattva.

—Ngulchu Thogme

When I was young I had an alarm clock shaped like a Japanese samurai, with a sword in his hand and a clock in his belly. For the ten years it worked, I would wake up every morning with the sound of a warrior yelling in Japanese, Wake up! Wake up! It is time for the battle!

For many of us, life does feel like a battle. Our first instinct in the morning is one of self-protection, wanting to burrow back under the covers instead of facing the day. This is because we often view our daily routine as just a way to get by in life—pay the bills, find a romantic relationship, maintain our friendships, nurture our family life—and at the end of the day we are exhausted by our struggle to keep it all together.

We spend so much energy constantly trying to keep up with voice mail, e-mail, junk mail, bill mail, females, or males. Instead of engaging these various aspects of our life with an open mind, we schlep our way through them and cling to our escapes: we chew our nails, drink beer, have sex, shop online, or go to the gym. Some of us might even be able to multitask and do all of the above at once. Although we try our hardest, we know that at the end of the day there is always another thing we should do, and yet we have taken so little time to take care of ourselves.

This is when meditation is especially useful. Meditation practice is first and foremost about learning to be present and appreciate the world around us. It helps us view the world not as a battlefield, but as fertile ground to practice being openhearted and awake. Buddhist teachings show us that the only thing keeping us from being truly present with our world is a strong hang-up on our habitual way of looking at things.

Most of us have a set routine that gets us through our day. Somewhere along the line, we solidified that routine into a way of life. The question then becomes, Is it working? Day by day, we may find ourselves getting restless with the same classes or job, the same relationship, the same hangouts or hang-ups, and we long for some radical change.

However, it is not our world that is necessarily problematic; it’s our point of view. It has been said that enlightenment is merely things as they are before we color them with our hopes and fears. If we could relax our idea of the way things should be and appreciate them as they are, then the world would be magically transformed into a rich ground of possibilities.

In the years I have been teaching Buddhism, I have often been struck by the incredible diversity in the sort of people who show up on the doorstep of meditation centers. Despite race, age, or economic class, the one unifying factor seems to be that none of them are entirely satisfied with their life as it currently stands. More often than not, they have tried everything else to make life more fulfilling—the new drug, the new job, the new car, the new romance—and yet none of it has brought a happily-ever-after scenario.

The Buddhist word for the cycle of suffering we find ourselves in is samsara. Samsara is everything from being uncomfortable because you have a hangnail, all the way to losing a beloved friend or family member. It is the fact that we long for what we don’t have, and that makes us unhappy. It is the fact that when we get what we longed for, we’re already thinking about something new that could entertain us.

Samsara is fueled by hope and fear. We hope we will do well at work, but fear we’ll upset our boss. We hope to go to the beach, but fear rain. Extreme hope and fear can sometimes ruin an experience because we have spent so much time in our head agonizing over what could possibly happen. Having acknowledged that external factors may not bring lasting happiness, most people are inspired to look within for change, but most of us have no idea how to begin.

This general dissatisfaction is what the Buddha taught about when he opened his mouth for his first sermon ever. He didn’t say, Here’s the plan, guys. Do X, Y, and Z, and you too will glow just like me. Instead he said, Listen. You guys are unhappy, right? Let’s analyze that. He then went on to point out that we suffer because we don’t know much about who we are. The good news is that he said there can be a cessation to this whole restless-life syndrome and he laid out a path for us to explore ourselves and find our own way to awakening the heart and mind. That path is one of meditation and good conduct.

Meditation is a simple tool for self-reflection, yet it has tremendous power. While it does not offer you the cure-all to transform your life, meditation definitely has the power to transform your mind and heart, making them more expansive and more able to accommodate the obstacles you face on a daily basis. The more expansive your mind and heart, the more you are able to engage your world without life feeling like a battle.

There are three stages people go through as they enter into meditation practice. The first one could be described as the Where did all these thoughts come from? phase. We are so used to our hectic way of life that the simple act of sitting down to meditate and being present with our breath shows us that a waterfall of thoughts is pouring through us at light speed. We have never taken the time before to look inward, and it is shocking to find the quickly shifting tones of passion, anger, confusion, loneliness, and multiple variations thereof going through our head.

The basic technique of meditation is to take an upright posture, connect with our body, and focus our mind on the breath. The breath serves as an anchor, lodging us in this very moment, the present experience. That sounds simple enough, but after a few moments we begin to notice our mind drifting off to a conversation we had earlier that day, or forming a checklist of things we need to do the moment we are done meditating. When these thoughts come up, we are instructed to acknowledge them, not as good or bad, but just as thoughts, and bring our attention back to the physical sensation of the breath. If it is helpful, we can even mentally say thinking to ourselves in order to acknowledge that we are not doing anything horrible, and that we have the ability to return to the breath.

In one half-hour meditation session, we could have a wide variety of thoughts. Often in the Where did all these thoughts come from? phase, people get frustrated because they feel like they are not getting anywhere or that meditation does not work for them. Meditation has worked for numerous average-Joes-turned-meditation-masters over thousands of years, but you, you’re most likely hopeless, right?

One of the beautiful things about Buddhism is that it does not worship Buddha as a god or deity, but instead celebrates the Buddha as an example of a normal person like you and me who applied a good deal of discipline and gentleness to his meditation practice, and ended up opening his mind and heart in a very big way.

When the Buddha was in his twenties, he wasn’t some great enlightened master. His name was Siddhartha Gautama, and he lived at home with his father. He had a wife that he married at an early age, and before he knew it they had a son. He was also just discovering how sheltered he had been growing up, because it was only in his twenties that he first encountered suffering in the form of sickness, old age, and death. Not unlike most of us in our twenties, he didn’t like what he saw in the world, and endeavored to find a way to change it.

Siddhartha Gautama, who I imagine was known as Sid by close friends and family, was inspired to pursue a spiritual life away from home. He went to great extremes to starve himself and live in harsh conditions in the name of holiness, as if he wanted a radical change from his cushy upbringing. Ultimately he discovered that by not being too indulgent or too hard on himself, he could tread a middle way where he could be kind to himself, practice meditation diligently, and live a noble life. Only then was he able to attain enlightenment.

Whenever people in the Where did all these thoughts come from? phase ask me what to do about their meditation practice, I recall what my teachers have told me: Keep sitting. This is not some trip about having faith because a guy named Sid did it twenty-six hundred years ago, or because we can turn to people within meditation communities and see that others have benefited greatly from this practice. It is because we can see the effects of meditation ourselves.

When the Buddha attained enlightenment, he sought out close friends who had meditated with him in the past. Instead of approaching them with the mentality of I’ve figured it out, now come study with me, he simply said, Come and see for yourself.

Meditation is a path of self-discovery. If we take the advice of the Buddha and other great teachers from the past and continue to practice meditation, we too begin to move away from feeling like we are being bombarded by a waterfall of thoughts. Instead, it may feel more like we are in the midst of a very powerful thought river. This is not a bad start. Over time and with practice, it feels like the thoughts bombarding us are more at the pace of a babbling brook or gentle stream, which ultimately leads to the mind of wakefulness—a large spacious pond without a ripple on it.

The gradual process of getting accustomed to returning to our breath during meditation practice begins to develop some mental space, which over time, without us having to do anything at all, naturally begins to manifest in our daily life. In our meditation practice, we learn to acknowledge our thoughts without acting on them. This is an incredibly helpful tool when we live in a world where one angry e-mail or one delete button on a cell phone can end a relationship.

Perhaps during a meditation session we find ourselves angry with a coworker or classmate. We run through a number of pretend conversations with this person and tell them off in a different way each time. We analyze exactly how they wronged us in the past, and think of how we could get even. Each time we catch ourselves doing this during our meditation practice, we acknowledge it, label it thinking, and return to the breath. It may run something like this:

Brett is a real asshole.

Thinking.

Back to the breath.

Brett really went out of his way to ruin my morning didn’t he? I bet he planned to—

Thinking.

Back to the breath.

By repeating this simple practice of allowing space on the meditation cushion, we are preparing to relate to this emotion and this person in our daily life. It is called meditation practice because we are practicing being present with our experience during meditation, and this practice spills over into the twenty-three-and-a-half hours we are not formally meditating. Hopefully the next time we see Brett, instead of buying into our habitual response of lashing out at him, we will encounter a small gap of spaciousness, a chance to not react as we always have in the past, and we will be able to just be present with whatever situation arises.

When we have such an experience, we may have graduated to the second phase, the This thing actually helps me a little phase. We are slightly tickled that meditation is starting to allow us to access more expansiveness in our mind and daily life. This is because meditation practice is not about trying to live up to some ideal version of who we are, but instead is about just being with ourselves and our experience, whatever it may be.

The third phase can be referred to as the Meditation is like crack phase. We have seen that by creating a more spacious situation around the thoughts and strong emotions affecting us in our meditation practice, we are more available to relate to them fully in our daily life. That feels good. So good that we want to continue to explore this path in the hope that we can bring some sense of sanity to ourselves, our daily life, and the world around us.

However, just like it took our prime example the Buddha many years to find a technique that worked for him, we cannot expect meditation to change our life overnight. If you want to get your body in shape, you don’t expect a radical difference after a few days of running or a long weekend at the gym. Instead you start off slowly by getting accustomed to the weights and machines, building your strength session by session over a good deal of time. You feel inspired each time you are able to push yourself just a little more.

The same rule applies to our mind in meditation. We cannot expect to sit down for five hours and get enlightened. Nor should we sit fifteen minutes a day for a week, and when we feel that we are no more sane or openhearted than before, give up. Session by session, we begin to build up the mental flexibility and openness that make our mind hearty and strong. We need to start by training our mind regularly in short sessions, in order to build up the stability that eventually spills over into the rest of our lives.

Ultimately I believe that anyone attracted to a spiritual life wants to be of benefit to the world. No one picked up this book because they want a better car or better-looking partner. We want to learn how to be sane, how to be more openhearted in our daily lives, and how to spread sanity and compassion in an increasingly chaotic world. The first step is encountering our mental demons through getting to know ourselves in meditation. We need to befriend ourselves, and as cliché as it sounds, love ourselves, so that we can be available to love the world.

The samurai alarm clock points to one way we can approach our day. Every morning we can wake up and think, It’s time for the battle. Me versus the world. In order to win, we can be ruthless at work and get raises and promotions, buy the hottest new gadgets, and have a super-model spouse. That point of view gets old and exhausting, because we are constantly struggling to reach that new rung on the ladder of our career, our gadgets are outdated in months, and our partner’s looks ultimately fade. Viewing our day as a battle separates us from the world around us, and makes it appear that our daily lives are something that we need to conquer, subjugate, or just survive.

Instead you can view your life as a rich opportunity. When the alarm clock goes off, you can take a minute to reflect on everything you have in your life—your friends, family, whatever you care about—and appreciate it. As you enter your day, you could take some time to meditate, and watch how taking that little bit of time for you makes you feel more spacious and your mind more expansive.

If you do this, you may find that the world that previously seemed so intimidating, so worth fighting against, is not as difficult when you don’t bring your fixed passion, aggression, and confusion to each scenario, and instead infuse each new situation with spaciousness. The less we buy into our set version of how things should be, the more we can be available to things as they are. When we are able to do this, our lives are not a battle, but a playground for us to enjoy.

2 / LAUGH AT THE DISPLAY OF YOUR MIND

Before embarking on a path of developing our wisdom and compassion, we need to learn the basics. We need to learn how to work with our own mind. The meditation technique introduced in this chapter is commonly