The third point in Mind Training in Seven Points is living practice. In living practice, you bring whatever you have developed in formal practice to how you live your life. In particular, you bring it to difficult situations.
Difficult times bring out deeper levels of reactivity, levels that in turn place more demands on our practice. In meeting those demands, we have to move to deeper levels of understanding, insight, clarity, compassion, and peace. In other words, difficult situations make practice easier: you don’t have to hunt for reactive patterns or try to get in touch with them. There they are in all their glory, waiting as only a machine can wait—insentient, devoid of life—for the right trigger to set them in motion and make a mess of your life once again.
Practice is not intended to make difficult situations less difficult. It is not intended to resolve them or make them go away. Instead, through meeting difficult situations, you build the skills and capacities that make it possible for you to stand in powerful reactions, experience them without being taken over by them, know what they are, and let them resolve themselves. To put it another way, one way you fulfill the bodhisattva vow is to not indulge confusion—not fall into confusion and make others suffer for your inability to experience what arises in you.
Movement in mind does not by itself cause you to fall into confusion and reaction. You fall into confusion and reaction because as soon as the mind moves, something in you takes the movement as I or other. That something has many names, but it is sufficient to say that it is a deeply conditioned pattern with great momentum. When it operates, the field of experience splits in two and you have once again taken birth in samsara.
How do you live practice? As in the second point, for any instruction there are three steps:
- learn how to do it.
- train it until it becomes second nature.
- remove everything in you that prevents it from taking expression when it is called for.
Trying to remember an instruction is not enough. The conceptual mind is too slow and too weak. Nor is it a matter of observation, observing the contents of your mind. That just reinforces a sense of I separate from what you experience.
Whatever the discipline, these three steps are essential if you are going to live your practice.
Broadly speaking, two kinds situations drop you into confusion: pleasurable ones and painful ones. Pleasurable situations can be just as problematic as painful ones, and you are more likely to be seduced by them. In pleasurable situations, you relax. Attention dissipates, and the next thing you know, you have fallen into reaction, succumbing to pride, desire, jealousy, or greed.
When life is good, enjoy it. As you do, however, keep three themes in mind and touch into them again and again.
The first theme is emptiness. Open completely to the experience of pleasure, in your body, in your feelings, in your mind, and then ask, “What experiences this?” Don’t try to answer. Just look, and rest in the looking for a few moments. You see nothing. As you touch emptiness, the pleasure doesn’t go away. It may take on a dream-like quality, there and not there at the same time, but it’s still there. You are just less likely to be hooked by it.
The second theme is interdependence. How did this pleasurable situation come about? It is the result of many different factors, and it is absurdly arrogant to take the view that you and you alone are responsible for it. Open to all the many factors that came together to give rise to this pleasure, and then to the totality of what you experience right now.
The third theme is taking and sending. Send the pleasure you experience to others, and in return, take in their pain, confusion, and struggles. Here you experience pain and pleasure at the same time.
None of these themes change the actual experience of pleasure. They do, however, ground you in groundlessness. Life is a mystery and it arises like a dream. Contrary to a deeply held belief, you are not the sole author of what you experience. And pain and pleasure are always present—in every situation, in every person, in every part of you.
When you live practice this way, do so quietly, consistently, and with a light touch. Do it without fanfare, without patting yourself on the back.
The same instructions apply when you encounter unpleasant or painful situations. The route is different, but you still end up experiencing pleasure and pain at the same time, taking in the pain of others and giving to them whatever is good in your own life (and, no matter how bad the situation may be, there is always something good).
This way of living is described by many masters. In the Hsin Hsin Ming, the 3rd Patriarch of Zen wrote:
The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything.
Niguma, one of the progenitors of the Shangpa tradition in Tibet, said it this way:
Like and dislike are the mind’s disease,
Certain to drown you in samsara’s seas.
Know that there is nothing here at all,
And then, my child, everything is gold.
