Resolutions

 During the last meditation session of the year, I had asked the group if they had any new year's resolutions regarding their own practice. I had mentioned that one of my own resolutions was to try to bring more relaxation to my work. GuoXing Fashi had once mentioned while he was in Toronto that people feel a lot of tension at work because on a conscious or subconscious level, they are trying to compete with others in their team, whether for status or accolades, or even out of fear of being the one with the lowest outputs. I have to admit that I have had such a fear myself, being in a company where "lean" is considered a good thing, and the department is always looking for ways to do more with fewer people. But one of GuoXing Fashi's key points that I found remarkable is how one can learn to treat their work as a spiritual practice: a practice of learning to master their own dualistic thinking and let go of self-clinging. That's a very tough lesson to learn, I have to admit. His other key point is that one doesn't necessarily have to leave their relaxation to a silent meditation hall;  in fact, relaxation can be practiced anywhere and it can even be done in high pressure situations. It takes more emphasis on the body presence as well as the sense that my existence does not depend on what is happening around me: it is much deeper than the ideas that I have about myself, work and others. As hard as it is, I start to realize especially during the second half of the year that I was very tense at work, trying to meet very strict deadlines, and I felt it in the form of body fatigue. I am definitely not relaxed enough at work.
     Resolutions, I have found, are not so easy to keep. There are many reasons for this, but as Rob Nairn suggests in his excellent book Living, Dreaming, Dying, part of the reason is that people are governed by very complex unconscious forces. I tend to think of it a bit like the Greek pantheon: rather than there being a single "ruler" God who is standing over all His creations, Greek mythology suggests that the forces of nature and spirit were in continual conflict and flux, even as mortals were looking to the gods and nature for sustenance and wisdom. This is hardly a stable place where a person's sole injunction is to obey a single ruler: on the contrary, it is a highly contested space where a variety of different gods and goddesses compete for the spotlight. Could some of this pantheon perhaps symbolize the different priorities that one's mind contains at any given time in life? And, if that's the case, how can I even resolve with any certainty to do anything, such as give up a bad habit or take on a new challenge?
      Nairn's answer is that the path of mindfulness is one of being aware of these forces by quieting the mind, and thus allowing changes to naturally arise over time. With the mindful mentality, my role is not to control forces but to harness them in ways that come from a sense of familiarity with them. Imagine, for example, being so terrified of snakes that you are not even able to face them without becoming anxious or going into a tirade about how bad snakes are, finally stomping out of the room in disgust. But if I sat in front of the snakes and allowed all these thoughts to pop in and out of mind without avoiding the snakes, what happens then? A lot of things happen, ironically, because I am no longer trying so hard to put some counter-thought in front of the snakes. I am simply becoming aware of the full gamut of my reactions, seeing how they change over time and might even disappear without our intervention in any way. By not trying to consciously control the situation, things become more clear because I am creating psychic space for more unconscious material to come out. In this way, I start to develop new patterns without trying so hard to create these patterns myself.

Nairn, R. (2004). Living, Dreaming, Dying: Practical Wisdom from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Boston: Shambhala