From a dharma talk I gave at Profound Existence/Dharma Punx Boston, October 4 2009:

“The Blessed One said, “When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental.” — Sallatha Sutta: The Arrow (SN 36.6)

The first arrow is just things as they are. When I refuse to accept the first arrow, getting pissed off or woe-is-me… that’s the second arrow, that’s where I shoot myself in the foot. It’s the idea that we can control things, that we can make them into something other than just what they are, that causes suffering. What I think of as my “self” wants more of what the self likes, and less of what it doesn’t like. Pure and simple. The heart of our practice is that there is no self…. and so there is no need for suffering.

The Buddha taught that there is nothing in any living being that is permanent, fixed, unchanging… nothing that could be considered one’s “true self” or soul. What we think of is an individual person is really a changing process of mental and physical qualities combining temporarily in one particular way.

We cling to this idea that there’s something permanent to our “selves” or our souls. We think because we think we know what we are, that we really do know who we are. I look at my thumb, and think it’s a part of what makes me ME, but if I someone chopped off my thumb, wouldn’t I still be me? And you say: of course not, that’s dumb, you’re not your thumb. But our bodies are constantly changing. Skin cells flake off and are replaced; hair grows and is cut; a cut heals; I grow old; I get sick. Over 15 years, every single cell in our body has been replaced with another cell. I am not my thumb; I am not my body. My thoughts change in an eyeblink: I am not my thoughts. Neither are my opinions, my prejudices, or my memories somehow an unchanging “me.” We cling to what we think we know and say: this is the truth. We make up a story of a character in our minds and convince ourselves that it’s real. This is all illusion. As we sit, as we deepen our practice, over time it reveals to us that we are changing, we are in transit, that there is no permanent self.

This doesn’t mean that there is literally no me, which is kind of silly. I need to know who “I” am and who “you” are so I can function in the world, but it’s important to have a light touch with this, and remember that the things we have been raised to think of as “self” are not the self. Our “selves” are not our bodies, not our feelings, not our perceptions, not our ideas, and not our consciousness. All of these things are not self.

All we have that we will always have is this one, undying flame of awareness.. and the ability to focus that awareness on things as they are, rather than how we think we want them to be.

This is a radical teaching, and it’s beautiful in its simplicity. Now this simplicity can be misleading, because saying it’s simple is not the same as saying it’s easy. This practice should not be constant effort, though, and I want to emphasize that: if you’re busting your ass trying to meditate, you’re probably doing it all wrong. It shouldn’t be hard. It’s subtle, though. It’s tricky. What we think of as our “selves” are very protective of their imaginary existences and so we have to be crafty and outwit the fake “self” and not allow it to throw us off. In Zen, as in most schools of Mahayana Buddhism, there’s a great tradition of what’s called skillful means or, basically, tips and tricks for not shooting yourself in the foot.

As we sit, as we quiet our minds and forget about the day-to-day crap, bills to pay or personal drama, whatever, what we often find is that, rather than this wonderful sense of peace descending over us we are just inundated with a shit-flood from our psyches… unresolved issues, deep wounds that remain unhealed, maybe an ongoing situation that is causing us a lot of pain. The point is not that you are supposed to ignore these things, and the fact that there is no self as we conventionally think of it does not mean that horrible situation is not, in fact, causing you real pain. What meditation gives us, though, is the ability to face whatever difficult situations arise in our lived with more equanimity, with more compassion for other and for ourselves, and with greater and greater amounts of insight and wisdom. So it’s incredibly beneficial to work with these emotions when we sit, for two wonderfully interwoven reasons: allowing ourselves to be open to these emotions deepens our practice, and being able to practice in the midst of difficult emotions strengthens our ability to deal with things in a more skillful way.

So what do we do when painful emotions arise? It’s not a one size fits all kind of thing, but there are a couple of techniques that I’ve used in the past. You may discover more as you practice. One thing that can be really effective if you are able to stick with it is to move into the bodily experience of the pain. If its a sadness, really feel into the dull ache in your heart. Notice how your breathing is shallow. Feel the way your heart beats, the sensation of temperature. Stay with the feeling, allow it to arise and pass naturally. It’s a really delicate trick, though, because the key to it is not to focus on thoughts associated with the pain, and that’s really hard to do.

Another technique that works well is to do labeling as difficult emotions come up. The trick here is to leave out the “I” and simply label “angry, angry” or “sad, sad.” Return to the breath and continue to sit with it, labeling it as it arises. What you’ll find is that the process of labeling - again: without involving the word “I” in it or getting wrapped up in whatever the story may be - actually reduces the intensity of the emotion. There have been studies of people doing this labeling while having their brains scanned in an MRI, and scientists saw that activity shifted from the part of the brain that deals with emotion to the part of the brain that deals with rational thought. So as you continue to label, the intensity of the emotion will decrease and you’ll be able to stay with it, and investigate the sensations in your body as they arise.

Deepening awareness of your inner life really does, over time, allow you to see that all these emotions and judgments, as powerful as they may be, are not “self” any more than your thumb is your self. They are a part of you, and they will from time to time require some attention, just as you have to pay attention to your thumb when you cut it. But just like sitting around crying will not stop your amputated thumb from bleeding, neither will marinating in negative emotions resolve the situation that caused them to arise. Reacting from emotion almost always makes the situation - and the emotions - more painful and difficult.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa said, “let yourself be in the emotion. Go through it, give in to it, experience it …Then the most powerful energies become absolutely workable rather than taking you over, because there is nothing to take over if you are not putting up any resistance.”