Instructions on Not Giving Up (aka SWITCH)
Photo by Jeffry Surianto
There’s a slow and quiet changing of a mind, even when we think nothing is happening. We can just begin or continue our steady effort to get close to all of it—the joy and the mess—as it is. It’s a simple instruction, but maybe the most difficult to put into practice.
So what can you do when the mind gets in the way of getting close and your thoughts become obstacles? SWITCH. In this talk Zuisei discusses SWITCH, a helpful way to understand and to remember the Buddha’s teachings on how to work with the mind skillfully and directly at these times.
This talk draws on the poetry of Ada Limón, the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, and more.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
In July of this year, the Mexican-American poet Ada Limón was named the poet Laureate of the United States. In an interview, Limón says she likes to “call things as they are” and “right now,” she added, “all I want is a story about human kindness.” Strange how, for so long, the story has been that kindness and goodness don’t sell; that true artists, creating authentic work, will not give shape or sound to what is simple and beautiful and ordinary. Strange—or not so strange—that underneath that story is our hunger for exactly that: the simple, the beautiful, the kind, and the ordinary.
It’s not that kindness is elusive—it isn’t–or endangered, or even particularly rare. It’s that we have to set it in our sights, focus, hold it still, and hold it and there, because there’s so much other jostling for our attention.
It's not that Limón’s poetry is all kindness, or it's all beauty, just as Mary Oliver's isn't, though beauty sells so well. I think Limón, like Mary Oliver, has a deep appreciation and willingness to not shy away from what is there as is, sometimes sharp-edged, but often so beautiful. Often I speak of the beauty, the ordinary, and the wonder of a human life partly to remind myself, and partly to remind all of us, of the strange idea of continuous living “despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.” This is something worth returning to, again and again: the idea of continuous living on purpose. I think that is a simple way to describe what a spiritual path gives us: a way of living continuously, presently, from moment to moment, day to day, on purpose—to live our lives like we mean it.
This poem that I began this talk with by Limon is called "Instructions on Not Giving Up." We don't give up because yes, there is war; yes, there is great inequality and injustice; yes, there is the planet’s degradation and our own slow decay; there are greed, anger, and ignorance from time without beginning; and there is also life—and what life! “The accidental and the immutable,” as the writer Philip Roth said, "the elusive and the graspable, the bizarre and the predictable, the actual and the potential—all the multiplying realities, entangled, overlapping colliding, conjoined." The actual and the potential are our field of play, our field of practice, because we're constantly in that liminal space between what we see as possible, what we're able to live (to enact), what we would like, and what we aspire to.
That's one of the things that I've always found so astonishing, just the sheer reach of our capacity… It is like that beautiful image that Limón gives of that green leaf slowly, unobtrusively, unfurling at the end of winter. After a great loss, a sharp break, or just a long dry spell where it seems like nothing in our lives is working or nothing's happening, there is still that capacity that we all have to say, despite everything, "I'll take it, I'll take it all."
I’ll take this less than perfect body, this harried mind.
I’ll take these five minutes to sit down and breathe.
I’ll take this crying baby in my arms, and I will enter the kindness there. This only means I won’t resist, I will not fight—for just this one instant, I will not want things to be otherwise. After my three decades of practice, I’ve come to the conclusion that I will not find a more challenging task: to take this as it is—to take this time, this place, and there do my continuous living. So what does that mean? How do we do that?
To start, catch those thoughts that whisper in the back of our minds: not enough, not enough, not enough... I'm not enough, I'm not doing enough. Others are not doing enough, practice is not enough, my partner is not enough, my body's not enough. If only I sat more, if only I had more time, more money, more quiet, more energy, more aspiration, more capacity to catch those thoughts and not let them proliferate... In the Vitakkasanthana Sutta the Buddha offers five ways to work with unskillful thoughts or signs, as he calls them. I've taken this and I've distilled it to five actions, which, to remind myself, l describe as SWITCH: switch, warn, ignore, trace, and chop.
First, of course, you have to notice— Oh, there's the thought: "I need to sit more." Grab it by its tail and hold it up. Notice when it's actively getting in the way of continuous living. How does it get in the way? It will create a bump, a crack, a sharp corner that you can't see around, or sometimes it leaves a trail, like a toilet paper tail stuck in the back of your pants—it's awkward and it doesn't let you move freely. It's kind of like that, it can be kind of embarrassing when you see the trail of these thoughts just sweeping behind you. It makes you self conscious and keeps you conscious of self, which is heavy and gets in the way. So first, really, before SWITCH is to notice.
Before I go into the sequence, this morning, I read an article in The New York Times about a town in the state of Bavaria, Germany, where every ten years the whole town of about 5000 people comes together to put on a play for the Passion of Christ. They have been doing this pretty much every 10 years with a couple of exceptions—the First World War and then the coronavirus pandemic. The reason they do this is because in 1633, the bubonic plague raged through Europe. It killed one out of four people in Oberammergau, this mountain village. As it was happening, all the villagers gathered together and stood in front of a cross, and together made this vow to God: if God spared them, they would perform a Passion Play every 10 years, until forever. Legend has it that since the moment they began the following year in 1634, no one else died. The latest play, which was going to be the 42nd enactment, was scheduled for 2020. It had to be postponed because of the pandemic but it's playing now with a cast of 2500 people, so half the town essentially. It goes for about five months, and millions of people from all over the world travel specifically to see it. Over time, they've made a lot of changes to the cast. Before everybody had to be Catholic to be in the play, but now they have people who are Jewish, they even have two Muslims in big roles. One of them is playing Judas. To prepare, the previous year on Ash Wednesday, all the men stop shaving and cutting their hair so they will look the part by the time the play rolls around. Of course, this becomes an all-out affair, it's not just the play. Not everyone involved is religious, but many are, and certainly many of the tourists who go, go to see the story lived in order to revive their own faith. They go to see this story reenacted so they can remember the truths that they themselves are living by.
I bring this up because, not in such a dramatic way, we are moment to moment, carefully enacting and hopefully constantly studying and revising the play of our lives. The very detailed script we follow is telling us where to stand, when to open our mouths, what to say—in essence, how to act. Are we aware of that script? When do we know what it says? Can we read the stage directions? Because if we're not familiar with it, it doesn't take much to see what will happen: you will get on stage and you will improvise. This could go very well, or not so well at all. So you could say this is our way of doing a close reading and making revisions so that the play, this dream, is the best one that we can possibly star in and offer to everyone else.
So you catch an unskilful thought like I hate my body. It's the kind of thought that you can’t let go of; it's that feeling that weighs you down. First, you work with it by switching it with a skillful version of itself. For example, every time this thought rears itself you stop and say, “I love my body.” If the thought is, “I'm not enough,” say, “ I'm whole, just as I am. I'm perfect, just as I am," or if it is "I don't have enough time”— “I have now."
Every time that thought pops its head in, notice, and switch. By themselves, these thoughts have exactly the same weight. Fundamentally, they take up exactly the same amount of space in your mind. It's just that the first has karma behind it, it has momentum—maybe you've been thinking that thought, saying it to yourself, for years. We have to change the channel until that time when we realize, Oh, I can just turn off the TV. Later we realize there's no TV to begin with. So at first, you have to notice and then change the channel from something like “CSI” to a cooking show, or the Discovery Channel. We have to notice how strangely drawn we are to the blood and gore, how we love to beat up on ourselves. Then we can say to ourselves, "Well, what if you look at yourself in the mirror instead and say I love you?" When we respond, "No, I can't do that," just notice that. As the Buddha said, the first teaching, the first tool, is to replace an unskillful sign with a skillful one. The traditional image is of a carpenter who's knocking out a coarse peg with a finer one, like in a game of croquet. If you have the black ball and it's not getting anywhere, you knock it out with another ball, a green, a red, or a blue one. Your aim does have to be sure, it has to be precise to hit it through that hoop. The thoughts need to match. The skillful and the unskillful signs have to match enough for you to be able to recall the skillful sign mindfully. Remember sati is to bring to mind: not this, but that. That's switching.
The second option is to warn yourself of the danger of a hurtful thought. First, ask yourself, "Is this a satisfying thought?" Is it helping me? Will it liberate me or will it keep me bound? Then point out to yourself the dangers of continuing to harbor such thoughts. We all understand perfectly well that if we stand in front of a plant and pour boiling water or poison on it, we'll kill it. Just so, we have to stay with our own minds when we're hurting, and our weird way of coping is by poisoning ourselves. I just saw that new production of Macbeth with the three witches, the weird sisters, casting their spell: "Double double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble." That language is just magnificent, you could just close your eyes and listen to the whole movie. We can use that image of those dark, gnarly, weird sisters hovering over that foggy and foul brew. That self-loathing thought is like that; like the thought that objectifies another; the thought that dismisses life that is inhuman, that says the human is pinnacle and everything else is there to serve us; the thought that throws something or someone away. The sutra says “we reflect on the danger of our thoughts, warning ourselves of their effect.” The image the Buddha gave is that of having the corpse of a snake, a dog, or a person hung around your neck (and I can't improve on that image so I'm going to let it stand). Sometimes we're impervious to danger, but if suddenly we were to notice, "Oh, there's a corpse hanging from my neck," we'd be horrified, disgusted. I wonder if this teaching is meant for us to reflect on the danger that such thoughts often don't quite get this visceral a reaction—every hair of your body standing on end, warning you, Do not go there.
When I was describing this to someone, they said, "Oh, but then if this is happening during zazen, does that mean that we're talking to ourselves?" Yes, it does, and it took me too long to understand that that was fine, that sometimes it was necessary. Seeing a thought, letting it go, and coming back is not always going to cut it. I needed to be able to discern, to understand, This is a thought. What kind of thought is it? What kind of antidote do I apply to it? Sometimes that means talking to myself. In his teaching, the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, the monk Shantideva does this all the time. He warns himself, berates himself, inspires himself, he challenges himself. He's constantly saying, "Don't forget, don't forget, don't forget." This is what you can do. In this case, you can do this to remember to say to yourself, "This thought is hurting me. This thought is robbing me of life every time I think of it. This thought makes everything heavy and dark." This is how we shed that corpse and return to ourselves.
The third option is to ignore the thought just as you would cover your eyes to not see something you don't want to see. In fact, that is the image that the Buddha gives. It’s like when someone is telling someone else the end of a movie, and you close your eyes and you cover your ears and you go "Lalalala." It’s like that.
My grandfather once told me a story: he and my grandmother went to the movies, they loved the movies, they would go all the time. They went to watch a mystery, and some guy ran in during the first five minutes of the movie and said, "The killer is x," and ran out—really? That is your idea of fun? That is how you spend your time? This has nothing to do with what I'm saying, but really—
If you haven’t been able to switch the thought, you haven’t been able to warn yourself of it, ignore it. Cover your eyes. To ignore is not really to switch, instead it's not giving the thought airtime. We do this all the time—the see a thought, let it go and return to the breath. I'm not going to focus on this thought, I am going to set it aside and focus on something else. So if you haven't been able to switch the thought and you haven't been able to warn yourself about the dangers—the effect that it may have on you—you ignore it. You can even go straight to ignoring it, it depends on the thought. This is where you need to discern. I've used this sequence since I first learned it a few years ago in lots of different moments of my practice, both on and off my cushion. There have been times when, because I had the time and because of the nature of the thought, I actually made my way through the sequence: I wasn't able to let go with the first, and I wasn't able to let go with the next, or the next, and like so, I would make my way through. Otherwise, very often, I would realize this kind of thought requires this antidote, so I would go straight to that antidote. Each thought does require investment and careful observation on your part. With each one, you have to really ask yourself, "What is needed here?" When my brother died, I knew from the beginning that if I spent any time on thoughts like if only I had done this or that, or said this or that, I was going to bury myself in a hole. I very, very deliberately vowed to myself to not go that way. Whenever I would notice that thought, "Oh, if I had just— Stop.”
Another way to think about it is deflect or reroute which is the switch. But first is the stop, then ignore. Don't go there, and then you can reroute, that is in fact what is necessary. How do I best stop this train of thought in its tracks? Does it require diplomacy? I'm talking to myself, I'm negotiating. Does it require deflection? Does it require just brute force? That is the last option. This is a process, as my friends Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe say, of “meditative inquiry.” That is why you're not just sitting there quietly, focusing on your breath. You're actively engaged with your thoughts. You're not doing this all the time—this is for thoughts that require this so you can let go of them.
The fourth teaching is to trace the path of the thought to get to the root. The sutra gives it a rather technical term: to still the thought formation of these thoughts. Essentially you're trying to get to the root, the source. The example the Buddha gives is that he's walking fast and he thinks to himself, "Why am I walking fast? Why don't I walk slowly?" He begins to walk slowly. Then he thinks to himself, "Why am I walking slowly? Why don't I just stand? Why don't I just sit? Why don't I just lay down? Why don't I study my mind?" With each one of these postures, he's calming the mind and stilling the formation of that thought. So by tracing (and I don't mean you trace it to the root in order to understand it—"Why is my thinking this way? Oh, it was because my mother when I was five...."), I mean tracing it to the root source, and in a sense, resting in that source, which is still and silent. You can get to that by asking, “What is the cause of this plot?” What is the cause of its cause? What's behind this thought? I think of it as diving: on the surface, there are all these colors and shapes and sounds. As you begin to go deeper and deeper, it gets darker and more still. There's still quite a bit of life, there's just less movement. So stilling the thought formation is tracing the thought to its source, which really, if you think about it from a practice perspective, is finding the origin of that thought. If you can really see the origin, then really, you don't need to do anything else.
Lastly, if all else fails, you chop the thought at the root. The sutra says you “crush mind with mind.” The unfortunate image that the Buddha gives is that it's like a weak man being crushed by a stronger man. I do not usually quote that. Instead, I think of it as reading myself the riot act. It is that moment where you say "Enough." You know where the blooming of an addictive thought is going to take you.
The image that came up for me as I was writing this talk was of me when I was little asking my mom, "Mom, can I do...?"
"No," she says.
"Well, why?"
"Because I'm your mother and I say so, end of conversation."
I always tried to argue. But really, at the end, you couldn't refute that because I say so. That's actually the attitude. It's not so much that crushing mind with mind is using brute force, instead, it's the moment in which you remind yourself who's holding the reins of your mind. It’s the moment in which you remind yourself of that parental mind that says, "I want to be free more than I want to be right." I want to be free more than to have my cake at this moment. It’s not because having your cake is bad. Again, these are for thoughts that are hurtful. So now, when all reasoning is exhausted, you do what needs to be done. As with the Bodhisatttva Manjushri's sword, you cut, chop off, what's holding you back, what's weighing you down.
It's a switch, warn, ignore, trace, chop. Whatever you do, do not give up. Because you can expect that given how involved this is, there are many times you're not going to get past the first one. You won't remember, or you won't know how. That is one of the advantages of hearing these teachings over and over again. Each time, you get it more and more in your body for it to have it be within easy reach. Even though these descriptions, once again, are quite involved, the actual process is like what Limón describes. It's not flashy, it’s not that dramatic. I love that stanza:
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me.
That's what it's like— the slow and quiet change of mind that happens even when you think nothing is happening. It’s the unfurling of a thought from mine to Mind (that’s Mind with a capital M) and from that to life, unbound. Steady and steady and steady is the only way that happens.
Sometimes we wait for the displays, or we have a display and we think, Oh, that looks pretty nice, and we try to recreate it. It’s not in the display though, and we’re the worst judges of what is happening anyway. Sometimes you tell me nothing's happening, or you wonder if you're doing it right. What I see is your life unfurling before my eyes, I see you going from fist to open palm. It’s all because you decided, "Enough. I want to live my life. I want to live life period." I don't have to tell you the instructions on not giving up, of course, are not in the steps, just as you know you don't travel by ticking off sites on a map. It's in how and how much you look. It’s how close you're willing to get to that leaf, that bloom— “the mess, the hurt and the empty.” I don't know about you, but I continuously look for ways to get close to the mess and the hurt and the empty because I don't want to. I'd rather not, thank you very much, but there's no other way. One way that I see, where I have found I'm able to get close, is to actively look for that wonder, that joy. Otherwise it's too much. So again, it's in how we look, how close we're willing to get, and maybe also how much and how often we're willing to say, "Fine, fine then. I'll take it." It's how often we can say this not in resignation but with a very simple, very ordinary, very direct seeing that it was always mine to begin with. "Fine then, I'll take it," and then the next step, "I'll take it all. It’s always been mine, anyway.”
Explore further
01 : Instructions on Not Giving Up by Aida Limón
02: Vitakkasanthana Sutta: The Relaxation of Thoughts translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
03 : Part-time Optimism by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard