Working with Negativity
Photo by Ubaid E. Alyafizi
Though koans may stop us with their seemingly irresolvable paradoxes, they are in fact direct expressions of reality, offering us glimpses of our true nature and opening us to manifest what we’ve seen in how we live.
So many of us have heard that famous Buddhist quote: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” What’s the difference between pain and suffering? Why did the Buddha stake his teaching on the claim that we don’t have to suffer—that suffering is what we do to ourselves?
In this talk, Zuisei speaks to this difference between pain and suffering using the simile of the arrow in the Sallatha Sutta. “We don’t suffer because things happen that we don’t want.,” she says. “We suffer because we don’t want certain things to happen.” It’s our view that colors our experience, Zuisei points out. When we’re able to just meet pain as pain and pleasure as pleasure, without pushing one away and holding on to the other, we get our first state of the freedom the Buddha himself realized and taught.
This talk, Working with Negativity, was given by Zuisei Goddard. Scroll below for video, audio, and transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ from the final talk.
Working with Negativity
Good evening. It’s good to be settling into our post-ango schedule together. I love the rhythms of practice, the rhythms of life. Sometimes things are a bit fuller and we need to really rise to the occasion to meet each moment as it presents itself, and other times we can be a bit more laid back. There’s a bit more space between things and we can relax into what we’re doing. Winter tends to be this way. There’s an inward turning with the growing dark, with the colder temperature, a need to burrow in, and that can be really wonderful for our practice. (I’m speaking from memory, since I don’t experience cold in Panama!)
Although I don’t like cold—or, my body doesn’t like cold, I should say, doesn’t do well in it—I came to appreciate winter when I was living at the monastery, because it allowed me to go deeper into myself. I didn’t feel as strong a need to be outside, and so I took the opportunity to deepen my zazen, and to let the outer quiet take hold inside me as well. Each season we moved through was like this. It had its own character, and therefore facilitated a slightly different kind of practice, but what I saw, was that practice itself, like my life, continued. That it didn’t depend on whether we were doing sesshin or ango, whether it was the training week or hosan, our time off. Sometimes the schedule was more intensive, sometimes less, but either way, my practice, like my life, depended entirely on me, on my aspiration and the actions that flowed from it, and my aspiration wasn’t to be free only when the weather was nice, to be kind to myself and to others when the days were longer, or when we were all in silence. I wanted to be free all the time, and that required that I practice and live in such a way as to make this possible.
I therefore learned, over time, to let the outer forms to support my practice, but to not cause dependency in me. If it was sesshin, I did more zazen, but when it wasn’t sesshin and I was sitting less, I worked to sit just as deeply, and to let what I saw guide me off the cushion. It didn’t matter what time of year it was, in other words. It didn’t matter—that much—how long I was sitting. I simply did my best to meet each moment of practice to the best of my ability, and to make the most of it. To let everything teach me, because everything can.
Practically, this meant I got up at the same time each day, and I did my zazen, and I did a bit of liturgy and then went to work, and in the evening I sat again, and periodically I saw my teacher, etc. I didn’t think of time off or “taking it easy” because there was no need. I simply found a rhythm that I could sustain over time, and then I kept to it and what I found was that this consistency let the practice build on itself. I wasn’t having to start over every few weeks or every few months. It was simply one continuous thread that I could follow wherever I was, particularly if I was feeling lost, like Theseus getting out of the labyrinth.
You know the Greek myth—Daedalus builds a labyrinth to hide the Minotaur, who’s half man, half bull—and after a war, King Minos forces the Athenians to send seven young men and seven young women each year to the labyrinth as food for the Minotaur. Then Theseus, the prince of Athens, volunteers to go kill the beast, and the moment he arrives in Crete, Ariadne, the Greek king’s daughter, falls in love with him, so she slips him a skein of thread and a sword, and Theseus ties the thread to the entrance of the labyrinth and uses it to find his way back out after he kills the Minotaur.
That’s how I practiced. But the good thing about it was I didn’t have to wonder, what am I supposed to be doing now? How do I practice again? It was right there for me to use whenever I needed it. One of the many benefits of practicing even when you don’t feel like it.
Negativity, Resistance, and the Suffering We Create
Tonight I’d like to speak about working with negativity. Negativity is such a particular and particularly interesting obstacle, the way that it colors everything we see. Negativity is that tendency to perceive our lives through the lens of aversion. It’s a big No to what is going on, “I don’t like this, I don’t want this.” It’s a type of bias that causes us to focus on what’s missing, what’s wrong, what’s uncomfortable or undesirable. But when we look closely at any situation, there’s nothing inherently negative about it; it simply is.
Let’s say you fall from a ladder and break your foot. If such a thing happened it would be painful, it would be unfortunate, but there’s nothing negative about it per se. What makes it negative is our perception: “I can’t believe this happened to me!” “Why did this happen to me?” “I don’t want this to happen to me!” “Look at all the things I can’t do with a broken foot.” Yet there’s no clause in the contract of life that assures us our foot will never break, our eyes won’t fail, people won’t leave. There are no guarantees, and yet we want them, we expect them.
Here’s the thing, though: we don’t suffer because things happen that we don’t want. We suffer because we don’t want certain things to happen. This isn’t a matter of semantics. It’s a matter of perception. We expect things to be the way they’ve always been, we expect life to conform to our wants, and when they’re not, when it doesn’t, we suffer. But the difference is that we don’t suffer because our foot broke, we suffer because we don’t want it to. This is the difference that the Buddha illustrated in his famous sutta The Dart, or the Arrow (in Pali, the Sallattha Sutta)
Monks—this is a translation by Thanissaro Bikkhu—friends, an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person feels feelings of pleasure, feelings of pain, feelings of neither-pleasure-nor-pain. As you may recall, these are the three types of sensations that all sentient beings experience: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral (or, technically, neither pleasant-nor-unpleasant). A well-instructed disciple of the noble ones also feels feelings of pleasure, feelings of pain, feelings of neither-pleasure-nor-pain. So what difference, what distinction, what distinguishing factor is there between the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones and the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person? That’s straightforward. The ordinary person feels pain, the enlightened person feels pain, so what’s the difference? After a moment, he answers himself:
When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats their breast, becomes distraught. So, they feel two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot them with another one, so that they 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, and laments, beats their breast, becomes distraught. So they feel two pains, physical and mental.
Reaching out for inspiration, reaching in for strength—both are valid and both are necessary.
That’s the second arrow. We were already bleeding from the first one, and not liking what we were feeling and not knowing how to deal with it, it’s like we grab a second arrow and stick it in ourselves. It’s ridiculous when we describe it this way, but when we’re the ones experiencing the pain, it makes perfect sense. We’ll do anything to make it go away, even if it ends up hurting more.
Well, but of course, we might say, “If I break my foot, or if my kidney stops working, or if I lose my job (because this teaching applies to psychological pain as well), of course I’m going to be upset.” It would be foolish not to be, it would be unrealistic to remain unmoved. Sure. Being upset isn’t the problem, feeling pain isn’t the problem. We feel pain all the time—that’s what happens to sentient beings. The problem is what we do with it. When we’re “touched by that painful feeling” the sutta says, what happens? We feel resistance, we don’t like it; we want it to go away. But if the feeling is pleasurable, then we want it to stay and grow.
It is very difficult for us to meet pain as pain and pleasure as pleasure, to not push one away and grab on to the other. But every time we glom on to pleasure and resist pain, we strengthen our tendency toward negativity, we make it harder for ourselves to meet life as it is, on its terms, instead of ours. That’s where the difficulties start. That’s how we create our own suffering, which blooms in the space between wish and reality. But so does practice. It’s in the space between wish and reality that we learn how to close the gap.
Thanissaro Bikkhu uses an interesting phrase. He says “As [the person who was hit with the arrow] is touched by that painful feeling, they are resistant. And any resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling obsesses them.” That’s exactly what happens, isn’t it? We become obsessed with the painful feeling, and that obsession-resistance then causes us to go looking for escape. How? Through pleasure. “I don’t like this feeling, so let me go find one that I will like,” let me replace this negative feeling with a positive one, but instead of working with our minds, we go looking for an experience, a thing, a person who’ll give it to us. Whole industries have been built on this tendency of ours—billions of dollars made on the assumption that we’ll chase after pleasure and run away from pain. That we’ll do anything we can to not feel what we don’t want to feel.
Meeting Pain with Wisdom, Compassion, and Freedom
So, what do we do? First, we can make clear the distinction between pain and negativity. Pain is an experience. Negativity is a view; it’s an opinion about our experience, and thus it’s removed. We don’t choose to feel pain, but we do choose our negativity. Again, think of negativity as resistance, as tension or friction or discontent. And in itself, it’s not a problem. It’s simply telling us something’s happening that we need to pay attention to, something that makes us uncomfortable. That's useful information to have. There’s something here I need to attend to.
If we can practice being present with that negativity—just being present and open to it—then that’s half of the battle already. It’s when we layer one negativity over another that we make things harder for ourselves. We do this in two ways:
1. We justify our negativity: that person is stupid! How could I not get angry at their actions? Anger shows that I care! The world is messed up and it’s foolish to deny it. Someone needs to point this out! And,
2. we feel bad about ourselves: I shouldn’t feel this way. I’m a Buddhist, so I shouldn’t be negative. Why I can’t I get myself together already?!
And there we go, adding arrow after arrow into an ever-widening wound. But we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to make a painful situation worse. So the first thing we can do, is pause the story. When we feel ourselves spinning out, we can just stop, let some space into the moment. This is where doing a lot of zazen comes in handy. We know how to let go of a thought, and in that moment of letting go, space opens up and we can stop identifying with the painful feeling. We stop seeing it as me, as mine. There is a feeling but it isn’t mine, and this is key. In the Sallattha Sutta, the Buddha says:
The well-instructed disciple of the noble ones, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat their breast or become distraught… they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling obsesses them. And because they’re not obsessing, they don’t need to go chasing after pleasure. They don’t need to distract themselves from the pain. They discern, as it actually is, the origination, passing away, allure, drawback, and escape from that feeling. As they discern the origination, passing away, allure, drawback, and escape from that feeling, no ignorance-obsession with regard to that feeling of neither-pleasure-nor-pain obsesses them.
They recognize the painful feeling. They see how it arises and passes away, and they see their mind wanting to chase after pleasure to feel better, but they also see the added suffering that this will cause. In other words, they see the full picture. They see the feeling as not mine, not me, and they see it as something transient, changing, and without any intrinsic power. This is like that student of mine saying, “I saw clearly that my depression is just a thought.” He wasn’t saying it’s not real, that it doesn’t affect him. He was saying, it’s not solid, it’s not permanent, and most importantly, it’s not me. It’s not who I am.
Thanissaro Bikkhu’s translation says that the enlightened person senses themselves as disjoined from that feeling of pain—slightly awkward wording for saying they don’t identify with the feeling. Another translation says they’re “not fettered” by it. That’s the difference between the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person and the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones. That’s the difference between someone who’s still tangled up in ignorance and someone who sees things as they are, between someone who’s caught and someone who’s free. It’s not that they don’t feel pain, it’s that they respond to it differently.
In practice we have to learn how to be fierce and kind at the same time.
It’s good to remind ourselves that we’re not owed the pleasure that life offers us, nor do we deserve pain when it comes. According to Buddhism, at least, there are no heavenly scales where our deeds are being weighed and justice meted out accordingly. There is no day of judgment. There is, however, cause and effect. How I choose to act now will affect what I experience tomorrow or in the next moment. So I can look out at the world and see it covered with excrement, as Shariputra says to Brahma Sikhin in the Vimalakirti Sutra, or I can see it as the buddha field that it is, with all its opportunities to wake me up.
It’s not that there are no highs and lows, no thorns and precipices, no peaks and abysses in the world. There are. It’s that depending on my seeing, they will be a problem or they will not. That’s why it’s so important to cut through our stories. To see that they are stories, and that they color what we see. Seeing with the light of wisdom instead, we can see the whole picture. My foot hurts, and it’s going to need some attention, and I need all my energy to take care of the situation, so I’d better not squander it by sticking another arrow into my chest.
When we don’t distract ourselves from the pain, we will feel it, and it will hurt. It might also be a little scary, especially if we’re not used to feeling what we don’t want to feel, so we need all our energy to meet that moment. We can’t afford to go squandering it on some distraction that won’t give us lasting relief. Thus, motivated by our wish for freedom, we decide we do want to learn how to practice this, and so we do. We practice being with the pain, first, by getting closer to it little by little, and for this, we can use the titration method. In chemistry, titration is the process by which you slowly increase the amount of a solution in another liquid until they react, sort of like adding hot sauce to a soup drop by drop until you get the right amount of spice.
In our practice, we slowly expose ourselves to a painful feeling, building our tolerance, so that gradually we become better able to be with our own pain. And as this happens, we see we don’t have to run away, or at least, not so quickly. And second, as we do this, we enlist the aid of loving-kindness and compassion. We don’t beat ourselves up for being negative, and we don’t push another down when we see them getting caught either.
In practice we have to learn how to be fierce and kind at the same time. We can’t diddle around, otherwise we’ll stay entangled. We have to give some energy and courage to the task. But we can’t will our way into a more noble view either, so we have to dance between the two, and we have to know when to apply some oomph and when to sit back and wait, when to inspire ourselves to be a bit larger, and when to fully trust where we are.
Sometimes, when I’m unsure about what to do, I think of my teacher and I wonder what he would do in my place. Invariably, I glean some clarity from this exercise. I can’t read his mind, of course, but I know how he carries himself as he moves through his life. I know his aspiration, and when I connect with this in myself, I no longer have doubts.
Reaching out for inspiration, reaching in for strength—both are valid and both are necessary, and if all else fails, we can remind ourselves of this: I don’t have to believe all my thoughts. They’re not very reliable authorities of what’s actually going on, anyway, so in a moment when we feel ourselves getting caught, we can pause and ask, Is this so? Is this so? And if it isn’t, what else might be here that I’m not yet seeing? I may not be seeing the full picture, but you know what? I want to. I really, really want to.
Explore further
01 : Gratitude as Resistance with Zuisei Goddard
02 : The Arrow (Sallatha Sutta) translated by Thanissaro Bikkhu
03 : The Gift of Contemplation by Zuisei Goddard
Working with Negativity, a talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Video, audio, and transcript available.