If Sad, Be Sadness Buddha

Meditators: We practice no matter what. I asked a meditation instructor what drew him to the practice and he said there was a time in his life when he was in a very painful relationship and the cushion was the only place he found and real sanity. That always stuck with me, real sanity. It was the hook for me.I knew he was right, that I need to home to that meditation cushion when I’m looking for truth or maybe trueness, even though that’s not a word (until now).

I always remember Eckhart Tolle’s humorous description of the usual protests to being in the now: What, This moment? No, not this one. Let me get to a little better place before I do that. That place will never come if that is our attitude. How can it? It can’t because we are only ourselves in the present moment. We are an evolving, transforming, moment to moment process. So we will not be having a better moment later. We only have the possibility of having a better moment now.

What is better? It means what one of my art professors at Bennington told me. “When you are in despair, paint despair.” I had been asking for extensions on an assignment because of depression and anxiety and felt I didn’t have the necessary inspiration to create.

Think about the mandala principle. Have you seen a mandala? An example is the picture above the shrine here. There is the Buddha or other being in the center and, radiating out from that center are retinues of emanations of that being’s essence in all times and places. There are landscapes full of people, little orbs, wish fulfilling jewels, that contain all possibility. Everything in one’s mandala is one’s world, special unto them.

Our world is saturated with our mood, our beliefs, our conditioning, everything we project. Everything we see is colored by our state of mind in that moment, and people also experience the energy of what we radiate. We affect them and they affect us, but we always see them as they are in our mandala. To create harmony we can to try to feel the energy of each person’s mandala. Each person is a world. To make a way for real sanity in our world, we need to feel free to experience this moment fully, to inhabit this mandala of whoever we are right now. If we feel despair, we are Despair Buddha in a mandala of despair, and if we are happy, we can be Happy Buddha in a mandala of joy. If we keep trying to stay dry, we never know what the water is really like and we can’t really work with it.

I had an experience recently when I was feeling overwhelmed by sadness and I sat to meditate. The little paragraph below is what I wrote afterward and what inspired me to share these thoughts with you, so that no matter how you feel, maybe you will try sitting and giving yourself the gift of presence, of jumping in so you know the nature of your world and you can work with it. On this particular day, I forced myself to sit for 10 Minutes so I could at least be in the 10 Minute Club and feel the support of my community. I wound up sitting for about 25 minutes instead, as long as the incense burned, and my stuck feeling shifted.

At PI Shrine. Drowning in heartbreak. I didn’t want to stop and be present; not with this life, not now. I sat in front of the White Tara mandala and became Sadness Buddha, in my own mandala of blue halos and landscapes. Each new breath, a little color, a little space. Eventually I could open to the earth beneath me, breathing with the earth. Grateful for this 10 Minutes of effort.

*This is reprinted from my Wordpress Blog at http://provinstitute.wordpress.com/