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Painful Experiences; Follow Your Bliss and Follow Your Fear; The Power and the Pain Book Excerpts

The blissful experiences that come on the path encourage us—but so should the painful ones, writes Andrew Holecek in this excerpt from The Power and the Pain.

"It is sometimes easier to wake up when we're in extreme pain."
—DZIGAR KONGTR�L

"If you haven't cried deeply a number of times, your meditation hasn't really begun."
—ACHAAN CHAH

Understanding the power of the path provides the inspiration that keeps us going forward; exploring its pain provides the understanding of what holds us back. It doesn't take long to discover the power, nor to feel the pain. Waking up hurts. And if we don't understand why, we will run from the pain and abandon the path. There are countless people who have become spiritual dropouts, or who are lost in detours because they have not understood hardship.

When your arm falls asleep, it prickles and burns as it returns to life. Frozen fingers sting when they thaw; we jolt awake when the alarm clock rings. But physical instances of anesthesia are mild compared to the anesthesia born of ignorance, and so is the level of discomfort upon awakening. The longer something has been asleep, the more painful it is to wake it up. If your fingers are merely cold, it is easy to warm them up. But if your fingers are frozen solid, it hurts like hell when they thaw. According to the traditions, unless one is already a buddha, an "awakened one," one has been snoring from beginningless time, and it can really hurt before we completely wake up. Mingyur Rinpoche writes,

"I'd like to say that everything got better once I was safely settled among the other participants in the three-year retreat....On the contrary, however, my first year in retreat was one of the worst in my life. All the symptoms of anxiety I'd ever experienced—physical tension, tightness in the throat, dizziness, and waves of panic—attacked in full force. In Western terms, I was having a nervous breakdown. In hindsight, I can say that what I was actually going through was what I like to call a 'nervous breakthrough.'"

Every tradition is replete with stories of hardship. Christ suffered in the desert, Buddha struggled under the bodhi tree, Mohammed grappled in his cave, the Jain saint Mahavira wrestled with his asceticism, and the Tibetan yogi Milarepa endured the demands of his guru. We will be hard-pressed to find a sage who slid easily into enlightenment, for great realization brings great obstacles.

We may not practice in caves and deserts, but we sit in meditation and wonder why it hurts. We look into our hearts and wonder why we cry. We enter a path and ponder why life and ponder why life falls apart. Understanding hardship helps us to deal with it, whether it is the anxiety of sitting still for thirty minutes, or the fear of entering a three-year retreat.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, addressing those who have or will undertake a retreat, gives this advice:

"You will fall sick, experience pain, and encounter many adverse circumstances. At such times do not think, 'Although I am practicing the Dharma, I have nothing but trouble. The Dharma cannot be so great. I have followed a teacher and done so much practice, and yet hard times still befall me.' Such thoughts are wrong views. You should realize that through the blessing and power of the practice, by experiencing sickness and other difficulties now, you are purifying and ridding yourself of negative actions.... By purifying them while you have the chance, you will later go from bliss to bliss. So do not think, 'I don't deserve this illness, these obstacles, these negative influences.' Experience your difficulties as blessings...when you do experience such difficulties, you should be very happy and avoid having adverse thoughts like, 'Why are such terrible things happening to me.'"

As Rinpoche advises, relating to hardship properly depends on the strength of one's view. In general, having a view is knowing exactly where you want to go and how to get there. It is the vision of knowing what you want. For example, if you have the view to become a doctor, your vision guides you through financial burdens, physical and emotional difficulties, and obstacles that get in your way. You know it will be difficult and involve sacrifice, but with a strong view, you forge to the finish line.

Similarly, if you want to become spiritually awakened, it is the power of your view that gets you there. If you are having a hard time getting to the meditation cushion, or engaging in the necessary study, it is because your view is not strong enough or is incomplete. A partial view, in this case, is one that doesn't include hardship. You can strengthen your view and accelerate progress by understanding how you lose your view in the fog of hardship, and therefore lose sight of your path.

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche provides the proper view for the challenging preliminary practices (ngondro) of Vajrayana Buddhism:

"Ngondro is the process of working to loosen our negative karmic seeds, our ingrained habitual tendencies, and to bring them to the surface. Once they are exposed, we can deal with them and transcend them....we are creating the causes and conditions for our karmic seeds to ripen. That's what is happening. We shouldn't blame the Vajrayana preliminary practices for any of the discomfort we feel or the intensity we go through. That's what we are looking for, it's what makes transcendence possible. Otherwise, if we retreat from those experiences, if we don't take advantage of them and free ourselves from those patterns, it's like starting to pull a splinter out, but stopping halfway when it becomes painful. Instead of completing the job, we try to push it back in. We think 'I'll pull it out sometime later.' Our aim here is to bring about the ripening of our negative karmic causes and conditions, and, when they are ripened, to transcend or overcome them."

Follow Your Bliss AND Follow Your Fear

FOR A SPIRITUAL PRACTITIONER, FEAR IS A GIFT. It will always tell us where we need to go to unearth the next layer of ignorance. Buddhas have no fear because they have no ignorance, but they only got to be fearless by working directly with their fear and exposing its underlying cause. They transformed darkness into light by plunging fearlessly into the dark.

Like everyone else, I tend to run from my fear. But when I have summoned the courage to plunge into it, to use fear as an invitation, the rewards have far surpassed the "toll." When I first thought about entering my long retreat, I felt a rush of exhilaration that was rapidly replaced with wrenching fear. It took me eight years to gather the courage and prepare, but I followed the black light of fear. I used it as my trustworthy guide, and it led to real growth. It is a lot easier to "follow your bliss" than it is to "follow your fear," but fear keeps us directly on the path while bliss can easily divert us.

Spiritual traditions are often called warrior traditions. Trungpa Rinpoche taught about the "sacred path of the warrior," and Don Juan spoke volumes on spiritual warriorship. In Tibetan, meditators are called "brave ones." The inner meaning of jihad, or holy war, refers to engaging the real enemy of ignorance. This is greater jihad, the warfare in oneself against evil and temptation. (Lesser jihad is the defense of Islam against aggression.) It takes courage to face our mind and the fear that harbors ignorance.

I continue to use this unusual rule, "follow your fear," but I do so in moderation. The point isn't spiritual thrill-seeking. If we jump recklessly into any fearful situation, our motivation may be twisted, and we may be ill prepared to handle the consequences. The path is always the middle path, and Campbell's advice to "follow your bliss" is well taken. Having the courage to follow our bliss is also difficult. But if we only follow our bliss, we can get blissed out, and if we only follow our fear, we just get freaked out. Our journey works with the extreme path to the middle, which suggests that we pay more attention to fear as an invitation for growth.

—adapted from The Power and the Pain

Without the proper view, we do not see clearly, so we project. We project the ideal that spirituality will make us feel good and that heaven or salvation awaits. This is a partial truth, the half-truth that makes us enter the path. Who would enter a path that guaranteed hardship? Knowing there is light at the end of the tunnel keeps us going through it, but understanding the darkness in the tunnel helps us to negotiate it. The full truth is that power comes with pain. Hardship is the neglected and misunderstood second half of the truth, and it completes the view. True spirituality is not about making you feel good. It is about making you feel real.

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More about the book . . .

Can we find diamonds in the mud? Is it possible to mine joy and strength from our daily difficulties?

We all encounter obstacles on a daily basis—from small inconveniences and nuisances to the really big hardships wreaking havoc with our lives. Sometimes just the small things are enough to set us reeling.

The Power and the Pain addresses these issues head on. Of course we will always be subject to problems. It is how we view them that can change. In fact, this change of perspective is the very ground from which we can develop our previously untapped inner power and strength.

Dr. Andrew Holecek offers us a progressive path, beginning with common, easily understood hardships, and moving on to more subtle and challenging ones that commonly arise on our spiritual journeys. While the material is mostly drawn from Buddhist principles, many wisdom traditions are encompassed, including modern science, philosophy and psychology.

This is an indispensable guidebook for spiritual travelers seeking a way to synthesize experience and practice, and with this find transformational personal growth.

"When practicing on the spiritual path, often people do encounter difficulties and hardships. It is important to understand what these hardships are and how to deal with them when they occur. I am very glad that Andrew Holecek, who has studied and practiced Buddhism for many years, has written this book that will help people work through the situations they face as they practice the path"—Thrangu Rinpoche

"The spiritual hardships that each of us face along the way can be literally hard to bear, whether these are purely psychological pressures or events that impact us on a physical level as well. Yet they can be ameliorated when we see their connection to our path as a whole. That is the distinctive gift of The Power and the Pain for contemporary Buddhist practitioners. It helps us make sense of our individual experiences, which, as unique as they are, have been challenging practitioners in different ways since the time of the Buddha.... When we move beyond our theories about the spiritual path into the actual practice of it, that is when the insights and methods offered in this book will become truly useful. Andrew's book is in this sense a compassionate refuge for troubled times."—The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

Dr. Andrew Holecek

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More about the author . . .

Dr. Andrew Holecek has been traveling the spiritual path for his entire adult life and for the past twenty years has been a serious practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. Readers may be familiar with Dr. Holecek from his contributions to such Buddhist periodicals as Shambhala Sun and Elephant and from his regular column on death and dying for Bodhi Magazine. Founder of the Forum of Living and Dying, he teaches seminars throughout the country on spiritual hardship and the Tibetan views of life, death, and beyond. Dr. Holecek is also the co-founder of the Himalayan Dental Relief Project, which serves impoverished children in five Asian countries. He is currently adjunct faculty at Naropa University and the Ngedon School of Buddhist Studies and lives in Golden, Colorado.