So in the following pages we’re going to unpack what it actually takes to live these principles in real time: in the classroom, the boardroom, and the bedroom; in the chat-room and, God help us all, in the comments section of the Washington Post. We’ll talk about our own failures—maybe some successes, too—we’ll tell a bunch of stories, and we’ll pepper the whole thing with references to the best psychological literature out there that is looking at how to accomplish the good life.
What we won’t do is talk to you about the complexities of Buddhist cosmology. We won’t ask you to sign on for yet another belief system. But just know that, in addition to some great studies and our own personal experiences, there is also the time-tested wisdom of the whole of Buddhism that we’re trying to pack into this little missive, which carries with it a thousand minds and hearts that have road-tested every one of these principles in their very real, very vulnerable lives. Just like you, these friends—our Buddhist ancestors—have wanted to live a life that is happy, satisfying, and meaningful. They’ve succeeded. We think you can, too.
One Last Thing
Who the heck are we? Are we greatly enlightened spiritual masters who are going to give you all the answers? Are we here to solve all your problems? Have we even solved all our own problems?
In a word: nope.
We’re not great spiritual teachers. We’re just two seekers who have tried to put these principles at the center of our lives. They’ve worked for us. They still are working in us. And while we can’t say we’re all that realized or all that special, we can say with conviction that we live a life that is, all in all, astonishingly ordinary and very happily adequate.
Yeah, okay, but who are we?
We’re a white, hetero, cisgender, middle-class, hyper-educated American couple who have studied with some of the great Asian and American Buddhist teachers alive today. We’ve been at it for about twenty years each. We’ve spent years in meditation retreat and years studying old Buddhist books, new Buddhist books, and a small mountain of psychology studies—all in this sometimes bewildering attempt to live an ethical and energized life that will benefit us, we hope, and maybe even benefit others, too.
Craig has a PhD in psychology.
Devon was a classroom teacher for a decade before starting to teach meditation full-time.
We’re basically here to pass on what we’ve learned to you in the hope that it can be immediately applicable in your attempts to survive modern life with your heart and mind intact.
Now let’s have some fun.
MEDITATE
Devon
There are approximately one bajillion reasons why you should probably be meditating right now. Leaving aside any particularly Buddhist ones—like enlightenment, or nirvana, or complete liberation from the endless cycle of suffering—there are some totally legit, immediately beneficial ways mindfulness and meditation can be good for you starting today. We’ll get to the cold, hard facts soon. But first, I wanted to share a bit about how I began.
MY STORY
I was born in an artsy small town in southern Oregon to stable, loving parents. My dad worked with Carl Rogers, the great humanist psychologist, until the late ’70s, then got into property management so that he could be a stay-at-home parent with me, the only child. My mom was a California-trained architect obsessed with small-is-beautiful sustainable design. Things at home were, overall, pretty great. We sang songs at dinner; we rarely fought; we all dressed up for Halloween in matching costumes. Picture a hippie New Age rendition of the Cleavers.
Still, like everybody, I suffered from everyday eviscerations, plagues of self-doubt and anxiety. As a white woman, cisgender and mostly straight, who grew up with a lot of safety and family love and wellness, it’s not so easy to talk about the things that were hard for me. I know many of my friends confronted, and still confront, whole other levels of difficulty, from abuse and financial instability to racism and systemic injustice. But even for me, in my sheltered life, I was suffering. Especially starting in my teens, I experienced a growing dread, this gut-tightening drive to be better, happier, thinner, a radiant model of accomplishment and good cheer.
All these perfectionist tendencies led to good things, like being the valedictorian of my high school class and winning an academic scholarship to a semi-exclusive liberal arts college. But slowly the need to be better and different caught up to me. This sense of being squeezed out of myself, out of my own body, grew and grew. And then I got to college, joined a sorority, and kind of lost my mind.
My first semester on campus stands out for me as a blur of under-eating, over-exercising, and trying to make my body into someone else’s body (skinnier, tighter, smaller) and my mind into someone else’s mind (elated, ever-sunny). I lasted until about Christmas break, maybe four months. Then, home for the holidays, surrounded by family and friends, I ended up sobbing on my parents’ kitchen floor, immobilized by a tidal wave of self-loathing and feelings of utter worthlessness. My mom, ever the pragmatist, gave me a book by Pema Chödrön, the great American Buddhist nun and meditation teacher and effortless communicator of deepest human truths.
Reading Pema Chödrön, it became utterly clear to me what had happened. Slowly, unwittingly, I had bought in: bought in to the cruel and unreasonable images of what a quasi-perfected body should be; bought in to sorority norms of hyper-feminized effervescence; bought in to the whole objectifying patriarchal consumerist imbroglio (see chapter 5). I saw, that night, reading Pema in an old easy chair, that these screwball internalized regulations, these unexamined shoulds and must-dos, were literally wrecking me from the inside out. Not eating when I was hungry, not stopping when I was tired, pushing through and pushing past every healthy boundary in my quest for some far-fetched standard of culturally sanctioned goodness, beautifulness, desirability, I had driven myself into digestive distress, episodes of dizziness and unreality, and a mind spun out on standards I could never fully achieve.
With these realizations, something in me just cracked open. I found something in Pema’s words that I had never heard before. It was radical and so simple. The way out, she said, was to get real. And in particular, to sit down and look at my own mind.
So that’s what I did. I began meditating. That summer, I went to a young adults’ retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Not long after that, I met my first teachers, two Western women lamas named Pema and Yeshe, who had just completed the traditional Tibetan three-year retreat. Within a year I was absolutely hooked on meditation. Not to mention the slow process of digging myself out of the societal delirium that so many generations of women seem to fall into: namely, thinking that whatever our body is, it should somehow, inexplicably and impossibly, be other, better, and, above all, less.
So yes, meditation worked for me. And the more it worked, the more I did it. And the more I did it, the more it worked. And then at some point, in addition to just doing meditation, I eventually started teaching it. This doesn’t mean I never get caught up all over again in the dream world of culturally enforced impossible expectations and other delirious forms of suffering. But it does mean that I’m a little better at waking myself up, over and over again, from the dream.