Lotus Pond (1930) by Lin Yu-shan

I've been working in my new role for a few months now, and it has not been without its fair share of hardship, but I have by and large, kept my cool.

Keeping my cool is something I'm actually very good at. I am guilty of wearing it as a bit of a badge of honour, in fact. It's largely an outcome of my earthy, melancholic temperament. It's also a great thing to hide behind.

In the past, some of my keeping cool had been rooted in that wildly enjoyable and deeply misguided act, spiritual bypassing. Do you know what you can do when you recognise that you do not, in the strictest and most commonly established sense of the meaning, exist? Pretty much anything – that's why it's dangerous lol. That's why initiations, guides, precepts exist.

But most commonly, people just fail to take care of themselves, and other people, because they're tuning out the signals of their immediate environment and body. They're abiding in the undifferentiated state of luminous awareness instead, or think they are. Tat Tvam Asi तत् त्वम् असि. oops.

Nowadays I don't fall for that so often. I've come to realise through painful experience how out of alignment with actually showing up for people you love, not least your self, such a posture actually is – despite good intentions to the contrary.

Losing it

So you won't find me tuning out, or at least I do my best not to hahaha, in heightened situations. But what I am guilty of doing is something that ultimately belongs to a shared category, though to a lesser degree. That is, let's say, trying to keep my cool:

Recognising a situation is increasing in intensity, that I'm getting activated. Responding by breathing down into my hara, feeling the connection between my feet and the floor, slowing my thoughts and making my actions more deliberate. That sounds fine, and fundamentally it is. It's titration.

The problem is not the act itself, but the motives behind the actions. I'm guilty of having thoughts that take the form of "I better keep my cool here" – which, if I take the mask off those thoughts, is actually me saying "I better not expose myself to this". I'm protecting myself, I'm avoiding vulnerability. Of course I am!! I'm human!

But the thing is, you don't always get to make that choice. Then what? Perhaps the practice you've accrued kicks in automatically you can handle things even while being fully swept off your feet. Or perhaps you lose all composure, and still try to do what you can with what you can handle.

That's not bad, how could it be? But the thing that protects me, that voice which says oops, idk if I should wade into that shit, thinks that if I did open myself to the risk of making an arse of myself lol, or totally freaking out, I would die!!

I won't die. I mean, yes, I will die eventually. But most likely whatever situation I'm in isn't going to be the thing that does it. I'll most likely be absolutely fine, with the worse outcome being some residual embarrassment.

What is embarrassment when held up against truly giving a fuck about what you're doing and who you're helping? What is left in reserve, truly, when we decide to love? We can pretend that it doesn't demand everything of us. But I'm not sure that's true.

I don't mean that to say that every time we make the choice to love, to expose ourselves and exchange self with other, we risk destruction. But there's some truth to that, isn't there? Look at Sufi poetry, look at virtually every love song you've ever heard. I would suggest that people do not get out of these situations in one piece, but actually it's the separation that's getting destroyed, the division.

We're being made whole each time. And it's not even you that risks destruction, but the ideas you have about who or what you actually are. And to say louder for the me of 10 years ago down the back: if you're not bringing equal compassion and care to your own soft animal body, you're not doing what you think you're doing.

The Gateway

I'm guilty of being a bit of a rogue zennist. That's not for want of trying to engage with the Sangha, but time, circumstance and karma have consistently left me as a largely solo-practitioner. This means my practice is fairly grab bag, but I've picked up a few things from group practice I still strongly adhere to. One of those is The Four Great Bodhisattva Vows:

Shujō muhen seigan do 衆生無邊誓願度
Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them;

Bonno mujin seigan dan 煩惱無盡誓願断
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them;

Hōmon muryo seigan gaku 法門無量誓願学
The Dharma Gates are infinite, I vow to enter them;

Butsudo mujo seigan jo 仏道無上誓願成
The Buddha-Way is unattainable, I vow to attain it

Some things you may notice: These statements are extremely cool. They're also completely impossible – there's the rub. These vows are made to be broken, because a bodhisattva is a buddha-to-be who has turned their back on the absolution of nirvana, to remain adrift in the waters of samsara, of suffering. Why? Because there is no separation. Because the act of compassion is the experience of enlightenment.

I have worn 108-bead malas for a long time, and one of the inescapable facts of mala beads is that they are impermanent. At some point, they're gonna snag on something, or someone, and 108 little beads will go flying in every direction. I say the Bodhisattva vows every morning when I hang my mala around my neck.

The other day, 108 little beads went flying in every direction just as I lost my cool but did my best anyway, and I remembered why I make those vows in the first place.