When we practice zazen we limit our activity to the smallest extent. Just keeping the right posture and being concentrated on sitting is how we express the universal nature. Then we become Buddha, and we express Buddha nature. So instead of having some object of worship, we just concentrate on the activity which we do in each moment.

When you bow, you should just bow; when you sit, you should just sit; when you eat, you should just eat.If you do this, the universal nature is there. In Japanese we call it ichigyo-zammai, or “one-act samadhi.” Sammai (or samadhi) is “concentration.” Ichigyo is “one practice.”

Shunryu Suzuki

More on Shunryu Suzuki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunry%C5%AB_Suzuki

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Generosity (dana) – The sincere and selfless desire to give to others with no expectations.
Morality (sila) – Following the five moral precepts.
Patience (ksanti) – Tolerance, forbearance and endurance.
Energy (virya) – Making a concerted effort to achieve and attain enlightenment.
Meditation (dhyana) – A way of helping a person to attain the highest state of consciousness.
Wisdom (prajna) – Understanding that is gained through Buddhist practice such as meditation.

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Taken from The Dalai Lama’s book of Inner Peace.
Pg 289
isbn 9780007745463

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Now imagine taking that hike again, but this time, before you go, I warn you that someone is hiding along the path, dressed in a bear costume and jumping out to scare people. Now that you know, you’ll be on the lookout. Of course, the hike is long, and at times you forget. The moment the guy in the bear costume jumps out to scare you, you’ll still be startled. You might even jump or scream. But you won’t be completely terrorized, and you’ll recover from the shock more quickly, because you were forewarned and had some time to accept the idea that someone was going to jump out at you. You’ll say to yourself, “I knew this was going to happen at some point, it’s happened to lots of other hikers.”

This is essentially what Buddhism teaches us about suffering. It’s there, and it’s scary, and at some point it’s going to jump out and startle you, but it doesn’t have to utterly terrify you. Try this: The next time you experience suffering or distress, instead of saying “Life’s not fair” or, “Why is this happening to me?” tell yourself, “I was aware that this could happen. I’m not alone. Others are also experiencing this same thing.” Once you know that suffering is an unavoidable part of the experience, you can embrace the fact that it will happen at some point, worry less about it, and be prepared to recover more quickly when it comes.

No Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners Pg 76-77
Noah Rasheta

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Learning to Stay
Words by Pema Chödrön – edited for clarity by chromatics

“I give full complete credit to Dzigar Kongtrul because he’s the one who has given lots of teachings on this, continues to do so, and it’s had a very strong influence on my life and on my teachings.

The usual translation of the word “Shenpa” is attachment. If you were to look it up in a Tibetan dictionary, you would find that the definition was attachment. But the word “attachment” absolutely doesn’t get at what it is.

If I were translating “Shenpa” it would be very hard to find a word, but I’m going to give you a few. One word might be hooked. How we get hooked.

Another synonym for “Shenpa” might be that sticky feeling.

Urge is another word. The urge to smoke that cigarette, the urge to overeat, the urge to have one more drink, or whatever your addiction is.

Here is an everyday example of shenpa. Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens — that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have strong addictions, you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we’re talking about where it touches that sore place — that’s a shenpa. Someone criticizes you — they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child — and, shenpa: almost co-arising.

It causes you to feel a fundamental, underlying insecurity of the human experience that is inherent in a changing, shifting, impermanent, illusory world, as long as we are habituated to want to have ground under our feet.

In terms of shenpa itself, there’s the tightening that happens involuntarily, then there’s the urge to move away from it in some habitual way, which is usually initially in the mind. In the West, it is very, very common at that point to turn it against yourself: something is wrong with me. Maybe it’s still non-verbal at this point, but it’s already pregnant with a kind of little gestalt, little drama.

Mostly we don’t catch this. First of all, we don’t catch shenpa at all until you start hearing teachings on it and start to work with it although you may have been working with it from different disciplines.

What’s very interesting is you begin to notice it really quickly in other people. You’re having a conversation with somebody. Their face is sort of open and they’re listening, and you say something — you’re not quite sure what it is you just said, or maybe you know what it is you just said, it doesn’t necessarily have to be mean — but you see their eyes cloud over. Or you see their jaw tense. Or you can feel them… you know, you touched something. You’re seeing their shenpa, and they may not be aware of it at all.

There’s some kind of basic intelligence that we all have. If you’re really smart and you’re not too caught in your shenpa, you somehow give the situation some space because you know that they’ve just been triggered, they’ve just been hooked. You can just see it in their eyes or their body language, maybe nothing even verbal yet. Your part of it could be completely innocent. You didn’t really do anything wrong, but you just recognize what’s happening there. This is a situation in Buddhist meditation where you can actually learn how to open up the space. One method is to be quiet and start to meditate right on the spot, just go to your breath and be there openly with some kind of curiosity about them and openness to them.

That’s why I think this shenpa is really such a helpful teaching. It’s the tightening, it’s the urge… it’s this drive, too. This drive. It really shows you that you have lots of addictions, that we all have addictions. There’s this background static of slight unease, or maybe fidgetiness, or restlessness, or boredom. And so, we begin to use things to try to get some kind of relief from that unease.

Something like food, or alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or working, or shopping, or whatever we do, which, perhaps in moderation would be very delightful — like eating, enjoying your food. In fact, in moderation there’s this deep appreciation of the taste, of the good fortune to have this in your life. But these things become imbued with an addictive quality because we empower them with the idea that they will bring us comfort. They will remove this unease.

We never get at the root. The root in this case is that we have to really experience unease. We have to experience the itch. We have to experience the shenpa and then not act it out.

This business of not acting out I will call refraining . It’s also called “renunciation” in the spiritual teachings. It’s interesting because the Tibetan word for renunciation is shenluk and it means turning shenpa upside-down. Renunciation isn’t about renouncing food, or sex, or work, or relationship, or whatever it is. There’s this term: not attached to this life, not attached to worldly things. It’s not really talking about the things themselves, it’s talking about the shenpa. What we renounce or what we refrain from is the shenpa.

The interesting thing is that there is no way to really renounce shenpa. Someone looks at you in a certain way or, you hear a certain song, you have a certain smell, you walk into a certain room and boom. And you know it has nothing to do with the present. Nevertheless, there it is: it’s involuntary.

In the Buddhist teachings, it’s really not about trying to cast something out but about seeing clearly and fully experiencing the shenpa.

If there’s the willingness to see clearly and experience, then the prajna begins to click in. It is just innate in us. Wisdom mind is our birthright. It’s in every single living being down to the smallest ant. But human beings have the greatest chance of accessing it.

There’s this prajna so then you don’t have to get rid of the shenpa. It begins to see the whole chain reaction. To use modern language, there’s some wisdom that is based on a fundamental desire for wholeness or healing – which has nothing to do with ego-grasping. It has to do with wanting to connect and live from your basic goodness, your basic openness, your basic lack of prejudice, your basic lack of bias, your basic warmth. Wanting to live from that. It begins to become a stronger force than the shenpa and itself stops the chain reaction.

Those of you who have had, or still have, strong addictions and are working all the time with that urge, with that craving, with that drive to do something self-destructive yet again, you know that there has to be the willingness to fully acknowledge what’s happening. Then there is the willingness to refrain from having just one more drink, or refrain from binge eating or whatever it is.

It has to be done in some way that you equate it with loving kindness towards yourself, friendliness and warmth towards yourself, rather than equating it with some kind of straight jacket that you’re putting on yourself, because then you get into the struggle.

There’s shenpa to positive experience, shenpa to negative experience — shenpa to everything, really. Say, for instance, you meditated and you felt a sort of settling and a sort of calmness, a sense of well-being. And maybe thoughts came and went, but they didn’t hook you, and you were able to come back, and there wasn’t a sense of struggle. Afterwards, to that actually very pleasant experience: shenpa. “I did it right, I got it right, that’s how it should always be, that’s the model.” It either builds arrogance or conversely it builds poverty mind because the next session is nothing like that.

Then you have the “bad” one, which is not bad. It’s just that you sat there and you were very discursive and you were obsessing about someone at home, at work, something you have to do — you worried and you fretted, or you got into a fear or anger. So you have this meditation that, by your standards, is bad, and it isn’t bad, it’s just what it was. But then the shenpa… That’s where we get caught, that’s where we get hooked, that’s where it gets sticky. To use Buddhist language, as long as there’s shenpa it’s strengthening ego-clinging. In other words, good experience, ego get’s stronger about good; bad experience, ego gets stronger about bad.

It doesn’t have anything to do with this world. It has to do with shenpa. Hooked: imbuing things with a meaning that they don’t inherently have. They give us comfort and then they develop an addictive quality.

The work we have to do is only about coming to know, coming to acknowledge that we’re tensing or that we’re hooked.

The earlier you catch it, the easier it is to work with it but if you catch it when you’re already all worked up, that’s good enough. Hard to interrupt that momentum, because the urge is pretty strong when you’re already all worked up.

Sometimes you go through the whole cycle. Maybe you even catch yourself all worked up, and you still do it. The urge is so strong, the craving is so strong, the hook is so great, the sticky quality is so habituated, that basically we feel that we can’t do anything about it.

But what you can do then is, after the fact, you go and you sit down in meditation and you re-run the story, and you get in touch with the original feeling. Maybe you start with remembering the all worked up feeling and then you get in touch with that. So you can go into the shenpa in retrospect and this is very helpful. Also, catching it in little things, where the hook is actually not so great.

These teachings help us to at least get a perspective on what’s happening, a bigger perspective on what’s happening. In this case, there could be two billion kinds of itch and seven quadrillion types of scratching, but we just call the whole thing shenpa.

This is what Buddhists mean when they say, “Don’t get caught in the content, go to the underlying hooked quality, the sticky quality, the urge, the attachment.” I think “attachment” just doesn’t get at it.

In meditation you can expect, you will see, that you have shenpa to good experience, shenpa to bad experience. But, maybe, this teaching will help you to see that and have a sense of humor. This is the first step: acknowledging or seeing. Because you can’t actually, you don’t have the basis to stay if you don’t first see.

Rather than get caught in the story line or the content, take it as an opportunity to be present with the hooked quality. Just use it as an opportunity to practice staying, which is to say, let that be your base, whatever your style is. Maybe you like nature and birds and things, so you go some place quiet and sit. Just practice coming back to the present moment, coming back.

What to do about it? Really, at this point, let’s just say, just see it. Then if you feel you have the tools or ability to not follow the chain reaction, it comes down to “label it thinking.” Not going off on that tangent, which is usually —especially when you’re silent —mental dialogue, right? Talking to yourself about badness or goodness, or me – bad, they – bad, something. This right, that wrong. Something.

So, free from the labels of right and wrong, and good and bad. It has to be that you just keep letting those labels go, and just come back to the immediacy of being there.

What do you do when you don’t do the habitual thing? You’re kind of left with that urge much more in your face, and that craving and the wanting to move away, you’re much more in touch with it then.

If you want to think of it in terms of four R’s, it’s recognizing, refraining — which simply means not going down that road — relaxing into the underlying feeling, and then something called resolve, which means you do this again and again and again. It’s not a one shot deal. You resolve that in the future you’ll just keep working this way.

If you just had to do it once and that was it, that would be really wonderful. It would be so wonderful because we all can do this a little bit. But it comes back. Because we’ve been habituating ourselves to move away and really strengthening the urge and strengthening the whole habituated situation for a long, long, long time. And it’s not an overnight miracle that you just undo that habituation. It takes a lot of loving kindness, a lot of recognition with warmth. It takes a lot of learning how to not go down that path, learning how to refrain, and it takes a lot of willingness to stay present.

And you do it over and over and over.

In the process you learn so much humility… it softens you up just enormously. As someone said, “Once you begin to see your shenpa, there’s no way to be arrogant.”

The trick is that the seeing, instead of turning into softening and humility, doesn’t become self-denigration. That’s the real trick.

But once you see what you do — how you get hooked and how you follow it and all of this —there’s no way to be arrogant.

The whole thing sort of softens you up. It humbles you in the best sense and also begins to give you a lot of confidence in that you have this wisdom guide, Sogyal Rinpoche calls it. Your wisdom guide is your own mind, the fundamental aspect of your being — this prajna, or buddha nature, basic goodness — that begins to be more and more activated. Then you, from your own wisdom, begin to go more towards spaciousness and openness and unhabituatedness, but it doesn’t happen quickly.

The four R’s are helpful to remember —of recognition, refraining, relaxing into the basic feeling, and then resolving to continue this way throughout your life, to just keep working this way with your mind and your emotions.

There is only one shenpa but you’ve already seen that it has these degrees of intensity. The fundamental, root shenpa is what in Buddhism is called ego, ego-clinging. We experience it as this tightening and self-absorption gets very strong at that point. Then the branch shenpas are all the different styles of scratching.”

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The happiness we seek, a genuine lasting
peace and happiness, can be attained only
through the purification of our minds. This
is possible if we cut the root cause of all
suffering and misery˜our fundamental
Ignorance.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
The World of Tibetan Buddhism

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