Right Now, Don’t be Bothered by Anything

There are two ways I can see to relate to the world right now,
if this is a moment that feels distressful.
 
One is to be bothered by the world and also by the distress,
and to work from that perspective…
possibly with success, 
but also with dismay, disapproval, disdain.
 
The other is to not be bothered by anything, not even distress,
and to be kind to ourselves and everyone else,
remembering that it’s possible to welcome everything
and still fight with every ounce of our being 
for love, and justice, and peace. 

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 475. I hope you’re doing ok. I was feeling shaken after watching the inauguration and then reading about the executive orders, but I also know there are many who are feeling joy. For me I think the shaken-ness was somewhat about that: about knowing there was such a wide delta between how I was feeling (and how many of my friends & colleagues were feeling) and how so many others were feeling. 

I talked with friends and family members. To a person, they said, “turn your attention to something else.” Most hadn’t watched or looked at the news and weren’t planning to. I’d tuned to it, and my wisest friends were saying, tune out. 

I wondered about that – about my strategy. I wanted to tune in. I wanted to know how I would feel, listening to the inaugural address. I wanted to hear what he had to say. When I did, I felt distress. But I was ok with that – was expecting that. I preferred it to not knowing, even though it meant – means – that distress was, and is, coming and going.

Suzuki Roshi writes, “when you are practicing…, do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything.” 

“Do not be bothered by anything.” 

I know that a great deal of ancient wisdom arose during very fraught times, times perhaps similar to our own. But living in this time, and given this moment, “do not be bothered by anything?” What an instruction. 

I’m interested in the instruction as an instruction for formal practice. Maybe this is how Roshi was offering it, I don’t know. Not being bothered by anything is something I’ve had the privilege (I’d call it a privilege) to experience, on a few retreats: the mind that’s quiet and lets thoughts come and go, and truly isn’t bothered by them: their frequency, their persistence, the weight of their content. It’s not something I can replicate easily when I’m not on retreat but at least there’s a kind of, what?, motor memory? A kind of noticing thinking, and other things, too, like a feeling of distress, or fear, or other difficult emotions, and simply letting them go. Not getting caught. But don’t get me wrong, I also have plenty upon plenty of things I get caught on, snagged on: this mind, a lot of the time, is still getting caught. It’s just that there’s also a memory, maybe it’s not as much motor memory and it’s more like memory foam, of how things feel when they’re not sticking. Maybe we can explore that in our practice in a few minutes.

In his talk, What Mindfulness is and What it Isn’t, Joseph Goldstein says that something that changed his practice – and I take him to mean, moved it onward – when he began the inquiry, “what is a thought?” And as he engaged in that inquiry, he came to the realization that a thought is ephemeral and has no substance whatsoever. Which enabled him to begin to truly let go of thoughts, and not be bothered by them. 

I’m familiar with at least the whisper of what he’s saying, and maybe you are, too: seeing the birth of a thought, almost like a thought bubble in a comic strip but even softer, arising, made of nothing whatsoever, and fading away. Do you know what I mean? 

And yet I still, so often, take my thoughts so seriously. This week, I’m having a whole series of thoughts, arising out of what’s happening with the new administration, and I notice I’m taking them pretty seriously. Does knowing that a thought is ephemeral, made of nothing at all, as Joseph says, make it possible, or easier, to let thinking be happening, let thoughts come and go, and as Suzuki Roshi instructs, not be bothered by thinking?

In my Berkeley students’ journals this week – and this is just their very first week – the most frequent question was, “OMG there’s so much thinking, how do I stop it?!” Which is basically, “thinking is bothering me.” Yesterday in class we talked about that: how to begin a practice of simply noticing that thinking is happening. And then, unlike with just about everything else they do, not trying to accomplish a task around that noticing, like the task of stopping the thinking – or of changing it from one set of thoughts to another. How to engage in the practice of not being bothered by thinking. 

On the cushion…but then there’s portable practice, life, life in the law. Life in the law in this particular moment. “Do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything.” 

Can our active minds, the minds that are truly wanting to help, wanting to heal the world, our thinking minds – can we let them be…and still do our work? Can we relax into the moments or days – possibly insanely long days – of thinking, strategizing, planning, serving, and not be bothered by thinking? It’s a lot, what we have in front of us – it always is, it’s always a lot to be human – and can we remember that we don’t need to be bothered by all the thinking, or really by anything? 

And could “not bothered” practice maybe even be helpful? Could it help us engage even more deeply, usefully, precisely, forcefully, with whatever it is that we’re being called to do right now? In other words, what might happen if we remove the layer of how exhausting things are, how scary things are, how tenuous, how difficult? What if we let go of being bothered by the world, but also continued to do everything we’re being called to do? Suzuki Roshi is pointing towards a practice that has no stress, no clinging, no stuckness in it. Joseph is, too. 

I wonder if we can point the law in that direction, even with everything in front of us, and in doing just that, locate a place to reside in the law, a refuge in the law (in it, not from it), that’s - not by definition so much as by practice –not stressful, more easeful. A place not with added wellbeing, but that is safe and where we inherently, already, are well. And if so, how might it change our capacity, and the power of our work itself?