"What Part of No"

READING

Pema Chodron is an American Buddhist nun, student of a renowned Tibetan meditation master, and author of several books. She is the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery for Westerners. Her books teach how to apply Buddhist spiritual practices to daily life, using simple illustrations and plainspoken language. This reading is from her book The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.

In the chapter titled "Finding the Ability to Rejoice," she writes about using meditation to learn how to open ourselves to joy - for ourselves, for others, and for life - to become aware of our basic goodness. "Every moment contains the free-flowing openness and warmth that characterize unlimited joy," she writes.

"This is the path we take in cultivating joy: learning not to armor our basic goodness, learning to appreciate what we have. Most of the time we don't do this. Rather than appreciate where we are, we continually struggle and nurture our dissatisfaction. It's like trying to get the flowers to grow by pouring cement on the garden.

"But as we train . . . we may come to the point where we see the magic of the present moment; we may gradually wake up to the truth that we have always been warriors living in a sacred world. This is the ongoing experience of limitless joy. We won't always experience this, it's true. But year by year it becomes more and more accessible.

Once a cook at Gampo Abbey was feeling very unhappy. Like most of us, she kept feeding the gloom with her actions and her thoughts; hour by hour her mood was getting darker. She decided to try to ventilate her escalating emotions by baking chocolate chip cookies. Her plan backfired, however - she burned them all to a crisp. At that point, rather than dump the burned cookies in the garbage, she stuffed them into her pockets and backpack and went out for a walk. She trudged along the dirt road, her head hanging down and her mind burning with resentment. She was saying to herself, 'So where's all the beauty and magic I keep hearing about?'

"At that moment she looked up. There walking toward her was a little fox. Her mind stopped and she held her breath and watched. The fox sat down right in front of her, gazing up expectantly. She reached into her pockets and pulled out some cookies. The fox ate them and slowly trotted away. She told this story to all of us at the abbey, saying: 'I learned today that life is very precious. Even when we're determined to block the magic, it will get through and wake us up. That little fox taught me that no matter how shut down we get, we can always look outside our cocoon and connect with joy."

SERMON

For anyone who has difficulty saying "no," life can veer out of balance, with commitments turning into defeats and generosity into resentment. It's a common problem. Most of us learn the hard way how to set limits before it's too late.

There aren't many of us like one young administrative assistant in an office where I worked many years ago. Though she was the junior staff person, she had a talent for fending off unwanted requests of all kinds. Hanging on the wall behind her desk was a bold hand-printed sign. It read, "WHAT PART OF NO DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?"

This message - which I could never reconcile with her friendly, outgoing personality - was her preemptive strike against the rest of us. She had us all tiptoeing around her desk. I never asked her to do anything. There is power in saying "no;" sometimes too much of it.

And there is no power in saying "yes" when we don't mean it. In the children's story I read earlier, Sherman Crunchley the police officer, spends most of his time doing what he does not want to do. His life is out of balance. He becomes obsessed with his inability to say "no" to anyone or anything: to his father, who expects him to become chief of police, and to his co-workers, who give him extra work to do. He can't even return something he bought.

Sherman thinks his problem is that he can't say "no." And that is certainly true. But that is not all he needs to figure out. The larger problem is how he will say "yes" to who he is and what he wants to do in life.

Sherman is not cut out for police work. What he loves is hats. Simply learning to say "no" would not have brought Sherman happiness for long. He also had to learn to say "yes" to what he loves.

The ability to say "no" always serves a larger purpose. Even when it sets a personal boundary, it affirms the dignity and self-determination of the person. "No" and "yes" need each other to give balance and direction to life.

It's a simple truth, but it has many implications. The power of "no" and "yes" affects the way we see ourselves and our world and how we act on what we see. Every day is an exercise in managing our own reactions, negative and positive, to what we experience.

The unhappy cook in the reading by Pema Chodron cannot work her way out of her negativity. Who knows, she may have good reason to be unhappy. We all do sometimes. But her spiritual life has opened her eyes to the possibility that "yes" is everywhere - and just when she least expects it, it is.

This teaching is at the heart of Pema Chodron's work. It began with a formative incident that took place when she was very young. "When I was about six years old," she writes, "I received [an] essential . . . teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, ‘Little girl, don't you go letting life harden your heart.'"

As Chodron explains, this is a core teaching in Buddhism. To be open to life requires a "soft spot," as she calls it, "a place" that is "vulnerable and tender." It takes work to stay open and vulnerable, as we all know. That work is a spiritual practice.

The search for balance is more than knowing when to say "no." It is remaining open to "yes," despite adversity and disappointment. And it is managing our negative and critical impulses, which can so easily create obstacles to finding what we need and want. Happiness and equanimity, according to Pema Chodron, require us to drop our biases and our reactions, our habits, as she puts it, "of liking and disliking, accepting and rejecting."

Think about it. How different would our lives be if we didn't pay so much attention to our opinions about everything that happens and everyone we meet? For most of us, the day is a running commentary of reactions to a succession of incidents and interactions: in the end, it's thumbs up or thumbs down, a good day or a bad one. Then our happiness is contingent on a stream of events over which we have no control. And that is one way to let life harden us. We like everything less and less, until we don't like anything or anyone at all.

Negative reactions and critical judgments are sometimes good, of course. They are necessary for honest assessment, which can lead to growth and change. Our critical faculties are closely identified with our liberal religious values. Our faith tradition prides itself on the role of reason in religious life. We are grateful for a spiritual path that allows us to use our minds, to doubt, and to reject. The challenge is how to use our critical faculties with compassion for ourselves and others.

I have observed over the years that we Unitarian Universalists tend to be hard on ourselves. I know this personally, holding myself to impossibly high standards, mercilessly critiquing my performance. I have heard so many of you struggle with similar judgments on yourselves, even linking your entire self-worth to getting some particular aspect of your life just right. And then, because we disappoint ourselves, we become disappointed in others. People fail to live up to our expectations. Our work presents one problem after another. Our families don't appreciate us. The church isn't what we thought it would be. Come to think of it, neither is life.

This is the state of negativity that can take over when a good person loses balance and perspective. Somehow we have to break free of the cycle of liking and disliking, of issuing a thumbs up or a thumbs down on everything and everyone, most of all, on ourselves. A realistic attitude towards life includes negative and positive judgments, but knows that happiness, growth, learning and fulfillment come from seeking balance. Balance comes from equanimity and compassion.

"To cultivate equanimity," writes Pema Chodron, "we practice catching ourselves when we feel attraction or aversion, before it hardens into grasping or negativity." Strong emotions one way or another can give us a sense of kinship with others, instead of judgment, which creates alienation. Rather than "narrow reality into for and against, liking, and disliking," we widen ourselves to include the experience of others, even parts of ourselves we wish we could make go away.

Pema Chodron tells a story about a Zen master. "Whenever someone asked [him] how he was, he would always answer, ‘I'm okay.' Finally one of his students said, ‘Roshi, how can you always be okay? Don't you ever have a bad day?' The Zen master answered, ‘Sure I do. On bad days, I'm okay. On good days, I'm also okay.' This is equanimity," she concludes, not a meaningless social reassurance, not at all.

Equanimity means staying grounded in a state of being that is not contingent on the ups and downs of life. To achieve it, Pema Chodron says, we must learn to practice compassion. This is the most original and useful insight in her work: equanimity comes from "opening up as wholeheartedly as we can," she writes, "to ourselves, to our friends, and even to the people we dislike." It is a search for kinship and fellow feeling.

As a spiritual practice, we can do it anywhere. She suggests trying it while we are driving - always a challenge to equanimity and compassion - or walking down the street. One woman overcame the misery of driving in traffic by using her "resentment and uptightness" and "fear of missing an appointment" as her "heart connection with all the other people sitting fuming in their cars."

Another way, walking down the street: "As we pass people we simply notice whether we open up or shut down," she writes. "We notice if we feel attraction, aversion, or indifference, without adding anything extra like self-judgment . . . Noticing where we open up and where we shut down - without praise or blame - is the basis of our practice. Practicing this way for even one block of a city street can be an eye-opener," she adds.

It's even something we could do in church. Which is why we are here, is it not? Aren't we all seeking greater balance and equanimity?

Here is one place to begin: with the simple spiritual practice of learning compassion for one another. Think of all the vulnerability, the fear, the pain, the anxiety that people carry into this space at one time or another in our lives. Think of the ways in which we open up and shut down to one another. And then think again, with tenderness and self-recognition, of the kinship we share, the bond implicit in our humanity, and the worth and dignity of each and every person. And think again of the possibility inherent in seeing each other in this way, the power of affirmation and compassion. Saying "yes" to the truth of who we really are, we find balance and equanimity in ourselves and learn what it means to be at peace.

This sermon is based on "The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times," by Pema Chodron (Boston: Shambhala, 2002). The children's story is "Sherman Crunchley," by Laura Numeroff and Nate Evans (New York: Dutton, 2003).