interview with a lama
Not long ago, I was fortunate enough to have a private interview with a Lama. It was a somewhat impulsive decision inspired by my ongoing ruminations on the issue of free will - i.e. do we have it? My views on this topic have undergone an accelerated evolution in the most recent 7 of my 43 years on the planet instigated by an unceremonious disabusement of the notion that I was actually in control, but that’s another story altogether. As it turned out, my efforts to engage the Lama on one of my favorite topics were thwarted either by language or cultural issues, though I’m not sure which. So there I was, on a couch with a Lama all to myself wondering what to ask next so I went big asking him what is the purpose of life?
In the moment I could recognize my disappointment - no juicy new fodder on free will and a very simple answer to life’s biggest question. His answer: to be happy… To be happy? That’s the only reason we’re here? No learning, no self actualization, no finding our higher purpose? Nope, we’re here to be happy. For the life of me I can’t figure out why I found his answer so surprising, after all, when I teach yoga nidra I tell my own students that their senses, thoughts, and emotions are all pointing them in the right direction, they need only to tune up the receiver, not use yesterday’s data and make sure that what they are reaching for IS, in fact, making them happy. In my own life, the act of paying attention, the kind of attention only possible for me when I’ve slowed to a snail’s pace on retreat, has illuminated many actions of habit that are plainly no longer serving me. Collecting fresh data can yield surprising results especially when it leads us away from things we’ve known and loved and towards those we were sure we’re not so keen on. It would seem we spend the first several decades amassing the sets of likes and dislikes that form so much of our identities. Unless we adopt a practice of challenging our own perceptions these ideas harden and eventually deny us the ability to move fluidly through those challenges we have absolutely no control over.
I love the expressions “come to your senses” and “be sensible” and exploring what they mean literally and what they’ve come to mean. If we go back to them literally, we can explore, with curiosity, the physical sensations we experience as a sensory guidance system but in for this to work we need to actually sense what we are feeling in our bodies when we’re feeling down or frustrated or joyful. While this might sound easy, anyone who’s tried this practice will recognize how incredibly quick we are to move away from pure sensation and into stories and thoughts as we essentially shortcut the process, i.e. use yesterday’s data.
I have learned and re-learned the value of this practice over the years, first exposed to it (though accidentally, briefly, and quickly forgotten) first during a yoga nidra workshop with Richard Miller in 2002. Not long after that I got many more lessons on this when my good friend Joyce coached me through a big heart-break. When I would relate my misery she would, without fail, ask me what it felt like. No matter what I answered (I’m sad, I feel soooo sad) she would challenge me to bring it back to my senses. This was such a radically new practice for me I really had no idea what she wanted - I had so completely short-circuited the processing of my body’s emotional signals into thought and story that her questions seemed nonsensical and downright frustrating. It was her patient and insistent repetition of the question “but what does it feel like… in your body?” that eventually allowed me to experience the power of this practice first hand.
By the summer of 2006 I had forgotten the name of the teacher who’s workshop I’d accidentally signed up for years earlier (I though I was taking a weekend yoga workshop while in Berkeley on business) but for reasons I cannot explain, I had a nagging need to resurrect his name and feared that I’d lost it forever. It was during this time that I was undertaking a massive purge as part of selling my house of 10 years, a 4 story behemoth filled to the brim with art, files, and too much furniture. I was convinced I’d thrown away the handouts from that weekend workshop only to discover them squirreled away in a random file folder. For no reason I could understand I was thrilled to have resurrected his name, Richard Miller, one so ordinary to have defied my efforts at recalling it.
A few short weeks later I received an email from a local yoga studio announcing that none other than Richard Miller would be coming to Maryland to teach his first ever yoga nidra teacher training. Nuh uh. I simply love serendipitous experiences like these, they blow me away, no small feat considering my early years as a hyper-rational Spock-like science type. I still am quite a logical being but I’ve adopted a radical empiricism about my data collection - I no longer collect data only with my mind but strive to include my senses as equal partners, dropping down the ladder of inference as the experiential educators like to say. It is precisely this kind of radical empiricism as described by William James that is required of us to be happy, no? James is a recent discovery for me. His writings resonate with the scientist and mystic in me and are just one more framing of the same practice of experiencing each moment with the fresh curiosity of an unjaded scientist seeking, simply, to be happy.
Yes, to be happy might be a ridiculously simple reason to be here. If only it was as easy as it is simple.
