Taking practice into life doesn’t work

Student: I would like to know how to bring the meditation into daily life. How to—in the moment—be able to respond rather than react.

Ken: So, the question is, “How to respond rather than react and how to bring meditation into daily life?” This question comes up again and again and again. If you’ll excuse me, I think it’s the wrong question. What if you turn it around? Let me talk a little bit about why I think it may be the wrong question.

When we sit and if we sit on a regular basis, we begin to get this experience of actually just being able to rest. When thoughts come up, we don’t get all uptight about them; they come and they go and we begin to get a different relationship with ourselves. I could talk about that a lot, but I don’t think I need to right now. And then we think, “Oh, this is very nice. Finally I’m not being driven crazy by all the stuff that’s going on in my head.” And so I think, “Gee, it’d be really nice to be able to live this way too.” And we think, “Okay, how do I take this peace and quiet—or this clarity or freedom or however you want to describe it—out into my life?” How long does it last when you tried to take it out into your life?

Student: It depends on how stressed I am and what triggers are hit. The more insecure and scared I feel, the less I remember in the moment to pause, and the more I just habitually respond with whatever—sually not with kindness and compassion, unfortunately.

Take life into practice

Ken: There’s an old adage from military planning here: “The best battle plan lasts until first contact with the enemy.” So, basically it doesn’t work because when we take it out, it’s just as you described, we encounter something, and kaboom, we are right back into all the old patterns of reactivity and so forth. So this idea of taking our peace and clarity into our lives, people have tried this and tried this and tried this, and it just doesn’t work very well. So, what if you turn the question around? Instead of, “How do I take my meditation practice into my life?” what if you ask, “How do I take my life into my meditation practice?” Have you ever thought of thinking that way? No. Okay, so, what would that look like? Well, what do you do in meditation that is different from what you do ordinarily in your life?

Student: I meditate every morning for an hour.

Ken: Very good. But during the meditation period, I suspect that you’re doing something different from what you’re doing the rest of the day, or trying to do something different.

Student: I try to use that time, for me it’s a conscious contact with God. So I’m trying to just be open and just try to quiet the mind so I can just say, “I’m available. I’m here. Please be loud, God. So I can do your will.” And so that’s different. During the day I try to, but there’s a lot of “me” in there during the day trying to get what I want [laughs].

Ken: Oh. You would introduce that “me” thing. Now we get very deep. God was fine, but when you introduced “me,” it gets much deeper. You look very puzzled there, but let me explain why. You sit quietly and as you say, you’re actually letting things quiet down so you can hear God, right? Now where does “me” come from? [Pause] You see I told you it got deep very quickly. Where does “me” come from? [Pause] She has an idea. Why don’t you give her the mic? Oh, that’d be such a relief. Where does “me” come from?

Student: The actions and thoughts that you have throughout the day, you kind of identify with “me,” your identity.

Ken: Okay, that’s good because that’s exactly what happens, but it didn’t answer the question. Where does the “me” come from?

Student: I would say “me” is who I am, my soul, who I was when I was born, who I am. I think of me as my thoughts …

Ken: How many of you would say you are your thoughts? Hands up. You don’t have any supporters here. [Laughter]

Student: Not my thoughts, okay. I guess “me” is … I think of it more as my soul, my heart, who I am.

Ken: This gets very, very deep you see. What’s that? Now I’m not going to push you too hard on this, but you see, it’s really difficult to say what that is, isn’t it? Yeah. That’s why I said it gets very deep. So let’s just put all that on a shelf, because we could drown here very easily, and go back to your question, and the question I proposed to you, “How do you take your life into your meditation practice?” So you started off by saying that you sit in meditation, you do an hour in the morning, you sit quietly and so you become very open. Okay. And then something happens during the day, so that that seems not to be possible in the same way. This is what we need to look at very carefully. So, you and I are talking right now. What if you go completely open right now? What happens?

Student: In the first moment I get scared because there’s a vulnerability, and then there’s an ease.

Ken: Okay. How long did that take you?

Student: Not very long.

Ken: Not very long. So that was a very small example of taking your life into your meditation practice. Okay. Now what if you did that all the time? You are absolutely right. On the one hand, it’s totally terrifying. Something happens and you just open. And it’s that feeling vulnerable and open, because when you’re open, you’re kind of vulnerable. All of that stuff comes up. And then strangely, actually almost mysteriously, there’s like, “Oh, I can be here.” But now it’s different from the way one ordinarily would be, isn’t it? So that’s what it means to take your life into your meditation practice.

Start small, with opening doors

Ken: You can start off with really, really small things. One of my friends suggest you start off with opening doors. How many of you open doors during the day? We all do that, right? So I gave this to a student of mine down in Orange County. I used to stay overnight because I had an office down there. A couple of weeks later when I was down there, he had green Post-Its on every door in his house, not just the doors from room to room, but the kitchen cabinets, the refrigerators, everything. He was practicing it. So as soon as you reach to open the door, you open, [snaps fingers] like that.

Now what happens here when you do this, is that you are taking your life and bringing it into the same kind of effort you’re doing in meditation. You’re not trying to bring anything to your life. You’re bringing life into that openness, if you see what I mean. It takes practice, you’re gonna fall down, skin your knees, bloody your nose a million times. That is just going to happen. But that happens when we sit. Everybody knows that when you sit, the first time you sit, it’s just complete chaos; there’s all these thoughts all over the place. Where did the breath go? But after awhile you begin and there is some continuity. Exactly the same kind of thing happens here. So you just open and it takes [snaps fingers] that long, and the more you do it, the more it becomes part of the way that you’re practicing in your life. That’s what it means to bring your life into the practice. So that’s one thing, you can do it with opening doors. Once you get the idea of opening doors, then you got to change it because otherwise we just get habituated.

The telephone meditation

Ken: Second thing, this is from Thich Nhat Hanh, it’s the telephone meditation. Always answer the phone on the third ring. How many of you like to answer it on the first ring? Ring. Hi. Right? And you run, run, run. But what happens if you answered on the third ring? The way Thich Nhat Hanh presents this is actually very nice. When the phone rings the first time, instead of answering it, you say “calm” to yourself. And the second ring you say, “smiling.” This is what Thich Naht Hanh likes, and it’s good. The third ring you say, “present” and you pick it up. Now how are things going to go If you’re calm, smiling, and present when you pick up the phone? I mean, maybe it’s the cable guy, maybe it’s a telemarketer, but it’s going to be different. Maybe it’s your mother-in-law, but it’s going to be different. Again, this is what it means to take life into practice. That is, we start working it right in our lives. We don’t try to take something from our meditation practice to our lives. We start working things right in our lives. Get the idea?

Take a breath before speaking

Ken: I’ll give you one more, which I found so useful. And there’s two parts to it, so I suppose it’s two different practices. One is, always take a breath before you speak. Now, when you’re having a conversation with a friend, how often do you wait? How long do you wait between the time when your friend stops talking and you start talking, one or two milliseconds? Something like that? What happens if you start taking a breath right there? Well, the first thing that’s going to happen is, you will never be interrupted and you will never interrupt anybody else. That’s quite a change right there. The second thing that’s going to happen is that people know they’re going to have to be quiet if they want to hear anything that you have to say, because if they start talking again, you’re not going to jump in. You’re just going to wait. And then when they stop, you’re going to take another breath. So they’re going to start listening. This is very effective. I do a little bit of business consulting. This really upsets people, it really upsets them. People say, “You are so quiet, Ken. You listen to everything.” They aren’t used to it.

Listen to your voice as if listening to another person

Ken: The other practice, which is also connected to speech, but is another example of how to take life into practice. You’ll probably kill me after I tell you this one, or after you try it for a week, most people do. When you are speaking, listen to your voice as if you were listening to another person. When you are speaking, listen to your voice as if you were listening to another person.

I had a student, again down in Orange County. This woman, she was a real estate broker, a very nice woman. And I gave the group exactly this practice. And when we met the next time, I asked them, “How many of you brought this part of your life into your practice?” Nobody had even tried it. So I made some rude noises. The next week, this woman, whose name was Linda came a bit early to the group. I said, “Linda, did you try this practice?” And she looked at me like this [mimics the pained expression on Linda’s face]. I said, “Why? She said, “She never shuts up.” [Laughter] She’d heard herself for the first time, how much she talks. So this is a very powerful practice.

How many of you sometimes find yourself speaking in your mother’s voice or your father’s voice? If you do this practice, you’ll really hear that. And you go, “Ah, that’s not me speaking. It’s them!” If you actually practice this way, as soon as how you’re saying something is different from what you want to be saying, you’ll hear it because you’re listening to yourself. And so you will sort of get tied up in knots, which is bringing this quality of attention to your speech. It’s making a practice out of speaking, if you follow.

Differentiating methods and results

Ken: You said at the end, so you can be kinder, more compassionate, etc. Really important point, and I just wanted to touch on this and then we’ll go to another question. One of the things that really confuses a lot of people about practice is differentiating between results and methods.

Now, suppose you were really tense, and you’d had a big shock or something like that, and we happened to meet, and I said, “Oh, you’re really tense. Relax!” What would you do, when I say, “Why don’t you just relax?”

Student: I get more tense.

Ken: That’s exactly right. You get more tense right there. Okay. That’s result. So if I tell you the result it doesn’t help you. But if I see you’re really tense and I say … what’s your name by the way?

Student: Corinne.

Ken: Corinne, why don’t you take a deep breath? Let it out slowly. Do that again. Let it out slowly, nice and long. And do it once more. How do you feel?

Corinne: More relaxed.

Ken: More relaxed, you see. So that’s the method. An awful lot of Buddhist teaching is description of result, and then people go off and try to do the result, and it’s terrible. They get so frustrated because it simply doesn’t work. I went to hear a talk last weekend, a very nice teacher, but the whole talk was about result. He didn’t say one thing that you could actually do. Everybody was sitting there, so attentive, they didn’t know they were getting stuff that was absolutely useless. I just sat quietly in the back and snuck out at the end. This is very, very important. Kindness, compassion, equanimity, all of these things, they’re results. They’re results of bringing attention to what you do. And I have just been describing different ways to bring attention. First one was, just open. You experienced that; you just opened and suddenly there’s so much more attention there. It’s a little scary in fact.

Then there was bringing attention to the experience of opening the door. You can do many others too, there’s the traffic light meditation and the stop sign meditation. It’s a great way to avoid tickets. You come to a stop sign, you stop, you take a breath, you’ll never get a ticket. Somebody behind you may honk at you, but you will never get a ticket.

Then there is taking a breath before you speak, which again is bringing attention into speaking. And then there’s listening to the sound. So all of these are about bringing attention, and all you have to do pretty well is bring attention to what you’re doing, and you’ll find a lot of things will just change from that. You don’t have to worry about being nice or being kind or being compassionate. That will just happen. There may be a few really ugly, bent people, that that doesn’t happen, but 99% of the population, they do this and the results speak for themselves. Thank you.