Start Where You Are

Lighten Up

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or if you remember, you say, “You’re not gentle!
Whack!”
You hear a slogan like “Always maintain only a joy-
ful mind,” and for the whole next two weeks you’re
just hitting yourself over the head for never being joy-
ful. That kind of witness is a bit heavy. So lighten up.
Don’t make such a big deal. The key to feeling at
home with your body, mind, and emotions, to feeling
worthy to live on this planet, comes from being able
to lighten up. This earnestness, this seriousness
about everything in our lives—including practice—
this goal-oriented, we’re-going-to-do-it-or-else atti-
tude, is the world’s greatest killjoy. There’s no sense
of appreciation because we’re so solemn about every-
thing. In contrast, a joyful mind is very ordinary and
relaxed.
Once on retreat I was reading some traditional text
that talked about bliss and special experiences, and I
began to feel wretched. I felt poverty-stricken about
never having had any experiences that felt like bliss,
clarity, or luminosity. I began to feel depressed that I
didn’t measure up to any of these glowing words. For-
tunately, I put that book down and picked up some-
thing simple about just being alive with who you are
right now—nothing special, no big deal, ordinary:
just keep your eyes open, keep your ears open, stay
awake. Those simple instructions began to cheer me
up, because I felt that I could follow them.
When your aspiration is to lighten up, you begin to
Lighten Up
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have a sense of humor. Things just keep popping your
serious state of mind. In addition to a sense of humor,
a basic support for a joyful mind is curiosity, paying
attention, taking an interest in the world around you.
You don’t actually have to be happy. But being curi-
ous without a heavy judgmental attitude helps. If you
are judgmental, you can even be curious about that.
Notice everything. Appreciate everything, includ-
ing the ordinary. That’s how to click in with joyfulness
or cheerfulness. Curiosity encourages cheering up.
So does simply remembering to do something differ-
ent. We are so locked into this sense of burden—Big
Deal Joy and Big Deal Unhappiness—that it’s some-
times helpful just to change the pattern. Anything
out of the ordinary will help, and tonglen is definitely
something different. This practice is about repattern-
ing ourselves, changing the basic pattern and unpat-
terning ourselves together. You can also just go to the
window and look at the sky. You can splash cold water
on your face, you can sing in the shower, you can go
jogging—anything that’s against your usual pattern.
That’s how things start to lighten up.
I just read a story about a woman who had been
gloomy all her life. As she grew older, she got more ir-
ritable and difficult. Then she got cancer and for
some peculiar reason—after an initial period of re-
sistance and anger—instead of getting more gloomy,
she began to cheer up. The more she fell apart, the
happier she got. She kept saying she was glad that
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Lighten Up

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she had this time to enjoy her life, which she had not
enjoyed up to the moment that she got sick. Finally,
the day before she died, she went into a coma. Every-
body in her family, who were coming to feel more and
more fond of her after all those years of finding her to
be a pain in the neck, gathered around her bed crying
and looking gloomy, just as she used to look. Just be-
fore she died, she opened her eyes to see them all
standing there, and she said, “Gosh, you all look so
unhappy. Is something wrong?” She died laughing.
So, “Always maintain only a joyful mind” and “If
you can practice even when distracted, you are well
trained” are implying that the best gift you can give
yourself is to lighten up. One way to do that is to let
distraction bring you back to the present moment.
Another way is to be curious. In addition, when
things are really heavy and you feel stuck in either
your joy or your misery, just do something different to
change the pattern. Tonglen is a good suggestion of
what you could do.