Year of Discovery (Week 5): Buddhist Mind Training and Problem Probing (not Solving)

I’m filled with so much gratitude this week for all the people I’m lucky enough to cross paths with (even if just for a brief exchange) and all the inspiration around me — from the changing colors of a leaf to the ingenuity of humans to solve day-to-day challenges to the kindness of strangers.

Over my Year of Discovery, I’m starting to feel like things do truly happen in our lives at the right time. We meet people at the right moments and face experiences — whether difficult or easy — at the right moments. Having more distance from the hustle and bustle of daily life, I’m reframing all of my past challenges, frustrations and ups/downs as learning experiences I’m so grateful for — of having the opportunity to make the mistakes and learn what I needed to by this point in my life. Over time, I feel that much more ready to take on harder challenges in the future.

This week, I’m sharing reflections from a Buddhist retreat I attended and some thoughts on problem solving.

Buddhist Retreat: The Training and Re-Training of the Mind

Last weekend, I went on a 3-day Buddhist meditation retreat. Growing up in a Buddhist family, I always felt lucky to have the teachings embedded in my upbringing. But because of my desire to establish my own identity, I spent more time rejecting the teachings than embracing them as a child. What I always appreciated — especially during my rebellious teenage stages — was how much Buddha and the practice pushes not for blind faith, but for constant questioning until the wisdom is not just intellectualized but deeply internalized. This retreat was significant for me, because it was one of my first times in adulthood (outside of regular meditaiton practice and individual reading) that I chose to truly deepen my learning and my practice in a group. Growing up, my mom sent me to Buddhist monasteries for the summer and as a Buddhist nun herself today, I always experienced my practices and learnings as happening to me, which I was grateful for. But taking the onus and starting to shift my active focus to Buddhism was incredibly enlightening and opening for my heart and mind.

The focus of the meditation retreat was on the Mahamudra, which in Sanskrit means great bliss and emptiness. Mahamudra is a lesson in Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism, and aims for the final goal, the union of all apparent dualities. During the retreat, we only covered at most 1% of the teachings, so I’m sharing a quick summary of what we did cover. These topics are quite deep and I’m beginning to understand why the realizations take patience and even lifetimes to understand.

The Mahamudra has four pre-liminary practices, and in the retreat, we covered briefly those 4 and then 2 of the actual practices. If anyone is interested in learning more about the Kadampa Buddhist tradition, you can read here (also happy to recommend books as well).

The four preliminaries:

1. Taking a safe direction purely — a bodhichitta heart that is dedicated to attaining enlightenment in order to benefit all beings
2. Purify negative karma
3. Accumulate merit and positive karma: make mandala offerings (training us to develop the mind that takes delight and joy in making other people happy)
4. Receive powerful blessings from the Buddha and rely on a spiritual guide

Samsara and the Mind

A key reflection I have from the retreat is on samsara, or the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma. Samsara is our own personal experience of things, and shows that the cause of our suffering is our mind (our delusions, self-cherishing, ignorance, etc). The ignorance in our minds makes it appear that everything is outside of our mind.

A key tenant in Buddhism is that all living beings suffer. Whether we are born a prince or in a slum, humans — through our minds — create our own suffering. This is because we aren’t free from samsara. To be free from samsara and the permanently cessation of suffering is to reach enlightenment, which means a clear, light mind free of delusions, emptiness and bliss.

There’s a wisdom I gained this week outside of the retreat related to samsara: “We are all someone else’s monster”. In the past, I’ve always been most shaken by the suffering I’ve caused others or that I’ve felt from my relationship with others and I’m realizing that through the attachment to self and what we do, say or think, we are constantly causing ourselves and others suffering and pain.

An analogy that was helpful to help me understand the mind and samsara a bit more is how our mind identifies:

• Friendships through attachment
• Enemies through aversion
• Strangers through indifference

Attachment, aversion and indifference (which are considered delusions) all come from a self-centered mind and Buddha teaches instead how to have an equanimity or an equally compassionate mind to all beings.

The Self

A concept in Buddhist teaching that I will be contemplating and meditating on for a long time is on the idea of self. During the retreat, we investigated the self. Does it exist? If we have a mind and a body, does that truly consistitute the self? There is nothing we can point to clearly and say: this is 100% the self. And the more closely we look, the less we see it. If the mind is not my self or ‘I’, then ‘I’ is a thought of the mind.

What exists and what we normally see around us is the mere appearance of the mind. Our mind manifests everything we see, our interpretation, the meaning the story we put behind everything.

Questions to continue contemplating on:

• How is my attachment to the self creating suffering in my day to day life?
• How are the labels or meaning I’m attaching to the things around me creating certain reactions or suffering within myself or others?
• What is the self? Is it possible to define it clearly? If there is no self, then what is there? What is the mind creating?
• In what ways can I incorporate a more regular spiritual practice into my life?

As I’m deepening my spiritual practice, a quote that keeps coming back to me is Annie Dillard’s:

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

It was easy for me to deprioritize or make excuses to not deepen my spiritual practice over the last few years. And as I speak with friends who are in their 50s and 60s, I’m realizing that over time as our life progresses, what ultimately matters the most to people is not necessarily their work, but their faith, spirituality and/or religion and the family/people around them. I want to take their wisdom and see how I can incorporate their realizations into my life today.

From Speedy Problem-Solving to Slow Problem-Probing

I’ve been pondering over this quote lately:

If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions. — Albert Einstein

I’m an action-oriented person and have always been quick to move things forward. I value speed and solutioning because to me, more gets done and more progress is made. In my upbringing, there were always plenty of problems to solve at home and I believed I needed speed to be able to tackle them all.

The great tragedy of speed as an answer to complexities and responsibilities of existence is that very soon we cannot recognise anything or anyone who is not travelling at the same velocity as we are. We see only those moving in the same whirling orbit and only those moving with the same urgency. Soon we begin to suffer a form of amnesia, caused by blurred vision of velocity itself, where those things germane to our humanity are dropped from our minds one by one.

Sometimes through speed, I lose my human-ness and I move too quickly to solutioning before understanding and validating that I’m solving the right problem. These problems could be big or small, personal, with someone else or at work. I can become tunnel vision about moving the solution forward that I almost forgot to look up and around me. Some questions to reflect on:

• Are you currently solving the right problem? What would it look like to spend more time on the problem and less on the solution?
• What in your life are you doing too quickly? What are you gaining and what are you losing by doing it so quickly? Can you take an extra few minutes, few hours, few days before you move into a solution?
• What in your life are you doing too slowly? What are you gaining and what are you losing by doing it so slowly?
• What in your life are you doing at the right speed? Why is this your assessment?

As I’ve been intentionally slowing down and problem probing, I’ve also found that I’m learning how to choose the right problems to solve and therefore how to create better solutions in the long run.

For example: A key ‘problem’ or question during my Year of Discovery is: ‘What is my next soul mission?’ I considered jumping into a new opportunity quickly after I moved onto the board of Moringa, but in hindsight, I would have been trying to solve the wrong problem with the wrong solution. The problem I would have been solving by jumping into a new opportunity immediately would be ‘How can I quench my fear of not knowing now and commit myself to something so I have a sense of comfort in what I’m doing next?’ That’s not the problem I truly want to be solving.

Now, the ongoing questions and problem-probing I have look more like this:

• Who am I today and what motivates me to a larger purpose?
• What types of problems in the world move me? What geographies and what industries are they in? Why? How does that align with a core world view that I currently hold?
• Why does this problem exist? Where does it exist? What is the context around this problem?
• Have I identified the right problem? What assumptions do I have around this problem?
• How do I understand this problem better from other vantage points and participants in the problem?
• Is there a way for me to reverse the problem and think about what to do to generate an opposite result?

Questions 3–6 are questions I’m also trying to apply to other parts of my life: whether work, personal, relationships, etc.

A great Buddhist talk I listened to this week: Appearance and Emptiness. I hope it serves you the way it did me.