Zen of "Not Enough"

Over at the blog Ox Herding yesterday, Barry wrote the following:

I've practiced steadily for nearly 22 years so you'd think I'd know better . . . but lately I've watched my mind whip itself into a frenzy of not-enough.

Not enough attainment. Not enough clarity. Not enough enlightenment. Just not enough of something that I think is different from what I actually have.

In the midst of my self-generated dust storm, I came across these words from Kwong Roshi in No Beginning, No End:

This is what the training should do - defeat you, defeat your thoughts, defeat your idea for the preservation of yourself.

Well, this sound wonderful to my thinking mind, but my gaining mind won't tolerate it. So I've been struggling.

Yep, I've been there too. I can imagine anyone who does this life project long enough is going to hit up hard against personal expectations. You know that it's not about self-improvement, and intellectually, you understand that we're all Buddhas in every moment, but sometimes, none of that matters.

When it comes to this "not enough" in my life, it often seems directly tied to comparisons. Comparing myself with other Zen practitioners. Comparing the current self I see with the past self I saw. Or simply comparing one day to the next, thinking that if things are a real mess one day, I should have my shit together the next. Which doesn't always happen.

I haven't had a lot of this "not enough" thinking in recent months, despite living in a lot of uncertainty about career goals and the general direction of my life. I can feel something unfolding, shifting my aim in life a bit, but it's not clear yet, so I'm just sitting with it. And for whatever reason, "comparing mind" has mostly gone on vacation. I'd like to think it's relocated permanently, but I'm not that foolish.

The other thing about "not enough" thinking is that it's intimately tied to a gut level feeling of lack. Some people call this "poverty consciousness," or "living in scarcity," but whatever you want to name it, it's really a pervasive distrust in the world's ability to support you, moment by moment. That somehow, there is enough, even if just barely. Which isn't to say that it's ok for the people in Somalia to be starving right now (it's not), but that even each of them have something amazingly powerful running through their lives, despite the severe lack of food, water, and decent shelter. I worked with famine survivors in my ESL classrooms, and whether they called it God or Allah or simply good fortune, it was quite clear to me that each of them got it, on a gut level, that we are enough as we all.

We are enough as we are. As opposed to having enough. Many of my students' family members didn't have enough to the point of physical death. But for every moment they were alive, they each were enough. While we always can "improve a little bit," as Suzuki Roshi said, it's important to remember that having and being aren't the same. In fact, when I think about, notions of having seem to come from the view of the self that Kwong Roshi says needs to be defeated.

What can we really have anyway?

Poverty Dharma(s)

Genju over at 108zenbooks offers the following provocative teaching in her post this morning:

In her retreat at Upaya, Joanna Macy spoke of being satisfied with just what we have. A retreatant asked how that could possibly be useful to the people in Haiti (the earthquake was very prominent in our thoughts on that day) who now had less than what had been already a horrendously impoverished life. Roshi Joan Halifax, adding to Joanna Macy’s response, pointed out that the dharma was aimed at our perceptions and she closed with this statement:

“Do not foster a mind of poverty in yourself and others.”

Yikes! When I first read this, it felt like a mountain we are called to climb without the use of our arms or legs. In fact, as soon as I saw the word "Haiti" I was ready to disagree with the whole thing, waiting for yet another soft, warm and fuzzy teaching from some privileged person aimed at "helping" the "poor masses." I've experienced enough of this kind of stuff now that my mind is on alert for it. There are benefits to thinking like this, but it also, in itself, can be an example of that "poverty mind" if one isn't careful.

“Do not foster a mind of poverty in yourself and others.”

One of the challenges this kind of teaching brings up for me is that it's only subtly different from all the languaging people in power positions have used throughout time to oppress others. The endless droning on these folks and their attendants do about "those whiny, pathetic people always asking for handouts." People of color in the U.S. know this kind of shit all too well, although they are only one example. I distinctly remember being poor enough to only have government cheese and powdered milk available in my house, and how the clothing my mother purchased at garage sales rendered me other amongst many of my elementary school classmates. It's hard not to develop a mind of poverty when you have lived in some form of material poverty, and have been repeatedly given the message that it's your own damn fault and that you or your family should shut the hell up and get a job, or a better job. In other words, it all becomes about material position, and so it's hard not to develop, and then foster in others, a "mind of poverty" because this is what is constantly being reinforced around us.

Yes, there is repetition in this post. Repetition is required for people to learn, or unlearn in this case.

Roshi Halifax and Joanna Macy are pointing to the ways in which we forget the boundless, totally generous functioning of this world. That beneath all the human constructed miseries there is that something greater pulsing through us in a totally generous, beyond poverty and wealth kind of way.

This is an important teaching for us, and yet one that isn't always easy to know how to apply.

How would a materially privileged person from a nation like the U.S. or Canada enter into a materially poor nation like Haiti and not foster the mind of poverty?

There is a rub because you can't separate the relative conditions from the absolute. If I, a lower middle class (by U.S. standards) white guy from Minnesota, went around a tent city in Port Au Prince and told people to "be satisfied with what they have," I'd probably get punched in the face. Or at least some dirty looks. This is the trouble with just repeating teachings to others, thinking they will instantly understand because somehow you think you understand.

One doesn't have to go all the way to Haiti to experience this fumbling about. I can think of countless times I have fostered some kind of poverty in myself and/or others. How I have hooked on to some form of "there is lack" here, and just went with it. How I have failed to hold both the real economic injustices that occur all over the world and the boundless, totally generous functioning of this world at the same time. Because when you are able to do this, you can speak clearly about those same injustices in a way that still fosters that boundless generosity - I've felt it in myself, and from others at times.

“Do not foster a mind of poverty in yourself and others.”

How can it be done? The answer might start with listening.