Experiencing Pain Identity as a Doorway to Selfless Being

An Excerpt from Spontaneous Creativity: Meditations for Manifesting Your Positive Qualities by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche presents his teacher, H.E. Yongdzin Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, with his newest book.Bring to mind a situation in which you are trying to help someone. Perhaps you face challenges to your efforts, and you are feeling frustration, disappointment, anger, or hopelesness. Whatever you are experiencing, recognize it in this moment without criticizing or judging it. Simply be conscious of what is happening when your intention is to help another. 

As you allow your experience to form in your imagination and you open to what comes to mind without judgment, turn your attention back to yourself and look more closely. Who is feeling challenged? Who is upset and angry? Who is tired or burdened? Who feels unacknowledged? Looking more deeply within yourself, you may discover fear or doubt or insecurity. When you face these challenges, it is important to recognize the pain identity, the sense of self that is associated with feelings like fear, doubt, or anger.

If you are looking at a situation through the eyes of a pain identity, even if your intention is to help and to serve, your actions are unlikely to bring positive results. In order to be effective, you first have to acknowledge that identity of fear or pain—the ego. Then you can explore minimizing the ego. Loosening the grip of the ego, the pain identity, does not mean getting rid of yourself. It actually means finding yourself. The true self is like water: It adapts to the shape of the vessel, the situation. But when your sense of self is bound and rigid, it doesn't change shape easily, and conflict with others inevitably ensues.

How can you find that sense of self that is open and sees potential and possibility in any situation? When you recognize that you are stuck and are experiencing a pain identity, rest your attention directly on this stuck experience of yourself. Resting your attention is the key. This is not the kind of attention that is panicking and trying to get rid of something, or trying to improve something, or even trying to analyze something and figure it out. Resting attention is open attention. It means being fully present with your experience.

There is a natural feeling of warmth and generosity that comes with open attention. You can explore this by focusing directly on an experience of discomfort or confusion. Your focus is like a beam of light that illuminates the discomfort. If your mind starts to move into analyzing or judging, redirect your attention to simply being present with the discomfort. See it, feel it, be with it. Slowly, the object of your focus will change. Your discomfort may actually dissipate, because any painful sense of self needs to be maintained in order to exist. When you are fully present with your insecurity in the moment, it gradually becomes less substantial and releases. When this release happens, you glimpse openness. It is important to recognize and value this openness. You value it by resting your attention in the experience of openness. This is a glimpse of selflessness, a moment of discovering a sacred space within you where you are totally free.

While you may have experienced this space, it might not have been pointed out as significant. Or you might not have known how to maintain the experience, so it was not stable within you. When you are able to be present with your sense of self and your experience without analyzing or criticizing, any constricted sense of self releases, revealing a spaciousness of being that is not bound or confused. The unbounded spaciousness of being, even if experienced only momentarily, is sacred. From that unbounded sacred space, you come alive and can act in a beneficial way.

Once you recognize this sacred space, you are able to show up fully for yourself even when you feel the most uncertain or shaky. One glimpse of the sacred space gives rise to an entire path of living your life from the creative and open source of your natural mind. You begin to see again and again that any sense of yourself as solid and fixed isn't accurate or true, and any attempt to find or make yourself solid or fixed is misguided and unnecessary. Not only is this realization a relief, it is a joyful experience. The recognition of selflessness is the dawn of wisdom.

The recognition of selflessness is a direct perception; the searching mind cannot discover it. According to the teachings, you cannot find it if you are searching for it because this wisdom is so close. If you are directly and nakedly aware in this very moment, no matter what is happening, you will discover the impermanent nature of both the problem and the problem maker—you. What emerges is the clear and open space of being that is sacred and pure and always has been.

(Spontaneous Creativity: Meditations for Manifesting Your Positive Qualities by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is published by Hay House, Inc. and is available through Amazon.com and other venues.)