Allow Joy into Our Hearts: Chan Practice in Uncertain Times

By Rebecca Li

When faced with an event that disrupts every aspect of our lives, how do we avoid succumbing to hopelessness, bitterness, and other destructive habits of the mind, and instead find ways to allow joy, kindness, and generosity to fill our hearts in the midst of suffering?&nb

• Language: English
• Publisher: Winterhead Publishing
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954564015

Rebecca Li

Rebecca Li is a teacher of Chan Buddhism in the lineage of Chan Master Sheng Yen. She is the founder and guiding teacher of Chan Dharma Community, a Chan Buddhist practice and study community made up of individuals committed to cultivating wisdom and compassion for the benefit of all beings. She has two decades of Dharma and meditation teaching experience and has been invited to lead retreats or teach at Buddhist centers in North America, Europe, and Asia. Rebecca is one of the founding board members of The GenX Buddhist Teachers Sangha where she continues to serve as a board member. Rebecca has published and been featured in several Buddhist publications, including Tricycle, Lion's Roar, and Buddhadharma. Rebecca is a sociology professor and lives with her husband in New Jersey. Her talks, guided meditation, and calendar of events can be found at www.rebeccali.org.

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Preface

This small book is a collection of talks given during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. Things have changed a lot since then, and some of our experiences now feel like distant memories. At that time, we knew little about how the virus was transmitted, whether masks worked, or when a vaccine would be available. Many people found themselves dealing with uncertainty in areas of life they never imagined—even grocery shopping became a source of anxiety and doubt. One of the words we kept hearing was unprecedented.

The beginning of the pandemic was a period of great uncertainty. Yet, while this coronavirus was new, uncertainty in life was not. This gave my Chan meditation students and I an opportunity to live an all-new level of uncertainty together—we felt the world we knew had disappeared and no one could predict what would happen next. Calendars became meaningless. Everything we had planned disappeared—birthday parties, graduations, weddings, visits to our elderly parents, gatherings with family members, meditation retreats … canceled. We could not hold our dying loved ones in the hospital to say our last goodbyes. It was a deeply frightening and confusing time. We collectively faced shock, denial, grief, anxiety, anger, depression, and bewilderment, yet we also learned to open our hearts to other people’s pain, to empathize, and to find resilience.

This pandemic is a unique event for those of us living through it. The distress and disorientation we experienced is not dissimilar to receiving life-changing news that shifts the ground beneath our feet—the sudden death of a loved one, diagnosis of a debilitating illness, or betrayal by a trusted friend. This book is about how to cultivate clarity and compassion in the midst of the distress and disorientation brought on by unanticipated and drastic life-changing events. In every moment we remember to reconnect with our present, with body and mind, relaxing into clarity, we allow ourselves to touch the quiet joy of the Buddha’s teachings. Regardless of what is happening, however challenging and painful the situation is, the moment we remember to apply the teachings and allow this joy into our hearts, gratitude, loving-kindness, and clarity arise naturally, freeing us from our unhelpful habits of suffering. Life is filled with uncertainties; we are not denying the pain they can cause, but they need not bring suffering. They can be opportunities to cultivate wisdom and compassion, and to discover the meaning of our life.

The pandemic may end with the arrival of the vaccines; the human condition remains. Sickness can turn our lives upside down at any time. Fear of old age and death lurks in consciousness. We will still be separated from our loved ones, encounter difficult people and challenging situations, and fail to get what we wish for. This is part of life, and resisting this reality is the cause of our suffering. The Buddha showed us how to be fully human by embracing everything with clarity and tenderness, and this is what I mean by Chan practice throughout this book.

I hope these teachings provide you with tools to reduce your suffering and be kind to others when you encounter challenging situations. The wisdom of the Buddha has been passed down through the generations, and anyone can make use of it, regardless of religious, education, or cultural background. One way to apply this book is to identify the teachings that resonate with you and practice them in your daily life. Meditation will help you stabilize your mind and remember these insights when you are in distress. If you are new to meditation, you are welcome to make use of the free information available on my website: www.rebeccali.org. A glossary of important terms can be found at the end of the book.

The more you apply these teachings in your everyday life, the more you will remember to draw on them during inevitable difficulties. You need not fear unexpected situations—they present opportunities for growth. When we live this way, regardless of what arises, as my late teacher Master Sheng Yen liked to say, Every day is a good day.

Rebecca Li

Bridgewater, New Jersey

January 2021

Introduction

On March 15, 2020, Rebecca Li emailed the Chan Dharma Community, a group of mostly Buddhist practitioners who had worked or studied with her, to offer resources and an online practice gathering to help everyone cope with the coronavirus pandemic that had recently reached the United States. At the time, there were just under 100 COVID-19 cases in her home state of New Jersey. In New York, 729 cases had been reported and three people had already lost their lives to the virus.

By the time the group met for the first time less than a week later, businesses and schools were closed in New Jersey and the governor of New York had signed an order shuttering all nonessential businesses and restricting public movement. Nearly 8,000 COVID-19 cases were reported in those two states and 57 people had already died.

Rebecca had some insight into the trajectory of the pandemic; her family had already been living with the coronavirus in Hong Kong since January and a new wave of the outbreak in March. She reminded the group of how essential Chan practice would be to allow joy into our hearts. As much as some wishful-thinking people would like to believe this pandemic is going to end in a couple of weeks, this is probably going to go on for some time.

In our group, practitioners from all over the world shared their pandemic experiences of joy and beauty, dread and fear of death, tragedy and loss, boredom and everything else. In the relative quiet of national and global lockdown, many would describe the experience of practicing together over these eleven weeks as akin to the intensive, intimate group practice of Chan retreats.

These essays are a record of ten Dharma talks given by Rebecca during our weekly online sessions. It was a time when, for many practitioners, simply remembering to breathe felt like an effort. Sharing a group practice was an act of enormous compassion.

Following a period of guided meditation, Rebecca encouraged participants in each session to share something about their practice, their state of mind, or their pandemic experiences from the prior week. Rebecca’s talks incorporated ideas that emerged during these sharing periods, often referencing instruction from her guided meditation to remind everyone to maintain a holistic practice, while using reading materials from thinkers, experts, doctors, and other Dharma teachers, as well as anecdotes from daily life, to reveal and illustrate Dharma concepts, situating them in the lived experiences of the pandemic.

Whether it is with written excerpts from Pema Chödrön, Joanna Macy, or David Brooks, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, or a medical report from neuroscientists studying the effects of stress on the brain, Rebecca points to the Dharma that is alive all around us, and never lets us forget to return to the practice so that we can access that Dharma.

Despite the virtual nature of these talks, they felt very intimate. Our goal has been to capture that experience, while still acknowledging that no moment can actually be recreated. Rebecca’s talks were transcribed verbatim, and then lightly edited. We understand that people listen differently from the way they read, and we did not want the idiosyncrasies of extemporaneous speech to distract from the meaning of what Rebecca said.

At the end of May, when restrictions began to lift in some places and practitioners in the Chan Dharma Community started to think about reentering society, the weekly group sessions came to a natural end. It was clear, though, that Rebecca’s teachings, while distilled during the intense process of grappling with the suffering exposed by the coronavirus pandemic, would stay with us for much longer. They are collected in this volume as a record of that time of group practice, to share those lessons with a wider audience, and as a reference for practitioners who work to cultivate wisdom and compassion by ceaselessly returning to the practice.

The talks recorded in this volume were dependent on causes and conditions resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, including the economic difficulties and the political and social turmoil that followed the initial lockdown. When forced to face our personal fears and challenges, and when society’s faults, imperfections, and inadequacies are revealed, we have no choice but to confront our own suffering and the suffering of others.

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the Buddha has given us the gift of clear awareness of the true nature of reality: Everything is impermanent and in each moment we are all co-creating our world.

Lee Harrison

Beth Adelman

Allow Joy into Our Hearts

March 27, 2020

Many of you have talked about feeling anxious, overwhelmed, stressed out. It seems like everything