Feeding the ghosts

I recently attended a workshop on Tibetan Buddhist Art and Meditation at Omega Institute. While not a practicing Buddhist, I am an avid student of contemplative practices from many different traditions. At the retreat, we worked on creating a Thangka (traditional Tibetan art drawing of a Buddha) of Green Tara.

Interspersed with our drawing sessions were meditation practices and contemplation breaks. I supplemented these with an in-depth study of a book by Pema Chödrön, called Start Where You Are. In retrospect, it feels as if it was exactly the slogan that I needed at the moment, as I had never taken an art class before and here I was signing up for a 5-day retreat. While the book goes on to describe the many practices (all steeped deeply in Buddhist tradition) that will help us open our hearts or help us return to an open heart, it’s simplicity and heartfelt humor touched me deeply.

I want to share what I kept coming back to. In the book, there is a story of the Yogi Milarepa (link) who spent most of his life by himself, meditating in caves. When, at times he couldn’t find any food to eat, he would find sustenance in nettles, eventually turning green. Such austere practices were common amongst the yogis or sadhus, and even Buddha is said to have practiced such austere practices until he almost lost consciousness and was on the death’s bed.

The story goes that one day Milarepa returned to his cave to find that several demons had made themselves at home, one was in his hut sleeping, another was cooking his food, another was sitting. He asked them to leave but they refused. He tried to persuade them, then begged them, and even warn them to leave but the demons wouldn’t have it. So he accepted that and decided that they could all just coexist peacefully in his cave. At that very moment all but one of the demons vanished. He says to himself: Ha, there is always the one!” He again asks the demon to leave but the demon refuses. After hours of trying to get him to leave, Milarepa just walks over to him, places himself in the mouth of the demon and says: Go ahead and just eat me right now, I have no intention to spend any time waiting and resisting. And, at that moment, the demon vanished.

I loved the story as it reminds me of what I recently wrote on befriending feelings. Of surrendering to reality and accepting what is. More often than not we struggle against reality, unable or unwilling to accept what is very much in front of our eyes. As if by not accepting, it could somehow magically reshape itself or disappear. In the story, the ghosts can be anything that plagues us: our thoughts and attitudes, our patterns and our beliefs, as well as our feelings. When we simply allow, breathe and stop trying to make reality (what IS at this very moment) be something else that we would rather have, we drop deeply into the moment.

A beautiful practice I learned from this book is called Feeding the ghosts, which involves relating to your unreasonableness and making friends with it. Traditionally you are supposed to make a cake and take it out daily and offer it to your ghosts, those negative aspects of yourself. Here, unreasonableness refers to any emotion or moods that seems to come out of nowhere and plagues you.

Say for example you wake up and you feel sad and you have no idea how this came to be. If you are like me, your mind will try to do one of the following: either tell you that you are unreasonable and to just ignore it, or it will spend the day ruminating on how it got here and back-track its steps to figure out what changed that could have “caused this”. After all, logic implies that behind every feeling there is a very clear reason and that if we find it and deal with it, then we will restore ourselves to feeling at ease again. In other words, suppress or repress. In Tibetan it has a name, it’s called a dön and though it comes out of nowhere, it is understood that it’s here to wake you up, so instead of trying to get rid of it, you just accept it and offer it a cake (or invite it for tea, as I like to do with my personal practice of befriending feelings).

You understand that while you have the option to chase it away, to act out on it, or to ignore it (repress or suppress) it is for the best and it is here to teach you. Accept it as a challenge to relax and let go. To accept. It doesn’t have to have a logical beginning, you don’t have to know a reason for it. We allow it to manifest, we accept it and surrender to it, and that’s the practice of mindfulness at its core. There is also an incantation that says Here is some cake, please come back and visit again” which at first may sound scary to us (“Wait, I am inviting sadness to come back and visit?”).

I now understand it as a practice that is here to help me see where I have lost my footing and slipped from mindfulness to mindless. It is here to hold the mirror up to us and show us where we side-stepped. Like any practice that challenges us, it will help us grow and transform. It may not be easy, it may not be comfortable, it may even be painful. But, one thing is for sure: it will be transformative. It will awaken us. We remember to do it with awareness and compassion, and it has the power to transform us.

From “Start Where You Are”

”You invite them back because they show you when you have lost your mindfulness. You invite them back because they remind you that you’ve spaced out. They wake you up. As long as you are mindful, the can’t arise. But they are like cold germs, viruses; whenever there’s a gap - Boom!- in they come. The dön will refuse your invitation to come back as long as you’re awake and open, but the moment you start closing off, it will accept your invitation with pleasure and eat your cake anytime.  That’s called feeding the ghosts.”

Pema Chödrön