Winning with Compassion

“… I still thought that perhaps it was the drugs that had been the real problem. But after having stayed drug free and completely sober for almost two years, I came to the understanding that the causes of suffering in my life were rooted well below the surface manifestations of addiction.

I came to the realization that the only thing that had ever truly alleviated confusion and suffering in my life was meditation. So I began to explore the possibility of finding a spiritual solution to my living crisis. One of the foundational experiences of my early spiritual exploration was the twelve-step process of recovery from alcoholism and addiction. Although I had been sober for a couple of years and was attending twelve-step meetings regularly, I had never truly attempted to practice the principles of the steps, which together form a practical spiritual and psychological process. In 1990, I began to do what was suggested in the recovery program, which consisted of prayer, meditation, personal inventories, and amends.

Simultaneously, I began attending Buddhist meditation retreats and studying the ancient wisdom of the Eastern spiritual traditions. This was very helpful to me, because the twelve-step view of an externalized “higher power” had always proven difficult to accept. After a couple of years of shopping around in the spiritual supermarket of New Age American spiritual interpretations of the Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi traditions of the East, and a short stint in a confused and corrupted cult, I came to find that the teachings of the Buddha, as originally taught (that is, pre–Mahayana Buddhism), were what resonated with me the most.

Over the past fifteen years I have been committed to studying and practicing the path of the Buddha. This practice has taken the form of numerous silent meditation retreats, ranging from a week to three months in length. It has also taken me, several times, to the monasteries of Southeast Asia and the pilgrimage sites of ancient India. About ten years into my practice I began teaching meditation classes in the same juvenile hall in which I been incarcerated when I began this path. Having dropped out of school as a teenager, I also began studying at the local junior college and eventually moved on to earn a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in counseling psychology.

In 2000, one of my teachers, Jack Kornfield, invited me to join a small group of Buddhist teachers to be trained over a four- or five-year period. That experience of mentorship, education, support, and encouragement proved to be transformative and became the foundation for expanding my ability to translate my personal spiritual experiences into the language and form of guiding others through the process of awakening. My practice and study under Jack, as well as others, connects me to an unbroken lineage of Buddhist practitioners that leads all the way back to Sid [Siddhartha].

For the past few years I have been engaged in teaching, writing, and counseling. My aim is to use my early life’s experiences to serve youth in juvenile halls, men in prison, and my generation on the streets and in society, and to do my best to make the teachings and practices of the Buddha accessible and available to all who are interested…This… is my offering to you of the path that I walk, the path of the spiritual revolutionary.

The path of the spiritual revolutionary is a long-term and gradual journey toward awakening. If you are looking for a quick fix or easy salvation, turn back now, plug back into the matrix, and enjoy your delusional existence. This is a path for rebels, malcontents, and truth seekers. The wisdom and compassion of the Buddha is available to us all, but the journey to freedom is arduous. It will take a steadfast commitment to truth and, at times, counterinstinctual action…”
~ Noah Levine, Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries

“When I first heard the radical Buddhist teachings on loving-kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, I was incredibly skeptical. Coming from a background of drugs and violence, I saw those heart-qualities as undesirable and perhaps even unsafe. In the circles I ran in, compassion was seen as equivalent to weakness and would make you vulnerable to harm and abuse. I learned early on that this world was full of pain and seemed to lack much kindness. In reaction to the pain in my life, I began to close my heart and to harden myself against all forms of love. So it was with great hesitance that I experimented with Buddhist practices of kindness and compassion. In the beginning I don’t think forgiveness was even in my vocabulary. The only reason I opened myself to these meditation practices, often called heart practices, at all was because I had tremendous faith in the practice of mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment), in the Buddha, and in my teachers, who assured me that it was safe to love again.

As I looked into these heart practices, I heard things like “Love is your true nature” and “The heart has a natural tendency toward compassion.” Now, I had already been meditating for some time, examining my inner world through mindfulness, and I didn’t see any of the love and compassion of which these teachers spoke. When I looked into my heart and mind, I saw only fear, anger, hatred, judgment, more fear, and a lot of lustful cravings. When I sat quietly, paying attention to my breath, my attention was repeatedly drawn into fantasies of vengeful destruction or pornographic sex. One moment I was bashing in my stepfather’s head with a Louisville Slugger; the next I was in a threesome with Madonna and Traci Lords. I was pretty sure that such sludge was all that was in there. Mindfulness helped me deal with my inner confusion—it allowed me to ignore my mind at times and not take it so personally at others—but it didn’t seem to be magically creating a loving heart out of my inner critic/terrorist/pervert/tough guy.

In the early days of my meditation practice I was interested only in mindfulness. I had been introduced to various breath awareness meditations, and as a result I experienced the direct benefits of concentration and mindfulness. I immediately found temporary relief from fear of the future and shame about the past. Learning to train my mind to pay close attention to the present moment was difficult, but fruitful. I experienced immediate, if only momentary, relief from the suffering I continuously created with my mind’s tendency to be lost in the future and past. Before I began my meditation practice, whenever my mind started to worry about what would happen in the future I would get completely sucked into the fears and often become convinced that the worst-case scenario would play out. Mindfulness gave me the tools to let go of those thoughts and to bring my attention into the body’s experience of the breath. Mindfulness made sense to me, and it wasn’t difficult to gain a verified faith in that aspect of Buddhism. For me, mindfulness proved to be the doorway to the rest of the Buddha’s Dharma, or teachings. I came to believe that it was going to be possible to train my mind, but I still had no hope for my heart.

When I did practice loving-kindness meditations, my mind was so critical and resistant that my efforts seemed to make my mind louder and my heart harder rather than softer. But I continued to practice loving-kindness meditations anyway. Again, the fact that I had seen that mindfulness worked gave me some confidence to try the rest of the Buddha’s teachings. Besides, what did I have to lose? I was already unhappy. My heart was already hard. Gradually I began to see that underneath my fears and lusts was a genuine desire to be free from suffering. Mindfulness had given me my first taste of that freedom, and I wanted more. So, without much hope, I eventually committed to including kindness, compassion, and forgiveness meditations in my daily practice. It was a slow and difficult process to learn to love myself and others. Eventually, though, I began to understand what the Buddha and my teachers had been talking about; I began to get glimpses of genuine kindness and compassion and to experience moments of forgiveness. But I have to admit that it took years.

Over my years of meditation practice, which has included regular periods of silent intensive retreats, ranging from five days to three months in length, I have gradually come to experience the compassion, forgiveness, mercy, kindness, and generosity that the Buddha promised would be found. My heart has softened; my mind has quieted down. These days, I rarely want to bash anyone’s head in. When I think of my stepfather, I do so with compassion for how much suffering he must have been in to have been such a jerk back then. My mind focuses easily on the task at hand, and I often feel warmth and kindness toward all beings. I now know that compassion is a natural quality of my heart—one that was lying dormant, waiting to be uncovered.

The Buddhist path is a process of discovery, recovery, and a gradual uncovering of a loving heart. I see the process of awakening and healing as being like the activity at an archaeological dig. In the early days I worked just on the surface. Mindfulness was a tremendous relief, and it acted like a metal detector that allowed me to know there were precious treasures beneath the ground. Mindfulness was also the shovel that began the excavation. But as I started to dig, I first found all the layers of sediment that were covering the heart. The heart practices allowed for a further refining of the soil. I was beginning to sift through the rubble, hoping to immediately find treasure. The unsettled feeling I got during my early days of compassion and kindness exercises came about because I was uncovering all the skeletons that had been buried over the years of trying to avoid the pains of my childhood and adolescence. I had become quite skilled, in my early years, at covering the insecurity and reactivity. But each meditative effort of forgiveness, kindness, or compassion removed another shovelful of dirt, each one getting me closer to the forgotten truth of my heart.

At times, the heart practices serve as even finer instruments of archaeology—that is, as brushes used to gently sweep away the remaining dust covering the treasures of the heart. Meditations are versatile in that way: sometimes you need a shovel to do the heavy lifting, and at other times you need something gentler, very subtle and refined, just to dust off the heart, as it were. But as we know, sometimes uncovering an ancient city can take a lifetime. There is no timetable that we can count on. There is no guarantee that we will reach the forgotten treasure of compassion anytime soon. What is promised is that it is there, waiting, and at times we can hear it calling to us, begging to be uncovered. The path of meditative training, if followed correctly and with persistence, will always lead to the recovery of our lost love and compassion, one scoop at a time.

I can say all this with confidence, because I have experienced it directly, as you will. These days, my life is filled with a general sense of trust and friendliness. My relationships with my parents, my friends, and my wife and daughter are sourced from appreciation, love, compassion, and forgiveness. But perhaps more important is the attitude of loving-kindness that permeates my attitude toward strangers. I spent my early life at war with the world. The heart practices of the Buddha taught me to surrender, but not to give up the commitment to creating a positive change. What was once a rebellion fueled by hatred is now a revolution fueled by compassion.

Now, I feel that it is only fair to also offer a warning: the path to uncovering our heart’s positive qualities is a radical one, fraught with the demons of the heart/mind that in Buddhism we call Mara. Mara is the aspect of heart/mind that creates roadblocks, gives excuses, procrastinates, and urges us to avoid all the unpleasant mind-states that accompany the healing of awakening. Mara is the inner experience of all forms of greed, hatred, and delusion. Mara—often personified as an opponent—will attack with vengeance at times, for by committing to the heart’s liberation, we are committing to facing Mara directly. The Buddha spoke of his battle with Mara, and noted that victory over Mara was won with the weapons of love, compassion, equanimity, and appreciation. After the Buddha’s initial victory, Mara did not give up, however. Mara continued to live with the Buddha throughout his whole life. The Buddha was constantly vigilant, always meeting Mara with a loving awareness, always disarming him with the heart’s wisest responses.”
~ Noah Levine, The Heart of the Revolution: The Buddha's Radical Teachings of Forgiveness, Compassion, and Kindness

Photos ~ Noah Levine, with wife Amy, and daughter Hazel's