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Right Relationship

Hello everyone. I'm going to try to talk about the topic of right relationships. How I'm using this term is in the same way that the word right is used in the Eightfold Path^[1]: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood ("right way of life"), Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

In fact, one way of looking at the Eightfold Path is that all eight of those factors are defining or bringing forth right relationships. That's what the Eightfold Path is about. The word right is problematic for some people in English because it just seems like maybe it's righteous, or some kind of moralistic right that you have to be a certain way. The word sammā^[2] in the ancient language—samyak in Sanskrit—its first definition in the Pali-English dictionary is "thorough." In Sanskrit, it includes the definition of being "full" or "complete." So, the intention, the view, the relationships that are complete or full is part of the meaning.

What would it be like for a relationship to be complete, to be whole, is part of this question and being part of the Eightfold Path. The word sammā also apparently has an etymology that goes back perhaps before the Buddha's time. It also has the meaning of inclining towards, moving towards, or being directed towards a particular direction. So, being completely involved in a particular direction, and the direction is towards liberation, towards freedom.

This freedom that Buddhism talks about is very relational in a certain way, and in another way, it is trans-relational, or free of relatedness. This wonderful richness of the combination of both is part of this fascinating way in which the Dharma practice deepens.

The way that the Eightfold Path can be seen as being relational is that the first factor, Right View, has to do with seeing suffering (dukkha^[3]) and seeing how suffering comes to be. Sometimes it's just seeing the cause, sometimes seeing the dynamics of how it appears. Suffering is always relational. The suffering that we're looking at has to do with the way that we relate to things in the world and to others. Sometimes, when harm has been caused to us, it's because someone is in relation to us, or the world is in relationship to us in such a way that there's harm caused.

But in a strict sense, in Buddhism, when they use the word suffering, there's a very personal contribution that goes into that, which we want to take into account. One of the contributions is that there's clinging—there's attachment to it. To be attached to anything is to be in relationship to that thing. To be attached to anything means you're not free of it; you're entangled or caught in it. If you can become free of it, that gives the opportunity for us to be related to it, to have a relationship. It's very different.

There might be no intentional relationship to it in terms of wanting something or intending something, but when a person is free, then their goodwill, their love, and their compassion can flow, and that contributes to whatever they relate to, whatever it might be. When you're free, you're not being defined by the relationship. When you're not free, we tend to be defined, shaped, or limited by the relationship because of the attachments of what we want, or what we don't want, or what we're resisting. Right View has to do with understanding that.

Right Intention, the second factor of the Eightfold Path, is clearly relational. One way of understanding it is that it is to relate to things with compassion, to relate to things with kindness, and to relate to things with renunciation^[4]. The simple way of saying it is to relate to things without projecting or clinging—without our attachment on it. The renunciation the Buddha always focuses on is not the renunciation of things, but renunciation in relationship to our clinging and attachment to things. So it's a different relationship, with or without clinging.

Right Speech is completely relational. Usually, we speak to ourselves, and we're relating to ourselves perhaps, but when we speak out loud, it's usually to other people. So we're in relationship with them. What comes through the speech? How are we relating? What's being created there? What's being done there? Right Speech is speech which is timely, truthful, and beneficial. So really, you're looking at the relationship and asking what's kind and what's beneficial for what's happening here.

Right Action is usually understood to be avoiding three actions, which you'll understand are very relational. One is killing someone, the other is stealing from someone, and the third is engaging in sexual misconduct with someone. That's very relational. As we develop the Eightfold Path, those areas of our relatedness to others begin to shift. Perhaps, rather than having those three awful things happen, it's the opposite that begins happening: there's a reverence for life, there's a tremendous generosity in not taking but giving, and there's a deep respect for people and their sexual well-being, and all that that entails.

Then there's Right Livelihood, or right living, which for most people is very related to something, if not to other people. Even if you're a subsistence farmer living by yourself, you're still relating to the world and to the land. Some of the most beautiful relatedness to the world is sometimes found in people who are farming in some kind of harmony with the natural world.

I read a wonderful New York Times article this last week titled something like "A Truce in the War." It was about the war that farmers—I think it might have been in Colorado or someplace like Arizona—had with beavers. Ranchers with beavers. Because they felt that these beavers were causing too many problems, they would blow up the beaver dams. Then this man inherited his father's farm, and he thought there was another way. He started to allow the beavers to build their dams^[5]. He kind of worked with them a little bit. Sometimes he needed to help drain the water, and he put pipes in, but he didn't destroy the dams. What happened was that his farm, his ranch, became much more resilient in times of drought and in times of flooding. The dams, it turns out, protected the land tremendously and protected the moisture in the land tremendously. So now there's a whole movement for ranchers to work with the beavers rather than getting rid of them. It's this idea of how we live our life in relationship to the world, and what kind of relationship we are living there.

And then Right Effort. That could be seen as a relationship. Right Effort is mostly very personal, though it has a relational effect. It has a lot to do with your relationship to yourself—to really understand in yourself what motivates and engages you with activity in the world and yourself. It's having mental activity that avoids unhealthy mental actions and mental activities, and doing those things which are healthy. That means tracking yourself, being mindful of what's going on.

Right Mindfulness is maybe a little bit harder to find exactly the right way, but it's the foundation that allows us to be in relationship to the world in a good way. And Right Concentration (Samādhi^[6]) is a phenomenally beautiful way to be related to oneself. It's probably one of the most beautiful ways to relate to yourself—to set up an inner life to be really settled, deeply concentrated, relaxed, and allowing the natural flow of energy within us to flow in a harmonious way. It's a beautiful thing.

So the Eightfold Path^[7], the totality of the Eightfold Path, maybe we can call right relationship.

What is a relationship? Some of you know that sometimes there's a category where they say there are three things: there's you, there's others, and the "we" that exists between them—me, you, and we. But "we" is a little bit of an abstract idea, so I like to say there's me, you, and the relationship between us. Sometimes we need to take care of that relationship more than we need to take care of the other person, and more than we need to take care of oneself.

I saw this very clearly as I started to have children. I have two sons, and when they were young, it became clear at some point. I had done a lot of letting go, and having compassion and caring, so it was like, "Let's just take care of this kid at all costs, whatever is needed." My mother would tell me, "Be careful you don't spoil him." That didn't mean anything to me; I just ignored her. Later, I understood that if she had only used a different word, it actually was good advice.

What I realized after a while was that it didn't really make sense. When a child is a month old, of course, you sacrifice everything for the kid that can't do anything for himself. But as they get older, you have to pull back and allow them more autonomy. It also became clear as my sons got older that there was a "we"—there was a family unit. Unless we took care of the family unit, we were going to create a skewed relationship in the family. My son wasn't going to learn how to live in harmony with the family unit. It wasn't all about his welfare and what he wanted—that's the recipe for disaster. He had to also learn that other people had needs, and the family had needs. I think just in time we got some sense of that, and the "we" became very important to the family unit.

That's true for when there are two people involved, or a family involved. It's true when there's a Sangha^[8] involved, a community involved, a town, a city, a nation, a world. There's also the "we" of everyone, and what is the relationship of that? What is happening there, and what are we contributing to that relationship?

Focusing a little bit on the relationship is unusual for some people. There are some people for whom what they focus on is me, myself, and mine. Everything is seen through the filter of how this affects me: what I want, what I don't want, how this is impacting me, how I'm being hurt by this, how I'm a victim of this, and how I'm afraid of everything. It's all about me. There are powerful conditioning forces in our society that really inculcate this kind of view. It's not something we create by ourselves. This whole focus on "me, me, me" is something that some people have been trained in by our society. Like I said about my family, I could see that if we weren't careful, that's what we were creating in our son.

Our society, with so many different forces, is reinforcing self-preoccupation and self-concern—being in it for yourself. That is some people's default. It is so strong in our culture that people don't even know they're doing it. It's like second nature for people to be self-concerned and to make it about "me." They don't even recognize they're thinking that way; it's just obvious.

Then some people are the opposite: it's all about others. It can be like that for young parents like me, who are kind of naive, not knowing, and just give everything, and it's all about that other person. Some people have religious and family worldviews that really reinforce that it's about others, constantly taking care of them.

But what about that third thing, the relationship? What happens in that relationship? How do we study it? How do we see it? It's not something we see physically. Now we're entering a little bit into the invisible world. Not like a mystical invisible world, but it's something we don't obviously see. You have to be attuned to it. You have to pay attention, pick up the cues, and understand yourself better in order to really understand what's happening in the relationship. But that also makes it kind of fun. It's a very different way of navigating in the world—surfing along the relatedness, rather than engaging this world by asserting oneself or denying oneself.

The example that I have for you might not work for many of you, because many of you probably haven't gone surfing. I haven't really gone surfing more than once, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. [Laughter] But maybe you'll forgive me, and I'll just use it as an example.

When you're on a surfboard and you're able to catch a wave, you don't just catch the wave and think, "Okay, I've done it, now I can just freeze and ride the wave out and not do anything anymore." The wave is dynamic, and you are dynamic, and everything is dynamic. You have to be totally in harmony, in relationship to all the different factors at play, shifting and adjusting accordingly the whole time.

Probably one of the reasons it's so fun to be on a surfboard is that self-concern drops away. Self-preoccupation and self-consciousness drop away because you have to be so fully engaged, right in the present moment, tracking all the different things going on. It's not just the wave, but it's everything that's involved, including you. If there are two different people riding exactly the same wave, and one person is really petite and one person is humongous, they're probably going to ride the wave very differently. They might follow the wave just as far, the same distance. Both of them are managing to ride the wave perfectly, but it's going to look very different for these two people.

The perfect way to ride that wave is going to be different for those two people. It has to do with the relatedness between the factors that the individual brings and the factors of the board. Depending on what board you have, even the same person riding the same wave on different boards will find the perfect ride is different, because it all depends on the board too. The person doing the perfect ride is in constant conversation and relatedness with what is contributing to that relationship to stay on the board, while also recognizing what the wave is contributing and what the board is contributing. It's a dynamic thing. It's the combination of all the relatedness, all the things coming together, that allows us to do the perfect ride.

So for you living your life, what's the perfect life? What's the perfect way to do things? What's the perfect way to be in a conversation with someone? What's the perfect way of caring for someone, or doing anything? If you carry an external standard of what that is—thinking you're supposed to be like someone else because that's the way they do it—that's not going to be it. The perfect way to be, or in the language of sammā, the complete and whole way of being in relationship to a situation, has to do with your contributions, who you are, and all kinds of things about you, just as much as it has to do with the situation.

I train people to do spiritual caregiving as chaplains. I tell the people being trained, "If you're an unrepentant extrovert..." Maybe that's not a good way of saying it, and then I follow that by "unrepentant introverts." What I mean by that is you're completely at home with being who you are. You don't have to apologize; it's not a crime to be yourself. If someone who is a very strong extrovert shows up to offer spiritual care to someone in a hospital, the right spiritual care relationship is found in that relationship between them. The person doing spiritual care has to be attuned not only to the other person but to themselves, to know where that right way of being is.

I knew one spiritual caregiver, a chaplain, who showed up to a very difficult situation. They couldn't really communicate with this person, who was conscious but had their face to the wall and wouldn't communicate with anyone. The patient was pretty upset. So the spiritual caregiver started singing "Amazing Grace." If I sang "Amazing Grace"... I would sing to my kids sometimes when they were little, and they'd tell me to stop. [Laughter] So that wouldn't be my way, but that was that person's way.

If someone is an unrepentant introvert, their perfect spiritual caregiving conversation is going to be very different. Maybe for them, considering who they are, the right thing is to sit down quietly and hold someone's hand, and that's the avenue through which the perfect spiritual caregiving happens. It's in the relationship between all the factors, not in some abstract idea that we have of perfection.

This is very respectful of yourself. You get to be yourself. Imagine, just being yourself! But you have to know yourself well enough to know what you're contributing, and to know the situation well enough to know that you're contributing the right thing and creating the right relationship in that interaction.

If what you're contributing is clinging, grasping, or attachment, it's probably not going to be a good outcome. If what you're bringing into it is cruelty, unkindness, or meanness, it's probably not a good relationship. It's not one that you're going to thrive in or that is healthy for you and others. If it's wrong speech—if there's a lot of complaining and you're doing verbal stabbing of people, using verbal knives to get back at them—you're establishing a certain relationship there. But if your words are kind and supportive, not mean, cynical, complaining, or blaming, a very different relationship gets formed.

The sad thing is sometimes people want to have an unhealthy relationship because they think they get some benefit from it. So we must be careful with this relatedness. In right relationship, what do we contribute to it?

One of the principles you find sometimes in Buddhism is the idea that to assert the self is delusion, but to allow all things to inform you is awakening. The key word is assertion: pushing yourself, asserting yourself aggressively, putting yourself out into the world with clinging and attachment. That can be done forcefully, but oddly enough, in Buddhist terms, we also assert ourselves in the world when we are really shy. Even though it looks like we're pulling back and not doing something, there's still a strong sense of self that we're contributing to the situation.

What we're learning in Buddhist practice is how to soften and relax all attachment and all clinging, so there will be an opportunity to come forward in a different way. One of those attachments is this excessive preoccupation with self. That has been the case since the time of the Buddha, otherwise he wouldn't have been teaching not-self (anattā^[9]) or the non-selfishness that he taught. Probably every generation thinks it's gotten worse now. It seems to me it's pretty bad, but it was still an issue then.

We need to really understand that "me, myself, and mine," and how much we're self-preoccupied and measuring things by the impact it has on us. Of course we want to respect ourselves. We're definitely part of riding the wave, right? But are you contributing a healthy relationship to yourself?

Maybe we should not even use the language "healthy relationship to yourself," because as soon as you see the word "self," it's a magnet for all these cultural, familial, and religious ideas of what it means to be a self that weigh us down. Another way of saying it may be a healthy relationship to all that lives within us, freeing it from this idea of being a self that we have to prove, defend, or do anything with.

To be awakened is to be informed by all things. To be informed by what's within us, it's all to be respected. Every thought, every impulse, every feeling, every emotion in this practice is respected. We're in a healthy relationship to it. We don't condemn it, we don't hold on to it, and oddly enough, we don't celebrate it. Nothing gets overly evaluated or overly valued. Everything is respected, which allows for the birth of this healthy relatedness, this freedom in which things can flow. The idea that things can flow within us without being appropriated by self, made into self, or measured by self, is a fascinating, delightful, and empowering situation to be in.

Begin exploring this world of self, this selfing we do, the attachment to it—not in any blame. It's not like, "Now you're a bad Buddhist." You don't become a bad Buddhist by anything that you do or how you are. Maybe you're never a bad Buddhist. But where Buddhism is found, and where health is found, is in the relationship we have with all things, including your relationship to yourself.

Some of the relationships that people have with themselves are very difficult. There's a lot of criticism, sometimes despising of oneself. There's a lot of difficulty here, and it's very painful, very deep. Trying to come to a new relationship, finding a relationship where there's compassion, care, and kindness, is a slow process. But it's helpful to know that this is what we're doing. We're trying to come to a new relatedness where we're freeing ourselves from the fixed ideas of who we are—fixed ideas of what perfect is, or what imperfect is.

Actually, there's no imperfect or perfect. If there is perfection in riding the wave, do you know how long that perfect ride lasts? It probably lasts less than a second. So congratulations, but you don't have any time to congratulate yourself, because you're on to the next half-second when you have to make the adjustments for the next perfection. [Laughter]

With this kind of idea, do you know how long you're imperfect? A few of us are occasionally imperfect, right? A little bit. But you know how long it really lasts. It's like the wave; it might be true for half a second, unless we're caught in the idea of it. We project the idea, we live the idea: "I'm imperfect." But the idea is just an idea. The idea of the wave is just an idea. The wave is always changing, you're always changing, everything is fluid.

One of the things we come to in this practice of mindfulness is appreciating deeper and deeper the fluidity of moment to moment. We're always on a wave. We're always finding our way. If you're not finding your way, you'll probably fall off the wave. In some ways, if you get involved in too much retrospective thinking about what you did, you'll probably fall off the wave. We want to ride the wave of the present moment. What is the right relationship? What is the relationship that arises when it's informed by everything within and without?

As we become freer, what we discover is that we don't have to be so self-concerned about how we respond. The sense of the right response becomes more and more almost natural, obvious. Of course you're going to be kind. Or to say it differently, maybe you'll automatically be kind, but you'll automatically not be unkind. You won't be mean. You automatically become someone... This is very clear in Buddhism: they say that once you reach a certain maturity in this practice, you become someone who will never kill intentionally, never steal, and never engage in sexual misconduct that harms people. There are all these ways in which you don't do all this harmful stuff, because that takes work and effort.

With the absence of that, what is left? What I love about this Buddhist tradition that we're in is that it doesn't specify what's left. It's very reluctant to say that what's left is your basic human goodness, that what's left is wonderful, that what's left is love and delight and all that. I think this is because as soon as you say that, you fall off the wave. As soon as you say that, you're locked into something and thinking this is how it has to be. Rather, there's a deep trust with this maturity of just allowing something to flow through us that you know is not going to be unhealthy, not going to be harmful. So that's taken out of the picture. Then, what the response is from the inside might not look like the ideal. It might not look like what you think it's supposed to be, but maybe it's the right thing in the combination, the relatedness of you and everything else. Who knows what that's supposed to be? You don't even know what it's going to be sometimes. Coming with preconceived ideas limits what might arise.

To assert the self is delusion. To allow all things to inform you allows for health to unfold—the healthy wave. I'd encourage you, if this talk had some meaning for you, to explore this. I'm not assuming that what I was saying about the relationship between you and the world, or you and others, is an obvious category to understand, maybe because it's always shifting. I'm not saying it's easy, but there is this relatedness. There is something that happens in relationship, and it takes a while to become sensitive to it, attuned to it, and appreciate it.

With some people, it's easier, and with some people, it's not so easy. There might be good friends to whom you can say, "There's a new thing I want to understand better. Maybe you can help me. There's you and there's me, and there's what happens between us—let's explore that." Having a friend to help you might make it come alive more and be interesting, and help you with this new kind of world. Maybe you'll understand at some point very personally: to assert the self is delusion, and to allow everything to inform you is awakening.

Thank you.