Sometimes life can surprise you in a wonderful way. I had the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, Buddhist practitioner for 30 years; writer and I would say researcher of the human condition. In this conversation we cover a wide range of topics like: human relationships, meditation, compassion, love, communication and even workplace motivation.
You spend many years in solitary retreat, how mucho where they and what was one of the main insights from that challenging experience?
It was a challenging and a wonderful experience in many ways. Some of the best years of my life where on retreat. I was six and a half years. The insight that I had wasn’t just an idea but a way of being: I felt less afraid of my own mind.
Sometimes when you think of sitting alone and doing meditation, for some people it is very scary because we don’t really know what to do with our mind. Our mind can be very wild and unorganized and a little intimidating, so I felt that my ability to relax with my own mind made me more balanced and unafraid of my experience.
For people that are not in the stage of doing such type of retreat, but are interested on observing their mind and emotions more clearly what would you recommend they do?
In our tradition they would recommend just to start very slowly, like not to jump into the water but just dip your toe in. There are many practices in this path but there is one called calm abiding that is just watching your breath so that your mind becomes very calmed.
They say in our tradition that a mind that is not trained is like being a blind man with no arms and legs sitting in a wild horse. It’s all over the place, and when you sit and practice you see: wow this is crazy. People observe and think my mind is so crazy, it’s not disciplined and it’s not relaxed. I don’t know what to do with all the thoughts and feelings and emotions. So what is recommended to do is very simple and it’s not religious in any way. It is not a belief system, it is just a practice.
Through the practice of meditation and watching the breath we are not so reactive with other people and so reactive against our own mind. We see that thoughts come up and then they dissolve. You start to see this is very interesting; you start to get to know your mind a little bit more in a gradual way that is not so scary. Slowly, very gently.
Buddhism is also a tradition very interested in developing loving-kindness and compassion. Sometimes the word compassion can be associated in a not very positive way, like as if you are talking about having pity or being naive. What would be the best way to describe the practice of loving-kindness and compassion?
For one thing, compassion in this tradition comes from two ideas: one is that it benefits oneself but it also benefits others. So we do a lot of contemplation about how much we move around the day just thinking about ourselves all the time. We are so fixated on me and mine, and what can I get and what can I get rid of and what is bothering me. This sense of “me” always thinking about “me” is very painful and suffocating in a certain way when we observe it.
We could go through our lives just thinking about “me” and a lot of people I think do, but actually when we take a moment to care for others it so deeply moves us and opens up our own mind and brings so much sanity to our own life and experience.
So that is something one has to play with and examine and that’s why on this path we cultivate that altruism. That caring for others is such a big part of the practice because it actually frees us from our own self clinging and our own suffering.
Then if one looks at oneself when others are kind to us, what a great difference it makes to us. So with that understanding of knowing that everybody is suffering and everybody wants happiness and that everyone wants freedom from suffering, we can form that simple understanding. We can extend to others.
I live in a very rural area and don’t see too much people, except from my family which I take care of. But Even when I go to a city and see homeless people, it does make such a great difference to buy them a cup of coffee or even just acknowledge their existence, to say hello, or help. Because we are social being, and we are interdependent and we need each other. There is nothing naive about it, and I’m sure you know this; it makes the world so meaningful to be able to be with each other in this kind of way. So, loving-kindness and compassion are very important.
Talking about love, I remember in one of your podcasts you told about when one of your favorite horses died, and there was this feeling about love and loss. After that experience what you said was, “fuck it, I will love even more”. Since in life impermanence is always changing things and there are so many types of deaths. Not only biological ones, but also relationships that end, and so on. How can we get into that fearless state of mind of thinking “fuck it, even though this wil end, I will love even more”?
That came up so spontaneously I can’t even say what is. But I guess there is this willingness to make your heart bigger in this tradition. I will tell you a story about my mother in-law. I had a very amazing mother in-law, my husband Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, is Tibetan so she grew up in a very remote part of Tibet. She was a very courageous woman and a very good practitioner of Buddhism. In the Tibetan culture they say that if you have a big heart you are courageous. To have a small heart means you are afraid to let anything in, even the suffering and the pain and the pungency of life.
She always said make your heart big enough so you can hold a horse race inside of your heart. Because she comes from a horse culture, where they used to race horses, she thought of that as very big.
What she was saying is that really the practice of compassion or loving-kindness is that we need to learn to stretch our hearts so that we can bear more. That we can take in more life. That we don’t have to shrink from life.
So I guess that experience with my beloved horse, since she was so dear to me, when I lost her I was so overcome with grief but at the same time I realized that she helped me stretch my heart more because I loved her so much . So why can’t I then continue that tradition that she taught me in. Stretch it more and include more rather than shrink up and feel that I can’t bear it. And I think if you would ask me about what is the essence of this tradition, i would say that maybe that it is to make your heart bigger.
So it doesn’t just mean compassion as giving but also that fearlessness that you mention, that comes from stretching your heart and your mind. To be able to include and know that life is not too big for us, we are big enough for our life.
Changing the subject from loving relationships to workplace relationships: How can people in the same company work in a less conflictive and more compassionate way?
I think there are many aspects of the spiritual path, usually in the workplace or in any kind of environment we tend to be very reactive because we haven’t worked with our mind very much. So in the same way that when you sit to practice meditation and you have some discomfort come up, physical, emotional or there are ideas that are hunting you or bothering you, we tend to react towards those. That is the same problem with people.
They say in the tradition that if you put too many cups and dishes on the table they will start to bang into each other and rattle. In the work environment we are in this confined spaces and its bound to happen, because people tend to kind of rub off against each other in uncomfortable ways.
So we really do have to work with our minds and become non-reactive. Things come up with people when all of the sudden they do something you don’t like and you immediately react and have an idea and label them. But of course people and our thoughts about them are not just who they are. People are changing and complex. They have their own struggles and we always have to remember this.
The problem is we hold on to this tight views and start to develop stories about this person and then it just gets worst and worst. So the idea of disciplining the mind makes us more patient, it makes us more tolerant towards others. It gives us more of a sense of humor, like we don’t have to take our thoughts so seriously or look at other people and just think of them as being stuck in one way. It makes us more passionate and disciplined and so on. We start to see that if we have a little more patience we could stop making a mess of things because we are not so reactive towards them.
People can do things that are a little bit ridiculous, irritating and mean, sometimes even unkind. But we can learn how can to be more savvy, because being reactive is naive in the sense that we are going to make a mess. Skillfulness is very important, we might not like what someone does, but it is almost like we have the opportunity to be more creative on how we can do it differently. How can we not react.
There is a wonderful Buddhist saying: don’t be so predictable. It means maybe don’t be so reactive, take a breath, pause just for a minute. Ask yourself how you can do it in a different way. This takes courage and a little bit of patience and discipline but we need to cultivate that.
The word respond and react are very different. There are so many ways that we can respond and we can be very clever about it for the good of the situation, not in a mean or sneaky way.
How can people that don’t feel happy in their job find in it an opportunity for spiritual awakening and motivation?
No matter what happens in your life, if you have the perspective that you are going to use it for spiritual awakening. I like this idea of looking at everything as your teacher. I try to learn from everything that happens to me because it is also an opportunity to practice loving-kindness.
When you are in the work place or you extend warmth to other people, it really sustains you in a certain kind of very deep way. Even when you are just talking on the phone, the way you are with someone can create a very nice atmosphere and connection with that person. Maybe you will never meet them, you will never know them but somehow they are another human being with a whole world and story. You can relate to that person with kindness and respect. These kinds of things make life so rich.
Since you need to work with other people, there is much opportunity in that to grow and create a good environment. There is so much suffering in the world but we can walk around and create goodness, a nice atmosphere in the world. It makes such a difference how you speak to others and how you are with them.
One of the reasons people are not happy with their jobs is because of their relationship with their boss. How can managers be more mindful leaders?
It will be wonderful that people in leadership positions are even thinking about these things. If they are, then this is the away to start to reflect on, to actually put themselves in the shoes of their employees and this basic human way of interacting that we have been talking about is so important.
A workplace of people that are interested in seeing how to communicate would be a wonderful thing. This kind of Buddhist practice is not a doctrine or a dogma of any kind. But sometimes the bosses are not interested; if they are things would change a lot even in terms of production. That empowers people; it makes them want to work harder. There is no doubt about it.
Ecuador is mainly a Catholic country, so I was wondering how can people from a different religious tradition benefit from Buddhist principles?
I really do think of this path as less of a belief system to adapt or a dogma and more as a practice. It’s interesting because I was just in Italy a few weeks ago and we were in Rome. We did a little pilgrimage to Asis because I always loved San Francis.
It was such a beautiful and contemplative environment. We stayed there for a long time and just sat peacefully and I was thinking that we can include anything. From the point of view of compassion practice, we call Bodhicitta, San Francis was a great Bodhisattva because he was compassionate to others and animals and his life was aimed at or focused on caring for others.
It doesn’t have to be any kind of separation or to practice Buddhism you don’t really have to adapt any belief system. You just have to be interested in looking at the causes of suffering and the causes of happiness, and how you can work with your mind in a way that brings wisdom, insight and compassion.
It is not really about so many should or shouldn’t if you look at what this is really saying. So it can be very compatible and one could still do practices associated with Catholicism which has so many beautiful elements that are very much in harmony with this. Compassion, introspection and meditation. Going into those monasteries in Italy and seeing people still practicing with faith and devotion to, as long as there is no dogma it is very beautiful. There is no rejection or aggression toward any of that, it is just an investigation or an exploration of the human condition.
A special thanks to Sasha Dorje Meyerowitz for bringing this opportunity to my life and to my personal Yoda, Mariuxi Oyague, who introduced me to mindfulness and Buddhist practices.
May this interview help all the people that read it and bring more freedom and happiness to their lives.
