Compassionate Awareness
Understanding the Nature of Suffering

An Interview with Carol Wilson

Bhikkhus, both formerly and now what I teach is suffering
and the cessation of suffering.
  -- The Buddha

Carol Wilson sat her first meditation retreat in Bodhgaya, India, in January, 1971. (Taught by the renowned meditation master S. N. Goenka, the course was a milestone in the transmission of Buddhist teachings from East to West - other participants included Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Ram Dass and Daniel Goleman.) Today, after more than 30 years of practice, Carol is a member of IMS’s core faculty, teaching at both the Retreat Center and the Forest Refuge. In discussion with Insight Newsletter, she shares her insights into the fundamental teachings of the Buddha regarding the nature of suffering.

Carol, what set you on a course towards meditation and that first retreat in India?

During my late teens, I felt that life didn’t quite make sense. I became aware of a deep inner urge that I couldn’t define. It drew me to India. I didn’t intend to learn about Buddhism specifically, but simply to travel, and perhaps understand myself a little better. While at a yoga conference in New Delhi, I heard about a meditation retreat in Bodhgaya with Goenkaji. I went to that course, and it changed my life.

How did that lead you to teach?

From that point on, I was irresistibly drawn to the Dharma, to practice and serve. Over the next 15 years, I sat longer retreats, cooked at IMS after it opened in 1976, ordained as a nun in Thailand, practiced intensively in England and returned to IMS to manage the center. By 1986, this process had naturally progressed into formal teaching.

In what ways does practice inform our lives?

Firstly, we need to define ‘practice.’ For many years, when I thought about this, it was with an emphasis on the form of intensive meditation. In my early years of meditating, I coasted from retreat to retreat, without giving much attention to mindfulness in daily life. The depth of concentration and clear seeing that would arise during a course was very compelling. This made it so much easier to notice the greed, hatred and delusion that came up in my mind than was possible to observe during the complexity and speed of everyday householder life. So I naturally preferred the silence and clarity of retreat.

It wasn’t long before I recognized it doesn’t make sense to separate the rest of life from practice – in fact, to do so is a delusion and creates suffering. Life is a process of continuous change; we move through various states of mind and conditions, whether we’re undertaking formal periods of meditation, or taking care of family, business, home and health. My practice has shifted from being a small, prescribed part of my day to having it embrace everything. Every moment can be fodder for awakening. This growing understanding helps me to stay interested and alert, not only during times when life is full of beauty and goodness, but also during those challenging times of pain and suffering.

What opportunities can pain and suffering present to us?

The first noble truth of the Buddha’s teachings is that everyone suffers. Whether on a grand or small scale, pain touches us all. The unreliability of not having things the way we want forms part of everybody’s journey. The teachings show us that this is nobody’s fault; it is simply how it is.

Frequently, we look for something or someone to blame for our suffering – often ourselves. This keeps us caught in a painful fantasy that somehow everything can or should be made okay – and leads to incredible frustration, disillusionment, anger and bitterness. When we stop looking for a place to assign blame, either externally or internally, we are then free to turn our attention inward and explore the real source of the anguish.

At this point, we can discover that the way we relate to our experience of pain is the cause of our suffering, rather than the pain itself. This was a major insight for me.

Can meditation practice help those with chronic and acute body pain?

It has transformed my own situation enormously. Some years ago I discovered I have an autoimmune disorder that affects my energy and my joints. Initially, I was caught in the idea that I was a spiritual failure because I had this disease. A subtle pain in my knee could set my mind to imagining a bleak and crippling future. I blamed myself and felt betrayed by my body. All this only made the physical experience seem worse.

Bringing basic mindfulness – attentiveness coupled with compassion – to the physical manifestation of pain can be illuminating. It’s important, however, to be clear about where to focus the attention – it isn’t skillful to linger on thoughts about the pain, such as the name of our sickness, its prognosis or our worries. Instead, it’s more helpful to bring stable and compassionate awareness to the actual sensations in the body, without trying to change or analyze them. This takes some willingness on our part.

I learned that the experience of the pain as it is in the moment may be vastly different from the unbearable nature of the mind’s fears. The repeated practice of holding the pain with a gentle and undemanding kindness can free the mind from many tormenting patterns.
Compassionate awareness is free of concept. Mindfulness practice helps us to cultivate compassionate awareness.

Another good technique is metta, or lovingkindness practice. Through this, I realized I had been relating to my body as an enemy. With that understanding, my attitude naturally changed to one of compassion for this body. I could then make choices about how to care for my physical and emotional wellbeing from a loving and informed place, rather than from fear.

What about mental suffering? How can it be a tool for awakening?

Things seem more complex when we talk about mental suffering – for example, the suffering of loss or of those patterns of mind such as worthlessness, pride and jealousy. This type of suffering is as much a part of the human condition as physical pain – for example, at some point in everyone’s life a loved one will die, someone we love could abandon us, or we could lose our financial security.

So, how to practice with this? The Buddha taught that the key to the cessation of suffering is to free our hearts and minds from greed, hatred and delusion. On the spiritual path it’s not uncommon to assume that we’re not supposed to experience any reactive emotions like anger, grief, fear, selfishness, irritability or grumpiness. Sometimes, we can be in such denial that we don’t know these emotions are there. This attitude interferes with our ability to bring mindfulness to the shadowy and unacceptable corners of ourselves.

In order to be free, we have to look honestly at our internal landscape – not with labels of good or bad, but to discover what causes suffering in our hearts and what doesn’t. When we observe with this compassionate awareness, we see that it is reactive emotions that cause us to suffer.

To prevent their seduction and rule over our lives, the first step in working with reactive emotions is to acknowledge when they’re present within us. We also need to put aside the notion that we should make them go away. Through practice, we become willing to explore them, much as we investigate physical pain, without either apportioning blame or being driven to act from them. Even if this is possible for only very brief moments, it’s quite significant – it means we’re learning to relate to life with greater faith.

So we start to move from identifying with thoughts such as “Oh, I’m so afraid” to examining “Oh, this is the way fear feels.” As this perspective deepens, we make a huge shift of allegiance towards trust and finding refuge in this new understanding. Although the method is simple, it’s not always easy! It’s helpful to start with small situations of reactivity to strengthen our confidence before attempting to cut through seemingly insurmountable suffering.

Sometimes we shut down in the face of suffering. We don’t feel anything, nor are we inclined to do anything about it. This is a form of shrinking away into passivity. Gratitude practice is one powerful tool that serves as an antidote and allows us to move forward.

By recalling any fortunate circumstance of our life, or a person who has helped us in whatever major or minor way, we can transform our worldview from one of helplessness and contraction to one of ease and quiet connectedness. From this place of balanced clarity, the actions we take in our daily lives have a greater potential to affect positive change, both in ourselves and in the world.

What inspiration and motivation can we draw from the Buddha’s teachings, given the current global picture of so much suffering?

The Buddha taught that all of us, without exception, want to be happy, no matter what actions we take through ignorance, clinging and aversion. If I continue looking into my own heart to discover how I contribute to both the hatred and the joy in the world, I stand a good chance of lessening that hatred, and increasing that joy.

At the end of every retreat I teach, I notice how much more open and bright each of us has become over the duration of the course. We can take that radiance back into the world – through all our different interactions it naturally communicates itself with anyone we meet. Just as hatred is catching, so is compassion, so is awareness, so is love.