“Our personal experience shows layer upon layer of absence all the way down to a hollowness at the core of our being. Reality is groundless, and the felt personal sense of this appears as lack, loss, or absence,” writes Gaylon Ferguson in his remarkable new book, Welcoming Beginner’s Mind. When we first palpably notice this absence, Ferguson explains, we often conclude that “something is wrong with me.”
This book is a warm invitation to find out that nothing is “wrong with you” and to get to know yourself through searching for what seems to be missing — Buddha Seeking, Ferguson calls it. Pain is a great motivator for Buddha Seeking and we are reminded that the classic story of Siddhartha Gautama portrays him as leaving his life of pleasure and family, delicious food, and wonderful music to answer the great question of birth and death after confronting the pain of human suffering when faced with living examples of old age, illness, and death.
In response to these encounters, Gautama, Buddha — first joins forces with a variety of holy men who practice spiritual disciplines that sometimes include extreme physical and mental exertions. Though he succeeds in these and even masters extreme deprivations, Siddhartha recognizes he has not found a lasting solution. “Neither a life of seeking pleasure nor a life of embracing harsh disciplines leads to true awakening,” Ferguson comments. Like Siddhartha, when we give up seeking satisfaction through pleasure and comfort, we may build our hopes on renouncing the world. But, Ferguson writes, “We don’t need to renounce the world or our friends and families so much as we need to change our inner attitude.” And that’s what this book is about.
One reason I savor Ferguson’s approach is that he invites us to embrace and practice a new attitude through something called the “Welcoming Exercise.” This exercise is a bold invitation to do NOTHING for at least three minutes at a time. Nothing. Really! We are invited to do just that periodically while reading the book – put it down and do nothing. Just welcome anything that arises and, please, don’t meditate.
In the book, Gaylon follows the sequence of Zen’s ten traditional Oxherding Pictures, which express the unfolding drama of looking for, finding, training, befriending, and dropping the “ox”(a symbolic stand-in for the object of our spiritual search). Ferguson confesses, “I am not a Zen practitioner nor a teacher of Zen. I never sat a single day of zazen…. So how is it that I wrote a book on these classic Chinese and Japanese pictures?” Chalk it up to Beginner’s Mind!
In this atmosphere, all is welcome. Ferguson’s funny, humane, and intuitive Beginner’s Mind invites us to be at ease. He lets us know that “allowing our suffering and joy, pains and pleasures, to arise and to go… we glimpse an innate awareness that does not come and go. This is a moment of liberation… We are freed from struggling with our experience.” As a Jungian psychoanalyst and psychologist, when I am asked by a new client about the goal of our time together, I say it is “becoming a friend to yourself: you have to know yourself and accept yourself just as you are.” Ferguson’s commentaries, I feel, can help us befriend our own innate wisdom.
In each chapter, we engage with one picture and with the Welcoming Exercise. Without spoiling the fun, I want to give you a taste of how things go.
Picture #1: Seeking the Ox
This is the beginning of our spiritual search. We have noticed that something is missing. We are expectant and frustrated, looking for evidence of how we are doing, but we find nothing. When will we find a tangible sign? The first picture shows no sign of finding anything, only a lonely person looking around. Here, we learn the Welcoming Exercise: “…we are almost always seeking to get something, to find something else.” Why do we need something else? A sense of lack has motivated us, but we also feel a new frustration: no matter how careful we are, we have only vague and confusing experiences of what we seek. Will we give up and believe “I just can’t sit still!” or “this spiritual stuff never delivers”? Ferguson suggests we welcome exactly what we find, including our fears and complaints. Eventually, we may glimpse something new.
#2: Seeing the Ox’s Footprints
Oh, here is some “evidence” of ox footprints. We are finding something! Ferguson asks us to notice how we “alternate back and forth between seeking and seeing, glimpsing and wondering…. the painful truth of searching that leads to constant dissatisfaction.” Our trailblazer is not a commanding Zen teacher, but our friend: “There’s no suggestion that we need to be harsh with ourselves by constantly courting discomfort. That was the ascetic alternative the Buddha explored and rejected, finding that it produced no real fruit. It’s mindfulness of the subtle suffering of everyday life that’s involved here.” The footprints are evidence of our humanity and humaneness; not what we expected, but what needs to be welcomed.
#3: Glimpsing the Ox
At last, we see an actual part of an ox: “Glimpsing the ox may feel as though we are losing ourselves as we find ourselves. Some of our narratives of personal identity may slip and slide a bit as we first encounter the ox in the meadow. Can the elusive ox go hand in hand with our usual stories of who we are and what we are?” Here, the very thing we have been seeking is not what we thought it would be. We begin to suspect that it may be subtracting from, instead of adding to, our “wealth of knowledge.” Our guide gives some instruction: welcome a non-fixated awareness, rather than a fixed awareness and begin to see that “vast spaciousness is one aspect of the ox’s true nature.”
Guiding our journey through the pictures, Ferguson emphasizes the ordinary thusness of our everyday lives, leaving nothing out: here we are doing the best we can, from moment to moment. We are not searching for some underlying reality, but to penetrate our own experiences. His commentaries echo and enrich the insight that samsara and nirvana are not separate, and that we each awaken to our own habits in the ways we perceive what we take to be the world. On this path, we will learn to welcome the contact of our foot with the ground, instead of the thought of our foot with the thought of the ground, but if our experience is the latter, we will welcome that too, and just notice it without rejecting. Eventually, the welcoming itself becomes known to us.
You can also read an excerpt of Welcoming Beginner’s Mind by Gaylon Ferguson, courtesy of its publisher, Shambhala Publications here.
