Won Buddhism of Manhattan

By Won Sa Yeon-Michael, Ph.D.

The article above reappears in its original form, as first published in 2003. An update in the form of the author's epilogue follows at bottom.

The New Logic in My Life

In the early 1980s, I found standing on the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel toll plaza, facing down an enraged motorist. Frustrated that I wouldn't let him cut ahead of a long car 

queue at rush hour, he hurled epithets and then swung for my head.

He missed, and when I swung back, he fell. His eye was swollen shut when he got up, but he was even more enraged, threatening to follow me home and firebomb my house. A police officer arrived, separated us, and had me drive off first, promising a quarter–hour delay before allowing my adversary to leave.

Upon reflection, I could have disengaged early in the game, just letting him cut in front of me, but could not resist the challenge opportunity. This was just before the "road rage" term was coined, and the phenomenon of ventilating automobiles with bullets by enraged motorists in California.

In time, my transportation mode changed, but not my addiction to anger. Flying over a million international miles in the last five years, I have had fits of "air rage" when I waited too long for service, and more often "ground rage" at various and sundry frustrations "suffered" at the hands of porters, ticket agents, and security people who were simply doing their jobs.

Moreover, if I wasn't angry, I was anxious. Or worried, distracted, fearful, or resentful. I constantly viewed my situation through the lens of survival. I felt challenged to demonstrate my worth continuously to my employer, and to ride out an unforgiving economic environment that creates winners and losers. I was continuously rebalancing the trade-off between work and family, leading to the phenomenon of "satisficing" – satisfying in one area (e.g., work) while sacrificing in the other (e.g., my loved ones). Result: I had a foot in each world, but complaints from either side.

Among other strategies, I tried "multi-tasking", which turned me into a jangled automaton. My spirit and personality eventually decomposed into the sum of an incessant number of daily twitches and jerk reactions to e-mail alerts, my connected "Personal Digital Assistant", Instant Message "pings", my chirping cell phone, the authoritatively establishment ring of my landline phone, and the vibrating urgency of my pager.

My negativity made a reality of my fears. An angry divorce was quickly followed by the painful breakups of two "rebound" relationships that were doomed from the start. As the stress in my life accumulated, I began smoking more, and sought escape in any variety of diversionary activities, none of which delivered the transformation I so desperately needed but for which I knew no good path.

Won Buddhist Solution

I am now well along a journey of profound personal transformation. Buddhism has provided me the technology to effect huge changes in my life. I finally realized that my dissatisfaction arose from my negative states of mind: anger, attachment, and ignorance. However, replacing time away from these mind states through thinking organized around acts of generosity, compassion, wisdom, and other positive states of mind required – as an underlying fundamental – systematic meditation.

For half a year, now, I have been meditating twice daily for 20 minutes. I originally began this inspired by a friend, in whom I witnessed the power of its cumulative effect. Ever the scientist, I was further encouraged by empirical research showing an association between meditation and physical health, mental health, increases in IQ (classically thought of as unchanging), and creativity. I reasoned that a commitment of 245 hours annually represented only 2.8% of my life's time, a small price for the possibility of the changes I wanted and needed.

Inventory of a Work-in-Progress

The combination of meditation with the spiritual teachings of Buddhism are leading me to new responses, breaking a longstanding, recalcitrant pattern of responses that are tolerated or fully accepted by our society, but still dysfunctional.

What I found was an increasing ability to remain peaceful in the face of stress. My voice became less likely to rise to a higher, flatter, shriller pitch when confronted with an error or perceived injustice. I am more likely now to respond with humor, and break the escalation of destructive competition.

For example, I have become freer from my anger addiction – with no overt action other than regular meditation, logged into my Dharma record. It was a sign of progress for me recently when I found myself replacing "road rage" with "road peace."

There is a difficult merge on the Manhattan side of the George Washington Bridge where cars are forced to cross each other's paths to get to either NJ or the Upper West Side; there is a forced "X" formation in the traffic flow. When I crossed in front of another car, even after signalling, it enraged that driver, who drove up next to me, and began screaming epithets and flipping me the proverbial "bird." (And with two hands, for emphasis.)

I responded with a deep breath, and a smile to him. I flashed a peace sign, and blew his minivan a kiss. He was dumbstruck. I had broken the script: I was supposed to mirror his behavior, but had not. Confused, he resumed normal driving. His companion was delighted. She smiled, laughed, and flashed me an approving double thumbs-up sign.

I felt deeply satisfied that we'd all somehow connected at the level of love, and prevented a poor highway design from triggering the ugly side of our human legacy. This new response in my behavioral repertoire can be safely attributed to the meditation-and-precept combination of Buddhism.

For another example, I have begun replacing "multi-tasking" with "uni-tasking." I am at my best when I can calm myself sufficiently and work a whole task, with full motivation, and intimacy with the work. The resulting satisfaction from completing a whole thought, expressed as a work product, is self-reinforcing: it makes me want to work this way all the time.

I now feel more engaged with people. Nowhere does this matter more than in my relationship with my daughters. During our too-brief weekly vists, I am increasingly able to be present for them, and allow myself to experience that time differently. One result I've observed is that I no longer block out their chatter (they are twins, now seven), nor regard it as a nuisance. To the contrary, a new expressiveness in my love for them has been unleashed. This all began with the thought, expressed by Rev. Lee during a Sunday Dharma talk, that giving begins at home. I've since brought them to services at the temple.

I find myself with greater personal resources to take on my fears.  I recently fulfilled a 26-year fantasy of writing and performing comedy, with three successes in some of NYC's respected comedy clubs. I have harboured this dream since I was 19.

As an added bonus my chess rating has improved over 200 points, mainly from the more creative alternatives that now spring to mind, breaking decades of badly patterned responding. I have studied nothing new that might explain this. I just feel that I have greater mental "bandwidth", and that my blinders are gradually swinging outwards, permitting greater lateral vision.

Finally, I just received my 180-day anniversary notice from "quitsmoke.com": 3,600 cigarettes avoided, $1,260 saved, and a few weeks tacked on to my live expectancy.

I have also been able to bring my pulse down to 46 beats per minute while meditating, roughly the resting level of an Olympic marathoner. (At the height of my athleticism, over 20 years ago, the lowest I could go was 52.)

The final benefit comes from the possibility that by joining with like-minded others, I can help change the world through my individual practice. One theory holds that stressed individuals create an atmosphere of stress in collective consciousness that reciprocally affects the thinking and actions of every individual in that system. When the proportion of meditators in a society rises, reductions in armed conflict and violent crime have been observed. The minimum threshold to trigger this effect has been estimated at 1% of the population, or 80,000 in NYC, 2,800,000 nationally, and 68,000,000 worldwide.

Today

When I began this journey, I was a corporate wage slave in one of the world's largest multinational companies. That is still my external situation, but the inner life of that big machine's cog now runs differently.

My challenge now is to maintain the discipline to stick with a semi-daily meditation practice. For this, I look to the Won congregation for inspiration and community. The temptation to skip is largely driven by my attachment to whatever I was doing just before the appointed time, sort of like a "time out" for a child. I can also trick myself into thinking I don't need it when things are going well. Inevitably, though, I notice the effects of skipping, and resume: anxiety and resentment come creeping back insidiously, on cat's feet.

Add to the benefits for me and those around me the "multiplier" effect of all our actions through the collective consciousness, and it is easy to hope that greater good may be realized than we might have ever imagined . After all, it's our Buddha nature.

June, 2003

A lot can happen in seven years, and in my case, a lot did -- all of it internal. One measure of that change is my current reaction to the the violent encounter that opens the article. The incident is true, and I did elect to lead with it. But the casual ease with which it is described is disturbing to me, and now (happily!) foreign. At one time, that incident was an important part of my self-identity; I was proud of it when it happened. Today, the opposite is true. The early portents of that about-face are described in the article.

Perhaps it is also an outcome of spiritual practice that I can make peace now with my inner critic, and view my words of 2003 through the lens of emotional context. Then, I was freshly separated, and swimming in the red sea of anger, bitterness, resentment, and pain. I was simply eager to share, perhaps too dramatically, but in the best way I knew how at the time, the salutary and incredible benefits of meditation practice and the dharma way, the promise of which I sensed then and realize daily.

Today, the waters are still, a metallic cerulean blue mirror reflecting back the image of rolling green mountains that surround it, and the sun shines brightly.

January, 2010