Release Your Cows: What Idea of Happiness are You Holding Onto, Keeping You Unhappy?

The very basics of Buddhism are the Four “Noble Truths.” If you’re like me, you’re highly suspicious of anything labeled as the truth — especially labeled as a “noble” truth. It is said that these four truths are referred to as “noble” because they liberate us from suffering. I prefer to think of the word “noble” as indicating the attributes of courage and authenticity. I prefer to think of the word “truth” as what is true for you — from your own experience and not as platitudes from someone or something on high.

In that light, a “noble truth” is something you have discovered to be true in your life, from your experience as an authentic and courageous traveler on this human journey, which is characterized by suffering. WE are the noble ones.

The first ‘Noble Truth’ is that unenlightened life is “suffering.” But a better translation of the Sanskrit word dukkha is not “suffering”, but more like “difficult” or “unsatisfactory.” Life always involves some sort of suffering, either painful physical or emotional suffering or the more-subtle “unsatisfactoriness.” And even when things seem to be going good, there is this sense of uncertainty. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The second ‘Noble Truth’ is that the cause of this suffering is craving, attachment, or grasping: you like something you want to grab it, possess it, keep it forever. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, you dislike something, situation, or person and you want to push it away, but it remains stuck in your mind. Either way you’re attached. Lama Yeshe said “attachment is where the mind sticks” and this stems from an ignorance about the nature of reality — the nature of what it IS that really makes you happy.

The third ‘Noble Truth’ is that it IS possible to end the dukkha; to unstick and lessen or extinguish the sense of difficulty or unsatisfactoriness despite the circumstances. And this is liberation, nirvana, or the enlightenment of inner freedom and peace.

The fourth ‘Noble Truth’ is the active companion of the third: That the path to the end of dukkha is outlined in the Buddha’s teaching of the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path is the practice to achieve happiness for yourself and others — and, eventually that release of mind stickiness.

The part of life that causes us the most problems is what the second ‘Noble Truth’ talks about. About attachment, grasping, keeping forever the things that we think will make us happy, or continually focusing on what makes us unhappy. It’s about the constant battle to recognize that we are grasping at something … that our mind is stuck on something … and identifying what it is we’re attaching to … and realizing that what we’re grasping at or stuck on is NOT making us happy but making us miserable.

I want to share a little bit of my own personal journey through grasping at loss. A grasping that caused underlying frustration, anger, judgment, and reactivity, as I was dealing with a series of losses happening in my life over a period of six years. It seemed like a pattern. And my mind tended to relive and focus on the story of each one.

“Dealing with” is an accurate characterization, but not quite true. The thesaurus says to “deal with” is about coping, managing, taking care of, sorting out, or contending with. And there’s the rub. That would mean it’s about recognizing that we ARE attaching to unhealthy states of mind. Yet attachment is insidious. I realized I may have been contending or coping, but I certainly wasn’t “sorting out” or “taking care of.”

Not until one sleepless night in mid-March of last year when a whole lot of “sorting out” started happening at my usual 3:00 AM witching hour. The time where things in my life — past, current, and future — haunt me. That night I opened my Kindle to read and my eyes fell on Thich Nhat Hanh’s book No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering. I had read the book before but didn’t have a strong memory of it. It called to me, like a Bodhisattva emerging from the darkness to help me wrestle with the devil or Mara.

From the minute I began reading the book again that early morning, it had a significant influence propelling a huge leap in an understanding or awareness of my situation. Up until that moment, I had been operating in my own ignorant chamber, thinking that I had truly accepted each loss by repeating and believing I was living my Sensei’s teachings that “acceptance IS transcendence.”

I believed I had truly transcended. I had even given Dharma talks about coming to that realization. And maybe I was? Maybe I was slowly climbing a circular staircase of active acceptance — one step forward, two steps back.

But Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching helped me see that I wasn’t digging deep enough into the series of losses. I never had the guts to embrace the hurt of the losses and stay with that embrace until the discomfort went away through release, or true acceptance. Instead, I was “dealing with it” by attaching to it. The pattern of loss became a faint rhythm, an underlying backbeat of a story I was attaching to.

Thich Nhat Hanh stresses that the nirvana part of dukkha reveals itself if we get deep into the dukkha — pushing our Buddha-Nature lotus roots deep into the mud. He writes:

“But we must remember that suffering is a kind of mud that we need, in order to generate joy and happiness. Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.”

Photo by Yingzhao Zhu on Unsplash

Wow! The whole tenderness-of-our-own-suffering business was completely foreign to my way of dealing with suffering. A stiff upper lip is my go-to in times of trouble. I was stiff in dealing with dukkha. And like a brittle tree in the wind, I was breaking.

In dealing with a series of eight losses of people and associations in my life over six consecutive years, I became stiff. And that stiffness, itself, is a symptom of attachment. I was very far from tender. Thich Nhat Hanh pinpoints that that is exactly how our suffering thrives:

“It thrives because we enable and feed it. We ruminate on suffering, regret and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up.”

Like the farmer whose cows ran away, in the story Thich Nhat Hanh told in his book, friends, family, and associations in my life seemed to run away. And each time, I didn’t understand why. The story, as Thich Nhat Hanh tells it, goes like this:

“One day the Buddha was sitting with some of his monks in the woods. They had just come back from an almsround and were ready to share a mindful lunch together. A farmer passed by, looking distraught.

He asked the Buddha, ‘Monks, have you seen some cows going by here?’

‘What cows?’ the Buddha responded.

‘Well,’ the man said. ‘I have four cows and I don’t know why, but this morning they all ran away. I also have two acres of sesame. This year the insects ate the entire crop. I have lost everything: my harvest and my cows. I feel like killing myself.’

The Buddha said, ‘Dear friend, we have been sitting here almost an hour and we have not seen any cows passing by. Maybe you should go and look in the other direction.’

When the farmer was gone, the Buddha looked at his friends and smiled knowingly. ‘Dear friends, you are very lucky,’ he said, ‘you don’t have any cows to lose.’”

In an instant, on reading that story, I understood a lot more about my own attachment and the nature of attachment in general. Thich Nhat Hanh explains that one of our biggest “cows” is that we have a narrow idea of happiness and we suffer because of that idea. He says:

“…You continue to suffer until one day you are capable of releasing the idea and right away you feel happy…. Every one of us has an idea of happiness that can become too entrenched, too rigid. Every one of us has cows to be released.”

In my case, in my response to what I perceived to be a pattern of losses, I was “rigid” around continuing to revisit each one and, like the farmer, my mind would continue to repeat, “I don’t know why, but they all ran away.”

I felt the farmer’s despair. When your cows run away on their own volition, there is nothing you can do to get them back. You are face-to-face with your complete lack of control over other people. And isn’t that a major dread in life: losing control? Not getting what YOU want and losing what you have? Yet, that is the nature of the impermanence and interdependency of life.

As a Buddhist practitioner and teacher, I knew all that, right? All about impermanence and interdependency. But attachment is insidious. Even knowing, I continued to revisit shock, disbelief, and anger. And it fed on itself. And yet, I “got over it” … I got over the loss of each of the cows by burying my feelings until the anger and resentment bubbled over, after the 2016 election.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in the book:

“The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption. Retailers peddle a plethora of classic and novel devices to help us cover up the suffering inside. But unless and until we’re able to face our suffering, we can’t be present and available to life, and happiness will continue to elude us.”

Indeed. The last of my eight “losses” was not so much personal, but more of what I would consider a worldly loss, when Trump became President of the United States. My point is not to bring political opinions into this article, but this was a major perceived loss on my part — and on the part of many. And it was one that I was attached to — addicted to — thanks to my devices allowing me to find a comfortable network of people raging with me on social media echo chambers.

It was like my bottled emotional response to the series of losses was finally able to discharge when the country and the world responded to the results of the election in shock, disbelief, and anger.

But, thanks to Thich Nhat Hanh, who triggered a digging deep into the mud, I came to realize that, in many ways, my clinging to the anger, rage, and resistance against Trump and his administration was how I hid from some of the more personal and painful losses. And in that digging, I realized, just as Thich Nhat Hanh taught:

“…You continue to suffer until one day you are capable of releasing the idea and right away you feel happy…. Every one of us has an idea of happiness that can become too entrenched, too rigid. Every one of us has cows to be released.”

I suddenly felt a freedom over the losses. All of them. Not just a freedom from suffering over the losses, but a freedom FROM the loss of those people and associations themselves.

No, I didn’t initiate the release of those “cows”, so they seemed like “losses”, but they were actually releases; a release I didn’t realize until I started relaxing into the mud. These releases that created an uninvited freedom, bringing a sense of peace and happiness.

On that day in mid-March, I took a vow to disengage from social media for 21 days. I took a vow to disengage from the anger, judgment, and reaction that social media and the news offers continuously. And the peace that came from my vow stretched beyond 21 days.

I am still disengaged from political and other angry, judgmental, reactionary discourse on social media. I read more of the books piling up around me. I treat myself and those around me more tenderly. I started to notice the world that was right in front of me again.

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that we can make peace with our suffering by “coming home to ourselves.”:

“It requires that we make peace with our suffering, treating it tenderly, and looking deeply at the roots of our pain. It requires that we let go of useless, unnecessary sufferings, release the second arrow, and take a closer look at our idea of happiness. Finally, it requires that we nourish happiness daily, with acknowledgment, understanding, and compassion for ourselves and those around us.”

Thich Nhat Hanh says that letting go takes a lot of courage. This is the nobility inherent in the Noble Truths. But, once we let go, happiness comes very quickly. You don’t have to search for it, because it’s always there.

I released the cow of anger over life doing what life does. It separates us from people and things. Friends and circumstances fall away. It’s natural. It’s the truth of life. I let it all go. In its place, I came up with four promises to ensure all my cows are released every day. They are:

1) It’s not about me.

2) You can’t control everything.

3) You can’t change other people.

4) Just be kind.

Release your cows is a practice I will keep. Maybe it can help you, too?

Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that we take a piece of paper and write a list of our “cows”: the things that we are attaching to — either the things we think you need to be happy or, like me, the things we think are making us unhappy.

Maybe you can release one each week? It might take months or a year or more, but each release will bring you more joy.