you will not build this house again

Lessons in Failure from the Dhammapada

The first yoga studio I ever opened was tiny. Like, tiny tiny. About 600 square feet.

At the time, I thought I was being smart. I was opening my first business, I had absolutely no idea if anyone was going to show up, and taking on a big space felt like an unnecessary risk. Start small. Keep the overhead low. Prove the concept. If it works, then you can dream bigger.

It sounded very responsible. Honestly, I probably could have made a PowerPoint about it.

But underneath all that very sensible business logic was something I couldn't see yet: I was afraid it wouldn't work.

Small felt safe. If the studio failed, at least I hadn't risked too much. If nobody came, at least I wasn't stuck with a huge space. I had unknowingly designed the whole thing around the possibility of failure.

And then, unsurprisingly, it failed.

The funny thing is, it didn't fail because people didn't want what I was offering. It failed, at least in part, because it was just too small. There simply wasn't enough room to hold enough people comfortably, to offer enough classes, or build the kind of community and business that could sustain itself.

I had been so afraid of building something that might fail that I built something around the possibility of failure. The thing I had done to protect myself from the outcome I feared had actually helped create it.
That one took me a while to see.

And I wish I could tell you I learned the lesson immediately and have been fearlessly swinging for the fences ever since. Absolutely not. I still catch myself doing versions of this all the time. I have an idea, get excited about it, and then almost immediately start negotiating it downward. 

"Maybe just this much. Maybe I'll wait. Maybe I shouldn't get ahead of myself. Maybe I should see what happens first."

The language is always reasonable. That's what makes these patterns so hard to recognize.

We don't wake up in the morning and think, Today I'm going to organize my life around an old fear. We just make choices.

We call it being realistic. We call it knowing ourselves. We call it being careful, practical, humble, responsible. And sometimes, of course, that's exactly what it is. Starting small isn't inherently an act of fear.

But sometimes the explanation we give ourselves isn't the whole story.

Sometimes there's a belief underneath it. And when we repeat that belief enough, it begins making decisions for us. A thought becomes a story. The story becomes a belief. The belief becomes a pattern. And eventually, the pattern becomes a place we live.

In other words, we build a house.

Which brings me to one of my favorite passages in the Dhammapada.

Download the Dhammapada from Shambhala here

"you are seen"

In verses 153 and 154, the Buddha describes wandering through countless lives looking for the builder of a house. Again and again, the house has been built. Again and again, he has found himself living inside it.
And then, finally, he recognizes the builder.

"House-builder, you are seen! You will not build this house again."

Now, obviously, the Buddha wasn't having a breakthrough about commercial real estate. But when I returned to this teaching recently, I couldn't help but think about that first little studio.

Because I think most of us are building houses all the time.

The house is the collection of beliefs, cravings, fears, identities, expectations and reactions that we keep reconstructing around ourselves. "I'm not that kind of person. I'm terrible at this. People always leave. I need everyone to like me. I can't handle uncertainty. I shouldn't get my hopes up. Better to start small"

Some of these beliefs have been with us for so long that we don't even remember laying the first brick. Maybe we didn't. Maybe someone else handed it to us: a parent, a teacher, a relationship, a failure, an embarrassing moment, a version of ourselves that once needed that belief to feel safe.
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But somewhere along the way, we picked up the tools and kept building.

So, who is the house-builder?

Traditionally, the house-builder in these verses is understood as tanha, usually translated as craving or thirst. It's that grasping quality of mind that says reality needs to be something other than what it is for me to be okay. We grasp toward what we want, push away what we don't want, cling to what we're afraid to lose, and become deeply attached to our ideas about ourselves and how our lives are supposed to unfold.

But here's the part of this teaching I find most useful: the houses we build don't necessarily feel like prisons while we're building them. Quite often, they feel like protection.

"I'm just being realistic.
"I don't want to get my hopes up."
"That's just who I am."
"I already know how this is going to go."

Those beliefs give us something that feels like certainty. If I decide beforehand what I'm capable of, I never have to risk finding out. If I don't get my hopes up, I can't be disappointed. If I make the dream small enough, maybe failing won't hurt quite as much.

The house keeps us safe but it also keeps us inside.

And this is the part of the Buddha's declaration that I love most. The turning point isn't that he finally becomes strong enough to fight the house-builder.

He sees him. That's it. I see you. Suddenly, something that had been operating invisibly is visible.

breaking the pattern

Most of us spend a lot of time renovating our houses. We rearrange our habits. We justify our reactions. We learn why we are the way we are. We become incredibly articulate about our patterns and where they came from. We can tell you who installed the windows, why there's a weird closet upstairs, and exactly which childhood experience is responsible for the leaky roof.

Awareness asks us to do something slightly different.

Can you catch yourself building?

Can you hear I'll probably fail before it turns into so I shouldn't try? Can you notice I'm uncomfortable before it becomes I need to make this feeling go away? Can you recognize I don't know what's going to happen before your mind constructs an entire imaginary future and moves you into it? That's practice.

And it's also one of the reasons I think the yoga mat is such a useful place to explore this teaching. Put yourself in a difficult shape and watch how quickly construction begins.

Your arms start shaking. You fall out of the pose. The person beside you seems to be doing just fine. Suddenly: I can't do this. I'm not strong enough. I'm bad at this. Everyone else is getting it. Maybe this pose just isn't for me.

Maybe. Or maybe you just fell out of a yoga pose.

There is effort. There is shaking. There is uncertainty. There is falling. There is breath. There is another attempt.

We don't have to build anything else around it.

And that, to me, is where asana becomes something much more interesting than exercise. We're not just practicing the pose. We're practicing catching the moment when experience becomes story, and story becomes identity. We're learning to recognize the builder while the hammer is still in our hand.
Which brings me back to that 600-square-foot studio.

I can't go back and build it differently. And I don't really want to. That tiny studio taught me something I probably couldn't have learned from a business book or a spreadsheet. It showed me that fear doesn't always arrive looking like fear. Sometimes it arrives with a calculator and a very reasonable plan.

So maybe the invitation in this teaching isn't to tear down every house we've ever built. We don't need to solve every pattern, excavate every wound, or become some perfectly healed version of ourselves before we can live differently.

Maybe we just start noticing when we reach for another brick.

The dream you immediately negotiate downward. The assumption you've mistaken for fact. The old story beginning another familiar sentence. The thing you don't try because you've already decided how it ends.

Catch yourself building and look at the hammer in your hand and maybe this time, put it down. The old house may still be standing but that doesn't mean you have to keep building it.

making decisions from hope, not fear

And, by the way, I stopped playing small. That next studio grew to more than 2,000 square feet. Then came a second at 1,600. And now, a third baby is on the way.

​Turns out, I didn't need a smaller dream. I needed to stop letting fear draw the floor plan.