Insight Dialogue: Sangha reclaims its seat(s)

As with many great things, it started with a Buddhist Geeks podcast.  In a two-part interview (

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

,

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

) an American teacher called Greg Kramer outlined a style of practice he had developed called Insight Dialogue.  The authenticity with which Greg was talking and his passionate belief in the opportunities for awakening through interaction with others spoke directly to me.  Excited, I looked Greg up online and saw that he would be in Europe, teaching at le Moulin later in the year, a place I had long wanted to visit.  Perfect.

I’ll let Greg contextualise the practice via this excerpt from his book, which I must admit is somewhat of a masterpiece:

We meditate alone but live our lives with other people; a gap is inevitable.  If our path is to lead to less suffering, and much of our suffering is with other people, then perhaps we need to reexamine our sole committment to these individual practices.  Meditating alone reinforces an unreflected assumption: that the deep work of awakening is a private affair.*  From this assumption we build a sense of the path – its overall direction and its particulars – that favors solitary and internal endeavour.  Meditating individually, we lack any practice that explicitly addresses the interpersonal realm.  We may sense vaguely that something is awry but cannot see what is missing.  We are not clear that the personal and interpersonal paths are profoundly connected, nor do we know how easily and even elegantly they can be interwoven.  A wider vision is available to us.  It is so simple.

The Insight Dialogue (ID) retreat at le Moulin in July this year lasted only five days.  The format was quite simple: the container of the retreat was silence and while there were periods of conventional silent practice, the two long blocks either side of lunch were reserved for dialogue practice.

For the first two days, given the novelty of the style for most of the participants, Greg outlined the practice guidelines in some detail.  These were short phrases or single words which we would use as tools to inform our practice, and as the days went by, each would reveal greater and greater levels of subtlety.  The guidelines are:

Pause  |  Relax  |  Open  |  Trust Emergence  |  Listen Deeply  |  Speak the Truth

So the dialogue sessions worked a little something like this.  You choose someone relatively randomly from the group (around 22) to be your partner and then set yourselves opposite each other in a classic sitting posture.  Greg would then introduce a contemplation theme and invite you to enter into dialogue together on that theme.  The theme could be an oldschool Theravadan classic like ageing, death, impermanance, Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha, greed, hatred, delusion – all that good stuff.  Or it could be more contemporary like self-judgement, the various roles we play etc etc.  All the while the teacher reminds us to use the practice guidelines to inform our practice.

So the question arises…what is the difference between a period of insight dialogue and a normal conversation, albeit a deep one?  To answer that I will ask another…what is the difference between a period of vipassana practice and a period where you are sitting still on a cushion?  It’s in the attitude.  It’s in the intimacy you are having with the experience of your body-mind.  It’s in the commitment for awakeness and awakening.  It’s in the witnessing of the patterns and the allowance of space for those patterns to run their course.

Part of my motivation for attending the retreat was that I find intimate interpersonal practices intimidating.  Having done some so-called “repeated question” inquiry, I just didn’t get it nor find it very useful.  What was very intereting about the ID retreat was that quite quickly I was able to see the ways in which I was holding back in relationship – what Greg calls the hunger not to be seen.  Having to look directly into the eyes of a stranger while being present to all that is arising in awareness is, wow, such a powerful practice and the learning was so great and stays with me today.

An Insight Dialogue retreat is a difficult one to describe.  But as someone who’s sat more types of retreat than the average bear I highly recommend getting signed up for one when you can, escpecially if you feel ‘established’ in your practice – I’ll certainly be going back for more.  Not only is it a form of practice that can open your learning into new and unexpected spaces, if you are fortunate enough to sit with Greg himself, you will be practising alongside one of the most authentic, intense, caring, trusting and human teachers around today.

[www.insightdialogue.com]

* for those Ken Wilber fans out there, you’d have to say insight dialogue is bottom left quadrant and therefore part of an integral insight practice.  AQAL me up!