Living the Whole-y Life (Part 1)

Earlier this year I talked about my intention to dedicate next year to formal practice.  And while my motivation and my urgency has not wavered, my life circumstances have done in that I have entered into a wonderful relationship with a wonderful lady.  And while I could still go along with Plan A and do the solo meditator thing, I know that it would not be the most skillful response to my life as it is right now.

All this has made me ask two big questions:

1. How can I serve my commitment to awakening while honouring the importance of my relationship?
2. What the hell am I going to do next year?

This blog post shows some of my working as I begin to answer them both.  But first…a silly diagram:

My limited views revealed and a new domain opens up.  Just by the asking question 1 about how to serve both my practice commitment together with my relationship I have realised that I was carrying around a view that a practice whose centre of gravity is in the solo-meditator-in-a-cave/retreat based model was intrinsically better than a practice where relationship played a central role.  While I had often talked the talk about relationship-as-practice, I noticed that this was actually often little more than lip service.  And this was really quite shocking to me.

Thankfully the reason I noticed this was an overwhelmingly positive one.  Given that my practice is stronger than the last time I was in a relationship I noticed something very important – that the specific qualities that vipassana practice develop can be cultivated just as well (if not better) through interaction – as long as you are being quite explicit and intentional about it.

Puppy paññā.  A silly (but real) example: I have little experience with pets and so when walking a friend’s dog Omar recently I noticed how my expectations of what a simple walk round the block would be like was really rather different as to the realities of how my fluffy little charge circumambulated his urban patch.

At the time I was mostly working with the practice of surrender in my formal meditation – examining the gap between experience as it was happening and my sense of observer.  And yes, while this was on a quite subtle level in formal practice the revelation to me while walking with Omar the dog was that this was exactly the same quality that I could develop in my relationship to him – just in a more gross domain.

This may sound obvious to many of you but it was quite a big deal for me.  For while subtle is more subtle than gross – what I realised was that I was holding the view that subtle is better than gross.  And it’s not…it’s just different subtler.  Develop the quality of surrender in whatever domain you care to and when you have created the conditions for working at a very subtle level of mind, then you’re all set.

Shining light on my blind spots.  Through my blog, someone got in touch with me recently who had just spent almost a decade in monastic communities in the UK and abroad and eager to hear his experiences, we met for dinner.  When I told him of my intention to spend much of 2010 dedicated to intensive practice he gave me a piece of advice which I did not fully understand at the time.  ”Don’t try and create the ideal conditions for your self – put yourself in community”.

I’ve now begun to understand his advice, for while working internally for a long time can do a lot of good work, it can often avoid some significant blind spots.  And especially in my case where the solo practitioner move is very much my comfort zone – I realise now that the most fruitful material to work with is to be found with other people.  Greg Kramer the founder of Insight Dialogue summarises this well when he says that so much of our suffering is relational but we try to come to its end through intra-personal not inter-personal practices.

Joy as the lubricant for awakening.  But of course  relationships aren’t all bad news!  First and foremost there is love.  I am not with my girlthing because I intend to use her as a foil in my ongoing adventures to awakening, I am with her because of my attraction, respect and care for her.  Joy or piti is one of the classical factors of awakening and when we are practising in a relational context it is no different.  Without this basis, relational practice can be hard work but with it, it can sing.  And for it to really sing, all parties should have some awareness that the relationship is being used in that way and for that purpose – this can bring a wonderful amplification effect to the vitality and investigation and indeed the awakening.

Moving past inherited monastic models.  In the Theravada tradition, the dominance of the monastic emphasis has meant that the domains of work, sex and money have largely been divorced from the practice of awakening.  For in the times of the Buddha, it was simply not possible to lead a householder life and have leisure time to dedicate to study and practice, so awakening practices were pretty much exclusively taught to the professional renunciates (see the Anathapindaka Sutta for – what I think is – a rather shocking example of this)

But this is not the world in which we live today so let’s not pretend that it is.  So for a genuine culture of awakening to flourish we have to look to extract the best of what the tradition has to offer and embed that into the realities of our lives and our societies.  This is exciting stuff and it’s new stuff – for its our generation that is working all this out.  A small group of us in London are particularly interested in this area and together with the teacher Martin Aylward are running course on this very topic in March 2010 called Work Sex Money Dharma…visit the site to find out more. (The WSMD site is in ongoing development at this stage so I will do a separate post announcing all the details when they are available).

My I have gone on rather a lot here haven’t I?

If you can bear it, in my next post I’ll talk a bit more about how I’m personally approaching my practice given my understanding of all the above.