9 things I learnt in 2009

photo credit: reynardkarman

Yes I too have succumbed to the ubiquitous practice of list-writing.  And while it may be a little cliché to compile a Top Ten at the end of the year, taking the time to review learning at a point of closing can be of enormous value, be that at the end of a meditation sitting or at the end of a year.  Or indeed a decade, should you be that bold.

In any case, this is a Top 9.  I hope it’s of some use.  It certainly has been for me.

[And please note that it can be really quite hard to write briefly about this sort of learning without the catchphrases sounding too much like generic spiritual aphorisms.  Please have my word that behind each one is a level of understanding that I'm just not eloquent enough to articulate.]

Lesson 1: I am not a monk. This is a fairly self-evident statement but the full understanding of it has only really done its work this year.  Living a fully engaged urban digital relational like (aka a normal life) while practising in a tradition that has a powerful monastic inheritance by definition results in a tension.   That has always been the case and perhaps always will but what has been different is that I now own it as a creative tension.  I now fully recognise this creative tension as the central narrative of my life – one which started in 2003 when I first started getting into Buddhist practice at pretty much the same time as I started work as a management consultant.  This blog is a fruit of that tension as is my new experiment The Hear&Now Project.

Lesson 2: the body is Silence. This is one of those things that I can’t really explain in any satisfactory way.  I was sitting at the Insight Meditation Society around Easter time and this statement hit me like a loving punch in the stomach.  Silence had been a theme of my practice for some time and the sheer obviousness of this viscerally-felt statement was like a blessing.

Lesson 3: technology and dharma are closer than they thing.  In many spiritual scenes, technology is seen as a threat.  And while that is understandable it’s also most likely generational.  As someone who has spent some time working in the area of digital and social innovation I am so excited aboutw what I see.  And what I see is an emerging web culture which is exploring issues such as openness, the economics of free and how online communities can lead to social action.  These are the same issues any practitioner of authentic spirituality gets into but we tend to give them fancy names like dana and sangha.  Might I go so far as to say that What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis and Free by Chris Anderson were the most important spiritual books published this year?  Oh look…I just have.

Lesson 4: romantic relationship make practice immediate. This has been a big year for me with regards understanding relational practice and I’ve gone into some detail into this elsewhere.  Being part of a committed intimate relationship by definition makes one’s sense of the world that little bit bigger with one’s partner offering infinite opportunities to connect and surrender.  And the icing of the cake is that being in love is a proximate cause of concentration…cool eh?

Lesson 5: time does not really exist (although it sort of does). Time, it’s passage and the restless that it’s passage invites has been a theme of my practice since day 1.   And now as I develop the ability to see the world as not-self, the relationship to time also has unhooked.  Perhaps the two – time and self -  are related?  I remember a mentor of mine once telling me that Krishnamurti said that time was just a movement in thought.  This year I’ve started to understand what that means.

Lesson 6: a simple definition of practice is a useful definition of practice.  When describing my practice, to myself and to others, I’ve often been rather confused.  And this confusion invariably leads to diffusion of energy and focus…because if you’re not clear what you are doing then how do you know you are doing it?  Again it was around Easter time when a simple definition of my practice came to me and it’s been of enormous value ever since.  It’s a simple two part formula: Be Quiet…and Hold a Question.

Lesson 7: it is a marathon AND a sprint.  It is of course a common saying that practice is a marathon not a sprint.  At first reading this means that it should be taken slowly…but I now realise otherwise.  Have you ever watched world-class marathon runners?  They run FAST.  ALL the time.  For a LONG way.  And when they take breaks they are still running faster than most people can spring.

Lesson 8: I’m just making this thing called life and practice up as I go along. But that’s ok because it’s based on a commitment to wise intention.

Lesson 9. This is sangha. 2009 is the first full year of my writing here at 21awake.com and it’s a constant surprise that anyone gains value from my ramblings which are ultimately means for me to reflect on my own life and its learning.  Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, linked and shared.  This is sangha.

See you in 2010.