exploring authentic Buddhist practice in our times

As you may have seen already, I am currently working on a new initiative called The Hear&Now Project – which is a natural progression to 21awake were I will continue to write about my personal experiences and take on the Dhamma, practice and all that.

However given that there is much common ground between 21awake & Here&Now I thought you wouldn’t mind me cross-posting.   This is a positioning piece called Mindfulness101 and I’ve not actually re-read or edited it yet but wanted to share to get your thoughts.

Please note though that the tone, audience and general vibe of H&N is a little different to here so apologies if anything jars.

Understanding this meditation thing.  In 10 easy pieces.

Hang on people, before we start…some caveats:

Caveat #1 – meditation cannot be summarised.  That sounds like a fairly odd thing for a webpage that is trying to summarise meditation but there you go.  The legendary American physicist Richard Feymann once quipped that “if you think you understand quantum mechanics… then you don’t understand quantum mechanics”.  Meditation is like that.  The more we start to understand the mind and how the way we see affects the world we experience the more mysterious, the more miraculous and more beautiful the world becomes. We want to say it all at once but know that it’s actually impossible to do.  This can be a little infuriating for people who like things in black and white.  But the world isn’t like that is it?  And that is a good thing.

Caveat #2 – we are not talking about ALL meditation.  Meditation is a broad term and while there can be many similarities between what two people call meditation there can also be some quite significant differences.  Here at Here&Now HQ unless we say otherwise, we are talking about what is either called mindfulness-based meditation or insight meditation.  So if you’re interested in forms of meditation where you stand on one leg, chant till you’re blue in the face or take hallucinogenic substances with exotic names then sorry, this is not the website for you.  If this is you, then I’m sure what you’re looking away is just a google search away.  Oh, and good luck.

Caveat #3 – meditation is a contact sport. Reading about meditation and trying to understand the framework for what it is and how it works is a really important part of the journey of understanding.  But if that’s all you do then it’s like going to a restaurant, getting all excited over the menu but then never actually ordering or eating the stuff.  In the Buddhist tradition they talk about three levels of understanding – that which you’ve just heard, that which you’ve thought about  and that which you’ve experienced through direct experiential seeing.  If we ask for one thing it’s that you kick the tyres of this thing and employ all three gears.

Ok enough caveats already, let’s get on with it.  <clears throat> The 10 most important things about meditation that the Here&Now Project thinks you need to know are…

1. Meditation is not what you think it is. When you say meditation to most people they tend to think of what they think it looks like rather than what it actually is.  Because it was the alternative/hippy movement in the 60s & 70s that brought meditation into pop culture, the association with meditation and nice yoga-loving/granola-munching/tofu-buying/tree-hugging* type people has stuck.  But let’s not mistake the wrapping paper with the gift.  Meditation does not look like a Californian vegetarian or Zen monk any more than exercise looks like that impossible athlete in the Nike advert.  This is because meditation is a process and not a fashion statement.  And what that process is doing is developing particular mental qualities in your mind just like you’d develop particular muscles in the gym.  And those qualities are developed by learning to pay attention to your experience in a certain way.

2.  The purpose of meditation is NOT to reduce stress. HANG ON we hear you cry…but that’s what the poster said and that’s what I turned up.   Let’s be very clear…meditation can be an incredibly effective tool in the reduction of stress in our ever so busy lives but it’s not the purpose…just as the purpose of going to Ikea on a Saturday afternoon is not to get a bit of a headache and wish the world would swallow you up there and then…that WILL happen but it’s not the purpose.  The purpose of meditation is to understand how our minds work – to learn about how the ways we see the world actually directly influence the way we experience the world.  And when we really understand that, we learn to let go of all the patterns of mind and thought that keep us feel trapped and limited.  So stress reduction and reducing the seemingly incessant commentary and noise in our heads is part of that but it’s not the whole picture.  But if we make that the whole picture then that’s all we’ll get.  That’s why here at Here&Now HQ we talk about keeping all options open with regards what particular results or understandings might come…we might just be surprised about the level of freedom that is actually possible.

3.  Meditation comes from the Buddhist tradition. This is an important point but one that can get passed over.  For various reasons, our culture has an almost allergic reaction to anything vaguely religious, probably for the fear that it will inevitably bring trouble and conflict (or worse) in its wake.  But let’s be 100% clear and honest…mindfulness-based meditation was first taught and codified by the Buddha back in the day.  An extraordinary man in an extraordinary time, he would be the first to say that he was not a religious sort but instead was only interested in helping people understand their minds, understand their lives and grow their sense of freedom.  All the Religious stuff (note the capital R) came later as institutions formed and the inevitable politics kicked in and whatever else happens when people and organisations form.  It’s fair to say that Buddhist teachings and Buddhism are generally very poorly understood.  The Here&Now Project will try not to reference the Buddhist traditions too much but if we have to then we will.  If you changed a few notes on Mozart’s kickass Symphony in G Major and then said oh no, that’s not Mozart, that’s just classical music, and music is just a common thing to everyone…then you’re pretty much ripping the guy off if you don’t at least reference him.  It’s just good manners.  So thanks B-Man, you were clearly awesome.

4.  Meditation is not anti-modern, anti-digital or anti-speed. Because meditation has come to 21st century western culture via a journey of hippies and Asian monastic or yogic traditions, again it gets associated with the mountaintop as opposed to the marketplace.  But it’s in the latter where we all tend to live, in the busy, digital, fast reality of urban life today.  However because as we know now, meditation is what happens when we decide to develop positive mental qualities in the service of understanding and mental freedom, we can recognise that that doesn’t have to live in a particular place.  Yes, being in an environment of quiet and nature and slowing-down can really help the process but that does not mean that meditation can only be learnt and the benefits felt in those conditions – nor indeed does it say that fast is bad.  To say that would be really quite disheartening since that’s not where we are.  What meditation does say is that fast is neither good nor bad, it’s just fast…but it’s not the only option.  So again, let’s not limit ourselves and give ourselves a disadvantage before we even begin.  Why not let’s try and find out what a way of bringing in authentic meditation into this buzzing world might mean?

5.  Meditation is what happens when awareness, intention and interest come together. Ok while that might sound like a bit of a mouthful (or is that a mindful?) – we’re now into the nitty gritty of what the practice of meditation actually looks like.  While there are a gazillion different types of meditation technique even within the insight meditation tradition they all centre on two simple instructions:

• be quiet
• be interested in what is happening

That’s it.  Sounds simple doesn’t it?   And because the first step is little more than a device to allow you to do the second step better, the most basic way of describing the practice is is actually just being interested and noticing what is happening at any one time.  The Here&Now Project will go into the practical aspects of how to meditate in much more detail but for the sake of this Top 10 List it’s important to know the main elements that go into this noticing-what-is-happening thing.  Firstly it’s about your awareness – you are paying attention to what is happening to your experience – body or mind – and not adding an extra layer by  judging it as good or bad but just knowing what’s going on in its rawness.  It is also about intention – you have decided to pay attention in this particular way for a particular reason therefore there is some direction and overall purpose.  And thirdly, you are interested – meaning that this is a learning process.  And what helps all that is the ability to keep doing it for some length of time – stamina if you like.  And that is why being quiet can be helpful since it helps collect your attention in one place rather than having it scattered and all over the shop.  Oh dear, this has turned into quite a technical sounding description of meditation hasn’t it?  If in doubt, just think be quiet/be interested and be done with it.

6.  Meditation is not about trying to fix the world, it is about freeing our relationship with it instead. While all the bits&pieces in this list are important this is very important.  Very very very very important.  The way we normally try to make ourselves happy is through stuff.  Getting stuff.  Getting rid of stuff.  Getting the right look. Getting rid of those last few pounds.  Getting the right partner.  The right car.  The right house.  The right job and on and on until you finally get dead.  Oh dear.  That really does sound like a lot of work and not much fun.  But it is often what our society and our culture most supports.  Meditation says hello to all that sees that that game is impossible to win since there is always more.  So it asks a different question.  What if we spent as much time working on we relate to that stuff rather than spending all our time fixated on the stuff itself?  Then whatever stuff happens, we’ve got the ability to roll with it – sensitively, vibrantly and freely.  Yes please.

7.  The way that meditation works is actually quite simple. SSSSHHHHH…we’re about to tell you the Big Secret.  When we take life really personally, we have a really bad time.  When we learn to hold life more lightly, we have a good time.  And meditation builds our capacity to do that.  That’s it.  Done.  And before you think that this means that all meditators are emotionless, flat, grey blobs then hang on a minute.  Pick up something small near you…your mouse, a pen, a phone whatever.  Now hold it really tightly.  And notice whether that is a painful or stressful experience?  Now just open your hand while still holding the object in your palm.  How does that feel?  Are you still holding the object?  Can you see the object better than you could before when it was all curled up in your fist.  The practice of meditation basically the process of moving from a life dominated by the fist-like tension to a life where more and more often you are enjoying the freedom of the open hand.  Life is still there.  But the relationship is now free.  Cool, eh?

8.  Meditation is a creative discipline. As you begin to understand the general framework and process by which meditation works, by making  it fit your life in whatever way makes most sense to you can have amazing effects.  Those who have gained the most from meditation are often the most playful.  When we play, we can’t really get stuff wrong.  We can only get better.  And have a lot of fun along the way.

9.  Meditation is not about you. There can be a common perception that since meditation is in the main an individual practice, then it is of no value to the rest of the world.  Let’s put that one to bed once and for all as being just plain wrong.  The purpose of meditation is to love better.  We learn the skills which allow us to hold life more lightly and in the doing allow us to be more generous, more sensitive and more loving.  And it’s just training…doing practice by yourself isn’t the end it’s the means.  You might teach yourself a language using an audio course of whatever and that’s pretty cool in it’s own right.  But it’s even better when you use your new skills to have a meaningful conversation with a person you’d never be able to communicate with otherwise.  Meditation is like that.

10.  Meditation will help you get laid. Ok maybe not, but since we thought you might be flagging by this point we thought we’d try to wake you up a bit.  The proper title of this last one should’ve been Meditation practice is like Super Mario Brothers.  So  while the overall prize might to save Princess Peach you pick up coins, treats & power-ups all along the way.  Just watch out for those mushrooms.**

*please insert your own favorite perjorative stereotype here as you care to

** a generally good rule in life we think

As well as starting writing for Mindapples, I recently wrote an article for the recently launched Buddhist Geeks digital magazine called Mara, the Buddha & me.

In it, I explore the idea of practical mythology – how to use the classical Buddha story as practice aids in the humdrummery (and otherwise) of your own life.  This type of metaphor has been very influential in my own exploration and the piece is just a few jottings of a much richer narrative currently mostly resident in my head.

Read it here.

I’ve long been a fan of Mindapples,  the UK-based campaign dedicated to promoting mentally healthy living for everyone.

As such I wondered what it might be like to be their meditation correspondent.  So I finally wrote a kick-off article for them called A Brief History of Mindfulness.

The feedback has already been really great to I look forward to writing more for them in the future as part of my ongoing exploration of sharing and translation.

Many people have been quite struck as to what I have called wedditation - and twice I’ve led such guided meditations at weddings, firstly for a dear friend and then for my sister.

So after many requests for the footage, only seven months on from the actual event, I’m pleased/slightly embarassed to share some video of what was my small part in a wonderful event.

And for those who want to know, the track I segue into is the effortlessly beautiful Gabriel by Lamb.

Image by Archangel27 via Flickr

I recently returned from a four week training at Gaia House which was a taught retreat on the theme of emptiness and was led by John Peacock (UK’s leading Pali scholar/Dhamma teacher) and Rob Burbea (resident teacher at GH whose main teacher has been Thanissaro).

It proved to be easily the most hardcore taught retreat I had participated in, thanks in particular to what can only be described as a bravura performance by Rob Burbea.

So as to help you get a feel for the level of teaching the last set of four instructional talks were:

• seeing the emptiness of awareness
• seeing the emptiness of time
• nibbana, cessation and the fading of experience
• the radical implications of emptiness

And while it was fair to say that some in the room were not necessarily that up for this sort of material, for me it was precisely the reason I sat the retreat.

Having never really made any notes on a retreat before, during this month I filled half a notebook with scribblings, diagrams and takeaways.  This was testament as to how important this retreat was for me, for while classical awakening still lies ahead, my understanding of the Dhamma and the accompanying depth of practice has certainly deepened.

I shall not attempt to go into the volume and richness of the areas explored since a) that would be quite boring for you and b) rather long and inarticulate.  Instead I shall outline my top four earning areas and see how that lands.  And in the next couple of weeks I hope to share some of the diagrams I drew of my understanding of the Dhamma and my own practice which are quite fun.

1. Trust your experience but keep refining your view.  This dzogchen saying is spot on.  For the last eighteen months or so I felt that my practice was perhapstoo comfortable and too flat but I wasn’t quite sure what I needed to do to nudge it on.  What shifted for me during this retreat was a deepening understanding of what the Buddha was actually saying.  Previously my understanding of the teaching was that “all dukkha is optional” which for me had settled out at a very strong level of “bare attention” mindfulness but without any more penetration than that.  I imagine this is a common hang-out point since life is really quite pleasant, experience is vibrant and most gross suffering is checked.   My current Dhamma synopsis has now graduated from “all dukkha is optional” to “all experience is fabricated” – a subtle move but one which has placed my practice’s centre of gravity in a much more subtle, fundamental and – quite frankly – more interesting place.

2. The Dhamma as jenga. A cursory google search shows me that noone has before (in text online at least) made the equation between dhamma practice and jenga so let me claim it here!  Paticcasamupada or dependent co-arising is the real core of the Buddha’s teaching, something which he repeated again and again – I teach only dukkha and the ending of dukkha.  So if the Buddha had had the ability to register URLs he would have gone for www.howstuffworks.com.  And his mechanic of how things work was that if any of the twelve aspects of dependent co-arising are in play, then so too will the rest arise…including dukkha.  Therefore the whole practice is experimenting by taking blocks out of the jenga-esque construction of self and world until in the Buddha’s words:

O house-builder, you have been seen.
And shall build no house again.
All your rafters are broken.
The ridge-pole is shattered.
My mind has attained the unconditioned.
Achieved is the end of craving

Or in a word…jenga!

So that’s what we do, see how the removal of certain building blocks remove dukkha and others don’t, with those marked push/pull and identification being particularly interesting.  And critically we have to have as much understanding as direct experience.  Experience without understanding is just a whizzbang (but not transformative) meditation experience.  And understanding without experience is just theory.  Marry the two though and you are rockin’.  And that is what the Buddha meant by knowing and seeing.

3. The erotic life of the breath. Thanks to my learning from this retreat I have now switched from open awareness (using the “sound of silence“) as a primary practice to an oldskool samatha-anapanasati/vipassana-body investigation style, supported by open awareness should I need to relax any gross clinging.  And it’s ace – helping me deepen out of the holding pattern I described above and at the same reconnecting me to some of my favourite hardcore 20th century teachers such as Ajahn Maha Boowa, Upasika Kee Nanayon and Webu Sayadaw.  And one of the things that really facilitated this homecoming of sorts was recognising that anapanasati can be a deeply intimate and erotic practice.  This may sound odd but it’s a personally useful way of how to frame my relationship to the breath and deepening concentration.  And it works both ways and can support ones presence in romantic relationships.  Some of you will know exactly what I’m talking about, I’m sure.

4. Time to bring time into play. In my recent end-of-year post I spoke about how my sense of time had become very light and wondered whether selft and time were related.  Theravadan Buddhism doesn’t really go into this at all, hence my lack of development in this area.  However in some Mahayana emptiness teachings it is made a main focus, especially in the work of the 11th/12th century Tibetan teacher Gampopa.  Rob Burbea taught it therefore as a key part of understanding emptiness, seeing through time as being as important as seeing through awareness.  [Aside: indeed his high-bar definition of a stream-enterer is one who has specifically had insight into the emptiness of both time and awareness]  This instruction to investigate time-sense as well as self-sense proved to be very powerful and will probably be a theme of my practice this year…playing with the “holy trinity” of subject, object and the time in which experience appears to happen.  This trinity, which Rob called the tripod upon which dukkha sits, and specifically this third leg of time feels like something I was missing from my practice so I’m excited to really get into it.

Finally a word or two about emptiness itself which I avoided defining above.  In my understanding, emptiness is a quality and a way of looking, recognising all elements of experience as not having inherent existence independent of mental processes.  In other words it is expression of dependent co-arising and therefore the heart of the dhamma.  For when self and world are progressively seen as empty, the mind progressively becomes untangled from the knots of identification.  This is what is known as freedom, as letting go, and in the end, as release.

PS if the title of the post seems non sequitur forgive me.  It was a phrase which summed up my learning and as I mentioned here, it is beyond my abilities to either share it all or tie everything together

PPS if you made it to the end of this post, I probably owe you a drink

Just a quick note to say that if I don’t post here for a few weeks you needn’t send out a search party.

I am going for a four week training on emptiness at Gaia House on Wednesday and therefore my blogging self shall not be around for a little while.

I shall however no doubt return with tales and inarticulation so I look forward to both the training and the return.

yours,

Rohan

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.

Nate over at the Precious Metal blog had a brain-bubble about having a blog swap for some Buddhist bloggers. The plan was for any interested Buddhist bloggers to throw their names in for a random drawing of which blog they will guest write on as well as who would be featured on their blog. I was extremely fortunate to have opportunity to post over here at 21awake, a blog that I follow and respect, as well as having Marcus from Marcus’ Journal post over at my site, Sweep the Dust, Push the Dirt.

Anyway, Rohan offered the topic of “what surprised me about the results of my Zen practice”. This topic is a difficult one to approach since I have been struggling over posting about this for a few months now. I hope to avoid the trap that many people fall into when they discuss spiritual pursuits.  It is very easy to fall into metaphysical analysis or analogy rather than examining the actual results.  So I hope that this description of mine stays firmly footed in the “real” and grounded effects of my Zen practice, but don’t expect too much.

It started with my wife’s pregnancy.   The upcoming birth of my daughter (now 16 months old) and the need to find a new, higher paying (and higher stress) job to support us led to my revitalization of my Zen practice – a practice largely left discarded since I graduated college and one that was largely a nightstand approach (a few Buddha books beside the bed). I realized that I needed to prepare for this change and the standard mental “get psyched” preparations would not cut it. I was worried and scared.  I needed to deal with me in this moment before I could ever be the person that would be able to care for and handle these new responsibilities. If you require the full story of what proved to be the impetus to restarting my practice go here for the complete and unflattering story.

Explosive vs. Intense

One of the most salient aspects of Zen practice as well as one of the most surprising was the effect on my emotional outlook. For the most part I am (or was?) a stubborn, over-reacting and explosive person. This was one of the main reasons for restarting my practice – to control the emotions that I know I have. The surprising part was how, in the beginning, I expected to “control” this aspect of my personality. Rather than gaining any amount of conscious control over my emotions; my explosiveness just began to dissipate slowly as my practice progressed. This isn’t to say that I am not an intense person- I am, but my predilection towards exploding emotionally just began to cease gradually.

The expectation I had at the onset of my practice was that I would gain a more complete understanding of myself and why I act and think the way I do.  I expected increased introspection would lead to an eventual understanding of my self and then control over it.  It was all very psychological and grounded in a self-help mentality.

I didn’t gain anything through my practice, least of all control over my emotions.  What I did experience was a gradual change in how I reacted to my environments.  But even that assumes some amount of control.  I never mentally control myself.  My self is just not as controlling.

I still get frustrated and annoyed by the daily grind of life but those moments pass by now rather than fester. Moments are moments and I engage with them in their own turn. I don’t reject or indulge in my emotional experience but nor do I assume to understand the nature of my mind or the origins of my emotions.  I just don’t let myself get intimidated or bound by them.

The best description would be an intense engagement of the moment.  That present moment includes my environments, my self and those around me.  Ordinarily, I think I ignored the “myself” part of that equation and assumed that it wasn’t part of my environment.

Feeling Gratitude

I feel engaged with my practice (it is part of the moment, after all). Rather than sitting back and allowing my practice to unfold before me; I strive towards it every moment I can. Far from being a “marshmallow on a cushion” my practice is a focused activity that stretches between my marriage, raising my daughter, chopping wood, doing dishes, living in the middle of no-where, writing reports/memos, blogging and the 84,000 other subtle gestures that I partake in everyday. This was surprising to me after being filled with the ideal of “Zen™” being soft and unfocused like a cheap glamour-shot taken at the Mall – A practice full of incense and bowing and chanting.

So I was surprised that Zen practice existed outside of the Zendo and off of the cushion but was equally surprised that I could gain such a feeling of gratitude by engaging in the practices that I thought to be mere “cultural baggage”.  Those idealized aspects that I listed about (incense, bowing and chanting) were initially rejected because I didn’t see the purpose behind them.  For me, starting out, practice was meditation and meditation was practice.  Everything else was rejected.

Well, either rejecting or indulging in those aspects of practice is equally worthless.  They need to be seen as just practice.  Meditation, chanting or bowing; dishes, wood-chopping or typing is all of the same matter – mindfulness and gratitude.

Meditation still kicks my ass

I never expected it to be easy (mentally or physically) but I did expect it to ease up a bit after a few years of practice. But here we are, still aching and working through each session; every day at home and every weekend at the zendo.

Each session humbles me and makes me take a few steps back. Before I get cocky, I get a sense of humor. I laugh when my legs fall asleep during a zazen session forcing me to stumble around and then only to settle back down to another session with a case of pins and needles that would bring Zeus to tears. I get to laugh when I have horrible gas during a group sitting or mess up the chants horribly (I will hit samadhi when I can pronounce Avalokitsvhara in front of a group of people). I laughed when I set my hair on fire while opening the altar (as did everyone else).

Basically, it’s still hard.  I don’t float on clouds when I mediate.  Nor am I light as a feather.  Nor do I become as gentle as a stream.  I don’t escape anything when I sit.  I sit to engage it.  It brings up some bad shit but I would rather see it and engage it than ignore it and place my head in the sand.

This is why I still see meditation as necessary to my ongoing practice and not as something to master.

Dharma Gates are Endless and full of sharp spiky things

I should end this with the biggest surprise of Zen practice – It isn’t all pretty. This is hard work and it brought up plenty of negative stuff to the surface. Like placing alcohol on a zit, it brings up the gross stuff. I have to deal with aspects of my personality that are still present.  That is the most painful part. I am working on the small things now during my practice and in time I’ll bang out some of the bigger ones. But in this moment and in this life I attend to those things that hang out in front of me.

Sometimes I think that I focus on the mundane too much and that it is denigrating my practice but then as I was sitting one day my daughter came in, sat on my lap, snuggled in and sat quietly with me for a moment. At that point, I realized that sitting did affect all sentient beings…little by little and bit by bit…the most surprise aspect of Zen.

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I am incredibly pleased to announce the Hear & Now Project – a radically innovative initiative from the nice people at 21awake (aka me)

Here is a video which explains the basic idea:

To keep up to date, please keep an eye on the dedicated site www.thehearandnowproject.com as the project rapidly develops or follow @hearnowproject on twitter.

And if you’d like to sign up to be part of the testing community, please tell us here.

Exciting stuff methinks.

In my previous post I talked about my nascent exploration of relational practice and here I’d like to continue this thread and share some of my thinking about where this fits into a full modern life dedicated to awakening and its expression.

Having previously decided to dedicate 2010 to some intensive practice and then – lo and behold –  Aphrodite playing one of her most beautiful cosmic jokes, I’ve had my plans for next year wiped clean like an Etch-A-Sketch.  And while I’m certainly not as foolish or hubristic as to want to design the specifics of my next year, I am exploring what is the framework that allows me to line up all the elements of my life in support of my ambitions re: awakening and living a vibrant and engaged life.

And I think the answer looks a little something like:

The Whole-y Life: notes on a diagram

• There are three general domains for practice – here I call them me, my social networks and my society.  This classification is a nod to Ken Wilber’s I/We/It classification of his integral framework

• What is different about my current relationship to previous ones is that I have a much stronger understanding of my practice and therefore can open my arms and include my relational domain as an act of inclusion.  Previously it would have been more an exclusion as I had a more binary view of how awakening practice related to relationship as a hangover from the monastically-biased Theravadan inheritance.  It’s worth noting here that this is more an attitudinal thing rather than something that affected my behaviour.

• So a mature engaged practice seems to be one of unfolding and inclusion – at each point including more of your life into its embrace, just as you include more of your experience into your awareness – the symmetry really is remarkable

• And at each of these levels – individual, relational, societal the core practice looks slightly different.  Classical inner meditative work is best for the Me domain but not so for the Relational domain – that requires a practice that is more formless and – by definition – more social.  And in the Societal domain, we’re looking at how our livelihood can be dedicated to service based on our core values, so that there is no dissonance between our work and the rest of our lives

• But remember that the movement outwards has to be from a position of strength.  It is just as limiting to practice exclusively in the relational domain or service domain as it is to just be internally focussed.  That is why the arrow of awakening runs through all three layers.

• Therefore by inference, a strong meditation practice I believe will always be the kernel of this game.  I can see the value of this model when I think about friends of mine who are activists – very strong in the service/societal domain but less literate in the inner or relational domain resulting in the anger that motivates their often excellent work to leak into the more intimate areas of their lives

• I’ve quite deliberately chosen to use My Social Networks as the label for the area of our lives that can be used for relational practice.  This is sufficiently broad so as to include our romantic partners, our practice communities, our family, our friends…even our Twitter followers

• So from a very practical standpoint, I am currently using this framework to see where the gaps are in my own life so that I can exercise all three domains to their symphonic potential

• These I have identified as the following:
  • deepening and dedicating more time to my formal meditation practice
  • learning more about relational practice and including my partner in that ongoing exploration
  • re-framing my work towards service which includes exploring ways outside of this blog in which I can share my limited understanding and indeed make some part of my living through it
• Deepening my traditional meditative practice is particularly interesting since not only is it motivated by my spiritual urgency, it is also due to my recognition that if I am to truly grow my practice into the relational domain then that requires a really strong inner base

I hope this has been useful – it has been for me.

However I recognise that it may not be tremendously articulate so I hope to continue to edit this post as my understanding of this framework develops.

Thank you.