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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3862, Sunday, April 11, 2010, Editor: Mark
Does a happy man seek happiness? How restless people are, how
constantly on the move! It is because they are in pain that they
seek relief in pleasure. All the happiness they can imagine is in
assurance of repeated pleasure.
Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
This may not be the empowering spiritual teaching you are looking
for, but everything has its time; everything has its place. Ego
is not in control of what's happening. Life is in control of
what's happening. To insist that something can empower us, all at
once, to dive into ourselves and see anything and everything we
need to see to awaken, is working at odds with people's
experience.
Everything happens in its time. You're not in control. This isn't
something we want to hear, though, is it? It isn't something our
mind wants. Mostly we want to hear things that empower our sense
of control. And we radically push away anything that does not
empower our sense of control.
I say this to people all the time. When you start to accept what
you see as true -- not what I say, but your experience -- that's
when everything starts to change.
Many times students come to me and say, "I can't do anything
about this, this part of my delusional apparatus, this part of my
personality." They'll ask, "What do I do? What do I
do?" Often I say, "Well, let's go back. You just told
me there's nothing you can do. Is that true? Has anything worked
so far?" "No, nothing's worked so far." And I ask,
"Can you find anything to do? Can you see anything to
do?" And sometimes they'll tell me, "No, honestly, I
can't see anything to do." And I'll say, "What would
happen if you actually ingested that part of your experience that
is telling you there is nothing you can do? What if you took it
in instead of trying to push it away?"
Often, when they take this in -- not just conceptually, not as a
teaching that can be dismissed, but really allowing it into the
body -- then this realization of what it is like to live without
resistance starts to change everything. Sometimes the experiences
that we are pushing away contain the most transformative insights
we need to have. Who would suspect that seeing that there's
nothing, nothing, nothing I can do is going to be transformative?
We're not taught that. We're taught to avoid that piece of
knowledge at all costs. Even if it's part of your experience,
year after year, decade after decade -- even if you keep
experiencing the same thing over and over -- the impulse is to
avoid it, to not let it in, to push it away. See what I mean?
We're all junkies. Really, we're all just junkies wanting to be
high and free. It's the same dynamic. It's the alcoholic who
realizes, "There's nothing I can do," who is on the way
to sobering up. As long as that person sitting there is saying,
"I can do this. I'm in control. I can find a way beyond
this," no transformation is going to happen. Bottoming out
is nothing more than coming out of denial. There's nothing I can
do, and look where I am. We don't need to know so much about what
to do. We need to have a mirror in front of us so we are able to
see what we see. When that alcoholic sees and that drug addict
sees that there is nothing they can do, that they are powerless
to stop their addiction -- only then do they start to see
themselves in a clearer light.
There's a transformation that starts to happen that is not
contrived; it is not practiced; it is not technique oriented. To
me, spirituality is a willingness to fall flat on your face.
That's why, although my students often put me up on a pedestal
and think I've figured out something wonderful, I tell them all
the time -- my path was the path of failure. Everything I tried
failed. It doesn't mean that the trying didn't play an important
role. The trying did play a role. The effort did play a role. The
struggle did play a role.
But it played a role because it got me to an end of that role. I
danced that dance until it was extinguished. But I failed. I
failed at meditating well; I failed at figuring out the truth.
Everything I ever used to succeed spiritually failed. But at the
moment of failure, that's when everything opens up.
We know that, right? This isn't sacred knowledge. Almost
everybody knows this; we've experienced it in our lives. We've
seen moments like this. But it's not something we want to know,
because it's not convenient.
- excerpt from an interview with Adyashanti, by Tami Simon of
Sounds True
Even the Best Meditators Have Old Wounds to Heal
For most people meditation practice doesn't "do it
all." At best, it's one important piece of a complex path of
opening and awakening. In spiritual life I see great importance
in bringing attention to our shadow side, those aspects of
ourselves and our practice where we have remained unconscious. As
a teacher of the Buddhist mindfulness practice known as
vipassana, I naturally have a firm belief in the value of
meditation. Intensive retreats can help us dissolve our illusion
of separateness and can bring about compelling insights and
certain kinds of deep healing.
Yet intensive mediation practice has its limitations. In talking
about these limitations, I want to speak not theoretically, but
directly from my own experience, and from my heart.
Some people have come to meditation after working with
traditional psychotherapy. Although they found therapy to be of
value, its limitations led them to seek a spiritual practice. For
me it was the opposite. While I benefited enormously from the
training offered in the Thai and Burmese monasteries where I
practised, I noticed two striking things. First, there were major
areas of difficulty in my life, such as loneliness, intimate
relationships, work, childhood wounds, and patterns of fear, that
even very deep meditation didn't touch. Second, among the several
dozen Western monks (and lots of Asian meditators) I met during
my time in Asia, with a few notable exceptions, most were not
helped by meditation in big areas of their lives. Many were
deeply wounded, neurotic, frightened, grieving, and often used
spiritual practice to hide and avoid problematic parts of
themselves.
When I returned to the West to study clinical psychology and then
began to teach meditation, I observed a similar phenomenon. At
least half the students who came to three-month retreats couldn't
do the simple "bare attention" practices because they
were holding a great deal of unresolved grief, fear, woundedness,
and unfinished business from the past. I also had an opportunity
to observe the most successful group of meditators - including
experienced students of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism - who had
developed strong samadhi and deep insight into impermanence and
selflessness. Even after many intensive retreats, most of the
meditators continued to experience great difficulties and
significant areas of attachment and unconsciousness in their
lives, including fear, difficulty with work, relationships
wounds, and closed hearts. They kept asking how to live the
Dharma and kept returning to meditation retreats looking for help
and healing. But the sitting practice itself, with its emphasis
on concentration and detachment, often provided a way to hide, a
way to actually separate the mind from difficult areas of heart
and body.
These problems exist for most vipassana teachers as well. Many of
us have led very unintegrated lives, and even after deep practice
and initial "enlightenment experiences," our sitting
practice has left major areas of our beings unconscious, fearful,
or disconnected. Many American vipassana teachers are now, or
have recently been, in psychotherapy in order to deal with these
issues.
It should also be noted that a majority of the 20 or more largest
centers of Zen, Tibetan, Hindu, and vipassana practice in America
have witnessed major upheavals, centering on the teachers
themselves (both Asian and Western), related to issues of power,
sex, honesty, and intoxication. Something is asking to be noticed
here. If we want to find true liberation and compassion what can
we learn?
Some Helpful Conclusions for Our Practice
1. For most people, meditation practice doesn't "do it
all". At best, it's one important piece of a complex path of
opening and awakening. I used to believe that meditation led to
the higher, more universal truths, and that psychology,
personality, and our own "little dramas" were a
separate, lower realm. I wish it worked that way, but experience
and the nondual nature of reality don't bear it out. If we are to
end suffering and final freedom, we can't keep these two levels
of our lives separate.
2. The various compartments of our minds and bodies are only
semi-permeable to awareness. Awareness of certain aspects does
not automatically carry over to the other aspect, especially when
our fear and woundedness are deep. This is true for all of us,
teachers as well as students. Thus, we frequently find meditators
who are deeply aware of breath or body but are almost totally
unaware of feelings and others who understand the mind but have
no wise relation to the body.
Mindfulness works only when we are willing to direct attention to
every area of our suffering. This doesn't mean getting caught in
our personal histories, as many people fear, but learning how to
address them so that we can actually free ourselves from the big
and painful "blocks" of our past. Such healing work is
often best done in a therapeutic relationship with another
person.
3. Meditation and spiritual practice can easily be used to
suppress and avoid feeling or to escape from difficult areas of
our lives. Our sorrows are hard to touch. Many people resist the
personal and psychological roots of their suffering; there is so
much pain in truly experiencing our bodies, our personal
histories, our limitations. It can even be harder than facing the
universal suffering that surfaces in sitting. We fear the
personal and its sorrow because we have not learned how it can
serve as our practice and open our hearts.
We need to look at our whole life and ask ourselves. "Where
am I awake, and what am I avoiding ? Do I use my practice to hide
? In what areas am I conscious, and where am I fearful, caught,
or unfree?"
4. There are many areas of growth (grief and other unfinished
business, communication and maturing of relationships, sexuality
and intimacy, career and work issues, certain fears and phobias,
early wounds, and more) where good Western therapy is on the
whole much quicker and more successful than meditation. These
crucial aspects of our being can't just be written off as
"personality stuff." Freud said he wanted to help
people to love and work. If we can't love well and give
meaningful work to the Earth, then what is our spiritual practice
for ? Meditation can help in these areas. But if, after sitting
for a while, you discover that you still have work to do, find a
good therapist or some other way to effectively address these
issues.
Of course, there are many mediocre therapists and many limited
kinds of therapy. Just as in meditation, you should look for the
best. Beyond the traditional psychotherapies of the `40s and
`50s, many new therapists have been developed with a strong
spiritual basis such as psychosynthesis. Reichian breath work,
sand play, and whole array of transpersonal psychologies. The
best therapy, like the best meditation practice, uses awareness
to heal the heart and is concerned not so much with our stories,
as with fear and attachment and their release, and with bringing
mindfulness to areas of delusion, grasping and unnecessary
suffering. One can, at times, find the deepest realizations of
selflessness and non-attachment through some of the methods of
transpersonal psychology.
5. Does this mean we should trade meditation for psychotherapy?
Not at all. Therapy isn't the solution either. Consciousness is!
And consciousness grows in spirals. If you seek freedom, the most
important thing I can tell you is that spiritual practice always
develops in cycles. There are inner times when silence is
necessary, followed by outer times for living and integrating the
silent realizations, as well as times to get help from a deep and
therapeutic relationship with another person. These are equally
important phases of practice. It is not a question of first
developing a self and then letting go of it. Both go on all the
time. Any period of practice may include samadhi and stillness,
followed by new levels of experiencing wounds and family history,
followed by great letting go, followed by more personal problems.
It is possible to work with all of these levels in the context of
a spiritual practice. What is required is the courage to face the
totality of what arises. Only then can we find the deep healing
we seek - for ourselves and for our planet.
In short, we have to expand our notion of practice to include all
of life. Like the Zen ox-herding pictures, the spiritual journey
takes us deep into the forest and leads us back to the market
place again and again, until we are able to find compassion and
the sure heart's release in every realm.
- Jack Kornfield, posted to NondualitySalon