Softening Views on Practice
Photo from our recent socially-distanced retreat “Compassion Meditation for an Aching World” at the Garrison Institute.
In cofounding Dharma Gates, I’ve noticed myself trying to embody an archetype that I imagine people want me to be: young, passionate, driven, and visionary. In many ways, I am these things. But I am also still working with anxiety, am confused about my role in the world, and continue to explore my relationship with spiritual practice and monasticism. Early on, I felt an absolute clarity that monastic practice was the right thing to do, and that deep meditation was going to save the world. Ironically, the practice itself has softened this view.
Spiritual practice has been the most powerful force for improving my own personal happiness. Sharing these teachings, using them to restructure our culture, and walking this path as fully as I can is my life’s work. What has changed is that I have realized that the path is actually far more wholistic than I thought. The Dharma is not just seated meditation practice and it is not just monastic life - my understanding now is that it is whatever moves us towards liberation.
If I look at the things that have actually changed my life, meditation practice is a critical piece of the picture, but many other sources of healing have also been incredibly important. Relationships, community, yoga, breathwork, therapy, prayer, running, hiking, nature, circling, and of course, classical meditation practice have, together, formed a constellation in my life which has transformed my experience of the world. Some of these activities are available or emphasized at monasteries, others are not. Some supports, like those of family, relationship, or dedicated body practice might be the right next step, while for others, retreat practice would be more beneficial.
There seem to be two main kinds of internal work: there is psychological work which concerns character structure, the health of our relationships to others, attachment patterns, and core beliefs, and there’s “transcendent” work that aims to experience a kind of joy that moves beyond all of that. Unresolved psychological work can block us from going deeper into our meditation practice. These blockages are often more easily resolved through relational and healing work - through therapy, positive community, and other modalities like yoga, breathwork, or spending time in nature. This also involves, in my experience, learning to treat ourselves well, both in our internal talk and in our bodies. Cultivating healthy and stable eating habits, spending time in nature, getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and cultivating a healthy community in our lives is actually spiritual practice. Intensive meditation training can help with this work, but it is not a given, and for many, unresolved psychological blockages can prevent their practice from deepening.
Most meditation teachers I’ve met hold the stance that, if you just practice long enough, eventually the psychological work will happen. My sense is that this is true in the long term, but not necessarily the short term. Often, people turn towards meditation practice to find psychological wholeness and end up with a whole different kind of animal. In my experience, this ends up alienating a significant number of people from deep practice, as they either a) become a zealot before eventually realizing the practice isn’t doing what they thought it would, and they lose faith or b) partway through their training a significant unresolved trauma arises that they feel unable to resolve within the monastic container, and they leave. Both of these reactions are an invitation to ground and face our humanness, and to look towards a certain kind of psychological work that is difficult to do in monasteries.
This does not mean that monastic training is not good or that we should not encourage people towards it. If your nervous system is up for it, monastic training is the most powerful medicine I’ve experienced. Our society is in urgent need of people who devote their lives to this kind of training. Most of us have a strong tendency towards doing what is easy and could use a little (or big) push in the direction of intensity and discipline. For the majority of young people, I imagine that spending a year in a Buddhist monastery would be the best decision of their life. However, monastic training is not the only work worth doing, and if you do this training, there is often significant integration required on the other side. If you do experience rockiness early in your practice, with a long enough view, faith, and a gentle approach, this too can be folded back into a broader arc towards depth. Increasingly, I hope Dharma Gates can be a support network to help people deepen their practice in all kinds of ways. This may be through retreats or residency at monasteries, but it may also be a process of softening our views about what meditation is or isn’t. Above all, I want people to feel permission to devote their life energy to finding wholeness in themselves, in their relationships, and in their lives. How we show up for ourselves is how we show up for the world. Let us do it fully.