The Heart of Our Practice

This week the meditation (& yoga) classes are about "heart" in various ways. I found myself sitting with the idea of the Heart of Our Practice, the core, the focus, the essence. And just about at the same time, I read these 2 little paragraphs:

“While we are more and more familiar with the concept of mindfulness & spiritual awakening, life can still come at us with force, turning tranquility into fear or frustration as the gulf between spiritual belief & our ordinary life seems vast.”

and

"Meditation is a way of being aware of the doing and being of our ordinary lives. It loosens the knot of self-centredness and opens the heart to greater ease."

Picturing “the world coming at us in full force” and “the gulf between our practice and our ordinary life”, it isn't difficult. I think we can probably all relate to the force of life, of difficulties, especially this past year. And we can all understand what it means to deal with upsetting, irritating or exhausting situations, people or events.

Recently I was discussing something about 'finding answers', and at the end of the conversation we agreed that life is less about finding answers than it is about asking the right questions. So what is the question in those two paragraphs? Is it 'How to stop life coming at us with force'? Or is the question 'How to close the gap between practice & our ordinary life'?

Well, I don't believe we can stop life coming at us, with or without force. The very nature of life is forceful. Life, the universe, everything, is unpredictable. Sometimes it's just plain crazy. It always has been. Life is not linear. It's not something we can line up or control, and no amount of sitting in meditation or spiritual practice can change that.

So what about closing the gap? Well, you could imagine the answer to be something along the lines of: 'If we sit still or meditate, we can gain insight so that we learn to align our actions with our practice and in that way close the gap.'

But that wouldn’t be completely the right answer. Primarily because there isn't actually a gap. There is no separation, no gulf.

I invite you to consider the Zen concept of duality. Humans create duality, create a separation in the mind. It's how our 'thinking' brain works. We need to have this ability, because we need to be able to judge whether something is safe or dangerous. Can we eat it or will it eat us? We still need it today, to do things like cross the road, for instance, and get safely to the other side.

From a philosophical point of view, in Zen we work with the concept of all phenomena being empty of inherent characteristics or self essence. Any distinctions we make between this and that, black and white, good and bad, you and me, like and dislike, etc. are arbitrary and exist only in our thoughts, in our mind. In Zen we call this dualism. It doesn’t mean that those things don't exist. It means they don't exist in the way we think they do. (It's a very complex concept, and this is a super simplistic, quick look at it.)

The idea of 'the gulf' indicates that we believe our practice to be one thing and our life off the mat being another. Or our practice being separate from our life. But this is like saying there is a gap between our life and our life. It's all part of the same thing. The joyful, sad, difficult, easy, calm, chaos, ordinary, extraordinary life is all part navigating our way through our human experience, and learning to work with our awareness, our perception. Opening up our heart so we can see.

The aim of our practice is not to empty the head, learning to get rid of thoughts or strong emotions, or creating any particular state of mind or creating a life without problems. None of that is possible anyway. Imagine emptying your head! No, our practice is about understanding the nature of our mind, about changing our perception. We get so wrapped up in our every day experience, thoughts & emotions, we can’t tell the difference, can’t untangle the happening from our attitude towards it, i.e. our perception.

And just as we can't empty our head, change life or get rid of emotions, I don't believe we can eradicate dualism from our brain function. And I'm sure that's also not at the heart of our practice. The heart of our practice is being aware of dualism, recognising our dualism and taking a mental step backwards so we can see better. We use meditation to create another kind of gap: more like a pause. A breather. So we can take that moment of complete mindfulness to consider how to act, rather than reacting to life in a knee-jerk manner.

Actually our sitting meditation practice is only the beginning, a beginners practice. We learn to sit with a quiet mind & open heart here, on the mat, so we can learn how to work with anything that arises in our mind or our life over there, off the mat. But it’s the same thing: mat, life. They are not separate. Eventually, we learn to meditate in every action. That why we call it a practice, because we practice. :)

One or two things I came across some time ago, which I think are relevant to this:

Charles R. Swindoll once said: “The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life… I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.” You might think he was a Zen teacher, but actually he was an evangelical pastor in the USA. But you can see there’s not much difference between what he said and something written by a Zen monk:

“Sitting serves as a ceremony, a time to practice balance, ease, and non-attachment. Once we realise this, we expand the same insight and surrender fully into daily life.”

Surrendering? Maybe that word has bad connotations for you. What it means is we need to learn to be still, understand the nature of our mind, drop our defences, loosen the knot of self-centredness and open our heart. Take the opportunity to practice what we do on the mat and quickly we will feel a great sense of ease. That’s the heart of our practice. There's no gap.

Have a wonderful week.

_/\_

Metta.