Tag Archives: practice

this I think I have heard

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How are you?

What are you practising?

What are you noticing?

Who are you becoming? (Or is that “whom” are you becoming?)

How are you now?

I am struggling with regaining practices: those hours of zazen, retreats in seclusion, silent meals and solitary walks. And… and, the inexplicable power of community, sitting, breathing together as a singular whole being.

In the desperate search for familiar ground, I (re)connected with teachers from various traditions. Apparently – and this I think I have heard – time moves on, people change. What a concept. Clearly no one had me in mind when they decided to grow older, wiser, petulant, resentful, joyous, whiny… And sometimes even forget they ever knew me.

How rude!

This too I think I have heard: what we see/feel/believe is not solely through the sensations coming from the outside in. Perhaps, one dear teacher suggested, in her nonchalantly pointed way, perhaps what you perceive arriving is only finding harmony with the tune you are singing in the moment? If that’s the case, I retort, I must be determinedly off tune to have spent so many years disenchanted by the great-ish masters. She smiles and asks if I want to meet again.

I am sad. The sorry state of the world has been laid bare for us in the past 16 or so months. It’s nothing new. The world has been crumbling for millennia; that is the first of the Buddha’s core teachings. But I don’t like this latest in-my-face version.

The Hsin Hsin Ming (this I know I have heard) teaches:

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.

Attributed to Seng-ts’an

Don’t get hooked by the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’. More correctly, are you hooked on them? There’s your practice! Remember, we aren’t Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Perhaps I should suggest, use words to mean only and precisely what YOU choose them to mean. Then notice if the impact is what you would have chosen to occur.

So much becomes disguised between feelings and response. The desire and then striving for absolutes like love and hate are only measures of my delusional nature, of what I thought I wanted or heard. Still, to practice an ease of releasing love and hate as they arise seems risky, like wandering into the wilderness of this new reality without protection. But what choice do we have?

I am unsure. Yet this I have heard through the Hsin Hsin Ming: when we sense “movement in (the) stationary and the stationary in motion”… “dualities cease to exist.” Then the Great Way is simply this:

I am here

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A tad nippy out there today. The weather networks say it’s only -10°C but my body says they are messing with my mind. This brings me to note that my mind is very messy these days. We’ve just ended the lease on our office in the city and will be working from home for the remainder of our debt load reduction. That may take a generation. It’s hard letting go of 25 years in one place, meeting and sharing the sorrows and joys of everyday life. I’m practising it as preparation for that final letting go. Grief, not for the object lost but as an adjustment to new surroundings.

Thankfully practice has been a buoy in both these calm and turbulent mental states. But practice has fallen off the edge since Pandemic 1.0 began and I’m becoming aware that I’m immensely talented at avoiding the cushion because it holds far more than my well-padded butt. Another awareness is a seed I planted about a year ago about exploring the intersection of the core suttas and their impact on my life. No, not a biography; more a series of prompts – the suttas and/or the events – to dig deeper into skillful practice.

It’s also a commitment to write, to breathe, to open the hand of thought and release clinging to that single moment when all will happen the way I want it to.

In a recent interview with a cherished colleague, I was asked how I came to the space of advocating for ethics in mindfulness based psychological interventions. What was the path that made this aspect of mindfulness so important to me that I would devote my work and practice to it? The question woke up deep memories of the people in my life who planted and cultivated the seeds of the Buddhadhamma and how they lived sila.

Daw Khin Myaing – Yangon

This is my grandmother. Daw Khin Myaing. A devout Buddhist who was also a cheroot-toting, wooden slipper-slinging mother of a wild band of children including my father. She was horrified by my parents’ Sunday afternoon poker parties and would sweep me off to Botatung pagoda. There, we would feed the turtles and chant the suttas with the monastics. A powerful seed that began to sprout decades later when, in stressful moments, I would hear the chants as an inner voice. But this was so long after we had immigrated that they were merely syllables with no meaning.

More years passed until out of curiosity – and a bit of anxiety that I was “hearing voices” – I discovered what they were:

Buddham saranam gacchami
I go to the Buddha for refuge.
Dhammam saranam gacchami
I go to the Dhamma for refuge.
Sangham saranam gacchami
I go to the Sangha for refuge.

The lineage from the Buddha to my grandmother is unbroken, as it remains unbroken for all of us who remember what our commitments are.

Wake up and all beings awake with you.

The next few posts will explore the key suttas (sutras, stories) that have enriched my life practice (hopefully but no promises!). I hope you join me in this exploration of living skillfully in difficult times.