When all is said and done, the most important support for your mindfulness practice is the quality of your motivation and the degree of ardor you bring to it. No amount of outside support can substitute for that inward fire, that quiet passion for living life as if it really mattered, for knowing how easy it is to miss large swaths of it to unconsciousness and automaticity and to our deep conditioning. That is why I urge those who practice with me to practice as if their lives depended on it. Only if you know or even suspect that it actually does will you have sufficient energy to sit whether you feel like it or not, and really inhabit and make maximal use of that infinitude of timeless moments available to you in sitting—however long it is by the clock—without doing anything. Only if you know or even suspect that your life does indeed depend on your practice will you have sufficient energy and motivation to (1) wake up earlier than you normally would so you can have some uninterrupted time, a time just for yourself, a time for just being, a time outside of time; or (2) make a sacrosanct time for practice at some other hour of the day that works better for you; (3) practice on days when you have a lot going on; and (4) above all, make your life into the real meditation practice, so that it is not merely a matter of making a regular time for formal practice but of nurturing a willingness to bring mindfulness to any and every moment, no matter what you are doing or what is going on. Approaching practice in this way, it can feel after a while more like the practice is doing you rather than you are doing the practice. All this develops naturally over time. It takes less and less effort, and becomes more and more simply how you choose to live your life. But the ardor, the passion to engage in this radical act, so unusual for our time-pressured, driven way of life and the sea of distractions and demands we are so much a prey to and addicted to, is vital if we are to maintain and even deepen our momentum and commitment to liberation from the veil of our unawareness and the suffering it inevitably brings.
That said, there are an infinity of ways to strengthen and support that quiet passion for wakefulness and the determination to live free of our conditioning. We might begin by perceiving just how much we are in its grip, literally from moment to moment, and by taking steps, through that very perceiving and that very knowing, to disentangle ourselves from it. We can recognize each moment as a branch point, and hone our senses, our sensibility, our ability to steer around the obstacles and challenges and pitfalls that each moment inevitably provides, and thus, experience ourselves navigating, moving, flowing instinctually toward greater clarity, calmness, and non-clinging, however many bumps and obstacles present themselves along the way.
Most important is to remember that there is no one right way to practice, and that ultimately, you have to make the practice your own, or rather, let it gradually become yours by your willingness to give yourself over to it and let it become your teacher. Actually, it is life itself that becomes the teacher, and the curriculum. If you pay attention and keep your eyes open, you will see over and over again that it is an extraordinary teacher, even in the most ordinary of moments and in the simplest of occurrences. And the “classroom,” so to speak, is the entire landscape of the inner and the outer worlds, the sensescapes, the mindscape, the nowscape, and everything that happens within them—everything, without exception—including the emptiness, the silence, the fullness of awareness that can and does hold it all. In this world, there are no obstacles to practice, only the appearance of obstacles.
There is no substitute for the ardor and passion you bring to your life, and to living it fully and gratefully. If you were the only person on the planet cultivating mindfulness, there would be no reason to give up, although it is admittedly a rather discouraging thought. In fact, it would be all the more reason to practice.
But one of the most powerful supports in practicing, at least I have found it to be so, is knowing that there are millions of people who are committed to mindfulness and to living a life of awareness, and that at any one moment on the planet, millions of them are actually sitting. So that when you take your seat, whenever that is, morning, noon, or night, you can know that you are not alone. You are “logging on” to a silent “presencing” that knows no bounds and has no center and no periphery. You are joining a very large community of like-minded human beings who share your passion for wakefulness and liberation. And with every day, more and more people are coming to the practice through the thousands of avenues that are nowadays available to folks that in times past were simply not there.
As was mentioned in Meditation Is Not What You Think (see “Dukkha Magnets”), the Buddhist term for this community of people committed to the dharma is called “the Sangha,” with a capital S, just as Dharma is often capitalized when it refers to the teaching of the Buddha in a Buddhist context. Originally “Sangha” referred to the community of monks and nuns who renounced the worldly life to follow the teachings of the Buddha. And that is still one very important meaning of the term. But the word has taken on a broader meaning to include everybody who is committed to a life of mindfulness and non-harming. We are all part of that sangha, with a small s, whether we know it or not, if we have even the slightest impulse to practice. It is not an organization that you join, it is a community that you are part of by virtue of your commitment and passion and caring. And having that connection can itself be a huge support in one’s practice.
One image that appeals to me is that we are all leaves on the same tree. We each have our own unique location and view from where we find ourselves. We are each whole, and the whole tree depends on each one of us for its life, for its sustenance, and we on it. At the same time that we are whole, we are also part of this much larger whole, in fact, part of nested levels of wholeness that know no bounds.
No matter how we came to the practice, or will come to the practice, it is the case that neither you nor I made it up. Mindfulness as both a formal practice and a way of being has been handed down to us for us to experiment with, to explore, and to see for ourselves what it might have to offer—and to do so with the greatest integrity and reverence for what has been given and for the suffering and the ardor and the genius out of which it emerged. There is a lineage of women and men, stretching back for millennia, who were committed to the dharma and to wisdom and compassion in the same way that those of us who practice now are or can be if we so choose. These are William Butler Yeats’s “unknown instructors” (see Meditation Is Not What You Think: “On Lineage and the Uses and Limitations of Scaffolding”). And as with any worthy lineage, at one time or another we will probably be filled with gratitude for their legacy and their gifts to us. Many of them left records of their experiences in many different languages and cultures, and many more didn’t. But the sum total of the legacy is in our opportunity to avail ourselves of the spirit, the methods, the scaffolding, and the emptiness—in a word, the dharma—that they bequeathed to us by virtue of having come before us and having cared. This is a bequeathing of the species to the species. Its vitality has never been more vibrant, nor the need for it greater. This is part of the love affair, a wisdom transmission emanating from the evolutionary arc of humanity itself across the ages.
We are blessed to live at an extraordinary moment in which universal dharma in all its manifestations has never been more accessible. Books by respected meditation teachers and scholars are now available as never before, as are podcasts and YouTube videos. We are proffered a veritable cornucopia of opportunities to learn from great teachers in different lineages, an extraordinary abundance that is continuing to build over time. I provide a relatively short list of some of those books and organizations that have had the greatest impact on my life and the lives of my students and colleagues at the back of this book. Guided meditations in various formats available online that instruct and facilitate aspects of mindfulness practice can also be valuable if not critical resources and supports for developing and deepening your practice. They include the guided meditations I developed for MBSR and to accompany various books of mine. These are described on the last page of this book.
But when all is said and done, it still comes down to getting your rear end on the cushion. Reading can be inspirational, as can coming in contact with great teachers either in person or though podcasts, websites, and videos. Sitting with others can be hugely supportive (more on this below), but you still have to practice yourself, with your body and with your mind, and with your situation. You can overdose on books, and the books, however authentic, inspiring, and supportive, can also just feed your insatiable yearning for information and for thinking. Any good dharma book could be read and studied over and over again to great benefit, only a page or two, or a chapter or two at a time, followed by reflection and sincere attempts to put what you have read into practice. That might take a lifetime.
So quantity is not the issue and the abundance itself can be overwhelming and feed endless doing. In the end, you will have to chart your own course, find your own way, and take readings (i.e., be mindful) from time to time to check and see if the path you are following—the teachers you are finding and the community you are practicing with, if you have found one—feels intuitively healthy and appropriate to your situation and to your aspirations. If not, I suggest you look for other teachers, other resources, another path up the very same mountain.
As you might have gathered from the stories I tell about my Zen teacher Soen Sa Nim (see Books 1 and 4) and about MBSR throughout, it is extremely important to find other like-minded people with whom you can study and practice, and with whom you can talk about your practice. Even one good dharma friend can be a tremendous support to your practice, and being a relationship, its benefits are usually reciprocal… in other words, you wind up supporting each other, and helping yourselves illuminate different aspects of practice just by having conversations about it. You may not even know a lot of the time that it is feeding your practice, but it is.
Forty-five or fifty years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find a meditation group in even the big cities. Nowadays, they are everywhere. And we can readily find them online. There are vipassana sitting groups and networks around the country and around the world. There are Zen practice groups and Tibetan practice groups. And there are an abundance of meditation centers that offer residential mindfulness retreats of varying lengths, from weekends to several weeks to several months, which you can attend if you care to, where the teachings are superb, offered in English by teachers who have dedicated their lives to the dharma, and to which people come from all over the world. And it is now all at your fingertips.
There are also many hundreds of MBSR programs and CFM-certified teachers in hospitals, clinics, and communities around the country and around the world, where feelings of sangha and community develop spontaneously in the classes, usually in very short order. This expression of sangha winds up being a tremendous support for those who are just getting launched into a mindfulness practice, or who are committing to at least seeing how it would feel over an eight-week period of time, as well as for those who are returning for a “tune-up” and to deepen their practice.
Websites that will take you to such resources for ongoing or periodic support for your practice are also listed at the back of this and the other books in the series.
And then there are the teachers. It can be extremely valuable and instructive to check out different mindfulness teachers and listen carefully to their dharma. With the best of them, the most authentic, you can benefit not just from what they say, but from observing how they carry themselves, from how they are, at least to the degree that they allow themselves to be seen as they actually are. Nobody is perfect, so how they deal or don’t deal with their own habits of inattentiveness and greed and aversion when such arise can be very revealing. For practice is not about putting on airs or pretending that one has gotten somewhere, or is blameless or faultless or beyond ordinary feeling states or, for that matter, beyond making mistakes. It is about being real, being authentic, not clinging to anything or recognizing and admitting when one is, and above all, being committed to not wittingly or unwittingly causing harm, and to acting ethically, with integrity and honesty, and warm-heartedness, as best one can.
You can learn a lot by watching how different teachers present the one dharma and embody it in their own lives. Everybody does it differently, and there is no one best or even right way to live mindfully and heartfully in alignment with wisdom. By watching different teachers, you will come to see that you cannot possibly be true to yourself and your own path by merely imitating or revering them, although some of that may happen in the early stages of practice and is not in itself a bad thing. But ultimately, if they are good teachers, they will not encourage a dependency on them. Rather, they will urge you to find your own way, to come to your own understanding through ongoing practice, and to letting life be the teacher, even as you continue to work with them or with other teachers. The Buddha himself stressed that in his dying words, which are purported to be, speaking to his Sangha: “Be a lamp unto yourselves.”
And ultimately, you will find that if life is the real teacher, then everybody in your life becomes your teacher, and every moment and occurrence is an opportunity for practice and for seeing beneath the surface appearance of things, and behind your own tendencies to react and contract and close down emotionally, especially when things don’t go “your way,” and equally so, when they seem to; also in your tendency to think at times that you’re a somebody, or in your attempts to strive in some moments to become one or pretend that you are; or in those moments when you know you are a nobody, or your fears arise that you are becoming one, or your ambition makes that its own object of spiritual status and accomplishment.
In all those and many more ways, your most powerful mindfulness teachers may turn out to be your spouse or partner, your children, your parents, other family members, your friends, your colleagues, total strangers, the meter maid giving you a parking ticket, people who actively dislike you, anyone. And of course, the same is true for everything that happens to you. Recall that we said in the previous chapter that, given the appropriate motivation, there are no obstacles to practice, only the appearance of obstacles. Everything supports wakefulness if you are willing to let yourself be awakened by coming to your senses both literally and metaphorically. Everything. But it requires a brave heart, and a mind that sees the folly in clinging… to anything at all, while at the same time, standing in your unique being, with integrity.
When all is said and done, it is always life that is the supreme teacher and the curriculum and the practice. Yet we can benefit enormously from all those people, past, present, and future, who offer us their love and their wisdom and their insights in all the various forms in which they come to us as teachers. They become true blessings in our lives, true gifts to us.
And so in the end, it finally comes full circle, back to your own personal interest in awareness and liberation, to your motivation, your aspiration, your willingness to use whatever arises as opportunities for deepening your commitment to being fully awake, and so, fully alive, no matter what is happening. And these opportunities are not merely for yourself anymore, although that is a perfectly valid place to begin. They are actually nodes in the larger web of interconnectedness, and of life expressing itself through you in the form of perhaps wiser and more compassionate action, not as an ideal or as an idealization of practice, but as a commonsensical way of minimizing suffering and harm in the world, your own and others’, and maximizing well-being, kindness, and clarity.
When you commit in such a way, not only can all the above resources become indispensable supports in your practice, there is a way in which, as we will see in The Healing Power of Mindfulness, the entire universe “rotates” into alignment with your new view and intentionality. But it is waiting for you to make your move.
As Goethe put it:
Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising to one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.