Category Archives: Contemplative practice

To sit still in winter

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Today, in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Winter Solstice, a day variously to reflect on the past year, to celebrate the season’s turning from darkness towards the light of the coming summer, and to draw together in the warmth we humans have learned to make against the long cold. It is tempting to locate its origins in the Last Glacial Maximum, when our ancestors must have been so acutely aware of their fragility in the face of the huge weight of time and climate that bore down on them, and sought with such longing for an assurance of this turning season.

Today is also the day the United Nations has set aside as World Meditation Day, celebrated for the first time this year. (Jochen Weber, writing for the Secular Buddhist Network, has an excellent and well-linked reflection on their website.)

Meditation, as far as we can tell from historical research, has been practised in something like its present form for at least 5000 years; the Winter Solstice has been celebrated, in ways we can recognise, at Neolithic sites like Newgrange and Slieve Gullion for roughly the same length of time.

To sit still in winter, to wait for the season’s turning, to watch for the coming of the light, must be one of the deepest instincts of humanity, going far back into the beginnings of our species, perhaps even of our old, old relatives from before we modern humans appeared. Sitting in my warm, lamplit room this evening I felt for a moment part of all this, no different from the long succession of humankind whose DNA still sings in my own blood; and something in me was thankful, in a way I hadn’t imagined, for warmth and life, and for the sweet succession of generations of women and men who have watched, just as I do, for the light.

Seasons

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The contemplative life has seasons. Perhaps that should come as no surprise – this life is as impermanent and changeable as any other – but it’s important to bear in mind. I call these variations in experience and inclination “seasons” rather than stages or phases, because although they are not strictly cyclical like the seasons of the year, they certainly don’t appear to me to be rungs on some kind of ladder of ascent, as so many spiritual traditions seem to suggest. I don’t think the spiritual life works like that; at least, it doesn’t for me.

One thing I do think worth remembering is that the seasons of the contemplative life are not measures of success or failure, not markers of progress to be charted, expected or evaluated. They are much more like changing weather than they are like stages in the growth of a plant or an animal. (This of course is why I dislike the “ladder” paradigm – it so easily leads to self evaluation according to some external, artificial scale or standard.) We may find we need to go back over and over to some areas of understanding before we finally “get it”; this is not a fault, but merely a necessary step on the path. Your sticking places may very well not be mine, of course, and it would be misleading – distressing or even dangerous – for us to compare our progress as if they should be.

So what do I mean by seasons? They are sometimes, I think, merely technical – matters of concentration, alertness, inward honesty – that might be compared to the fine motor skills developed by practising a musical instrument. At other times they seem more like stages in the Jungian idea of transformation – and as such may need to be revisited at different times, and in different orders. At times we may find we are struggling with the losses involved in impermanence; at other times it may simply be that we are plagued by painful memories, and the fear or anger or remorse they bring with them. These are vitally important things, and I don’t think we can just tell them, “Come back next month – I’m supposed to be working on my sense-impressions this week.”

We need, as always, to be gentle with ourselves as we sit. I truly don’t think that for most of us a warrior mentality, flogging ourselves through some kind of spiritual boot-camp, is constructive. (For a few it may perhaps be, I confess – there are almost infinitely different kinds of people – but I suspect they are few and far between.) Truly listening to our hearts – if that’s the right term – in the course of faithful, persistent practice seems to be a sure enough guide. Keeping our regular times and duration of practice is key: coming back to sit without avoiding the difficulties, yet not overstretching ourselves by overly extended practice, is the safest way I have found to navigate these passages.

Another point is the necessity of study: we will get on far better if we will only learn from those who have been this way before. Kathleen McDonald:

[The contemplative path] requires a slow and gradual process of listening to and reading explanations of the mind and the nature of things; thinking about and carefully analyzing this information; and finally transforming the mind through meditation.

I have made a very short list of books I have found helpful in another post; I’ll just say here that this is again an intensely personal matter. You will have your own list of favourite books, and it may very well prove to be useful to have some of them handy on a desk or table – or on your e-reader app – where you sit, for ready reference at the end of practice, before you get caught up in quotidian things again.

I should just say, before I forget, that it took me a long time to twig this matter of spiritual seasons; and it was for me a major insight when I did. It is so easy, especially if one is practising without a human guide or teacher to consult, to think that there is something wrong with one’s practice because things don’t remain the same, or because they’re not progressing quite the way one has been led to expect. Patience, gentleness, listening – that’s all we need; and the resolution, if it all gets too scary, to ask for help.

Surrender, again

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I find surrender a difficult thing to write about, even really to think about if it comes to that. To attempt to understand this call to relinquish will and intention in, and through, practice is to attempt to grasp what is, by definition, ungraspable. All we can do, it seems, is – as always – to sit still.

Just sitting in open awareness begins with breathing, obviously. And breathing, in itself, involves surrender. Unless we are deliberately choosing to breathe in and out, as an act of will, then it just happens. Sitting still, we watch it happen. It always does, just as it does when we are asleep – unless perchance we have died. And that, in an odd sense, is just the risk of surrender. We have to surrender to the autonomic function of breathing, to its steady beat even when we are asleep. We have to trust the inflow and outflow, the coming and going of the breath, to keep us alive for as long as our life lasts.

In just this way the coming to be and the ceasing of things continues: night and day, summer and winter, birth and death. They are just phases of the one way, two sides of the one, and to accord with the way is just to remain quiet and watch. Everything that comes to be rests in the ground of its becoming, but only when we let it be can we see this, can we ourselves rest in peace, in the ground of our own being at last.

Unseen

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Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, from ‘Signs of the Unseen’, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2024:

Ever since humans have had reason, both artists and mystics have been asking some variant of the following questions: What if what I see is not all there is? What if just beyond the limit of my senses there’s a whole other world, and what if that world has something important to teach us? In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James called this something “the Reality of the Unseen.” The Greek philosopher Anaximander called it apeiron, “the indistinct,” and identified it as the unifying, generative principle of all that we experience. In Zen we’d call it mind. My first Zen teacher, borrowing from Teilhard de Chardin, called it the ground of being.

“I don’t know what it is, but I know it is in me,” Whitman says, tiptoeing his way toward wisdom. And whatever it is, he adds, it’s untamed, untranslatable, without name—and then he names it: happiness. But this is no ordinary happiness. It’s not merely good fortune, nor is it subject to chance. It includes form, union, plan, eternal life. Taoism refers to it as the natural order of things, the eternal Tao.

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.


(Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation)

…This is why, amid so much that needs our attention, that needs our care, our work, our involvement, some of us stop and not do for a while. This is why we sit hour after hour focusing our attention on just one thing—the breath, a question, an image, a sound—diligently unnaming all the multiple things. So we can love them. So we can protect them the way we protect ourselves. We fiercely guard stillness and silence so we can guard that which in our to-doing gets lost or overlooked. We let go of thoughts so we can remember what we so easily forget. Yet paradoxically, it’s through forgetting that we remind ourselves of the unseen. It’s through the conscious, deliberate forgetting of names and forms and opinions and preferences that we recall what’s always been there, hidden just below the surface of our busy, clattering minds. (The Pali word sati, mindfulness, means to recall or bring to mind.) We could call this type of practice remembrance by forgetting or, in the language of the Tao Te Ching, attaining through nondoing. Its prerequisite: a cordoning off of our attention, a cloistering of our senses.

Sometimes I find myself hungry for this “cloistering” – so hungry it’s almost a physical sensation. One of the Desert Fathers, Abba Moses, is reported to have said, “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Everything? That’s the thing, that’s the hunger, only if it is that then it is no thing, and that is more than the human heart can hold.

There is an odd passage in the Old Testament Book of Job that almost nails this strange and awful hunger:

“And after my skin has been destroyed,
    yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
    with my own eyes—I, and not another.
    How my heart yearns within me!”

(Job 19:26-27 NIV)

I remember that once, in my early twenties, during a life not characterised by what a religious person might think of as “holiness”, I was suddenly struck one afternoon by the sense that if I were just to sit quietly enough for a while, in sufficient solitude, the doors of perception might swing open, and I would be confronted with the “Reality of the Unseen”; that which is no thing, the ground of being itself. Oddly enough, for someone who had been happy to experiment with psychedelics, I was terrified. This, I intuited, might turn out to be real; once seen, maybe, it might be impossible to unsee. Maybe, even more likely perhaps, it would unmake “me” altogether.

This is all at least slightly unnerving, of course, even at this remove of years. It’s odd to think of it, but there may be a real insight here. Maybe “forcing” the doors of perception (as one tries to do with any serious use of psychedelics, after all) is a bad idea, and maybe concentrated contemplative practice of any kind, without years of gradual work, really does carry mortal danger for the unprepared. Goddard again (I’d recommend reading her whole excellent essay):

[M]y longing got me thinking that maybe we use our knowledge and certainty as buffers. Maybe they’re our protection against taking in too much reality too quickly. So maybe it’s good that practice takes so long, that we generally see so piecemeal. We’re certain until we’re not, and then we go looking for a bit of ground to stand on. Slowly, tentatively, we take a step and then another, and we see a little more of what we couldn’t see before. Then we get cocky and become certain again—until we’re not, and then we take another step. And little by little, we walk ourselves into waking.

Simple presence

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Achieving or revealing spontaneous presence is not about striving or effort but about relaxing deeply into the natural state of mind. It’s like a river flowing effortlessly down a mountain—there’s no force or control, just a natural movement in harmony with gravity. When we stop trying to control or manipulate our thoughts and experiences, we allow awareness to flow naturally. By simply resting in the present moment, without grasping or pushing away, we recognize that this spontaneous presence is always there, like the river’s flow…

Achieving spontaneous presence is not about adding something new but about recognizing and resting in the innate clarity and awareness that is already there, ever-present, like the sun behind the clouds.

Pema Düddul, ‘Finding Presence: A teaching and practice on the Four Yogas of Dzogchen Semde’ in Tricycle Magazine, October 2024

This teaching carries so many echoes of shikantaza, of what we know of the simple practices of classical Taoism, that it reminds me of the essential plainness that seems to me the truest contemplative practice. I have long felt that the complexity of religiosity, with its rules and rituals and its levels of attainment (whether Christian or Buddhist or whatever else) is – at least for me – the enemy of the contemplative life.

Earlier this year I wrote:

Words, when it comes to spiritual things, are signs only in the sense we mean when we speak of hints and premonitions as “signs”, not in the sense of street signs, or signs on office doors in a hospital. They are not, by their very nature, precise and prescriptive; it is their very vagueness that allows them to be used at all, for they can do no more than offer us a glimpse into someone else’s experience – a window, if you like, into that which it is to be them.

We risk all manner of missteps when we conflate the term “spirituality” with concepts like religion, or the supernatural; and we risk worse when we consider it intrinsically opposed to science, or to critical thinking.

As I get older, it increasingly seems to me, perhaps counterintuitively, that religion itself only gets in the way of the spiritual life. Doctrine, scripture, tradition: they are beside the point, mere distractions. Elizabeth Reninger: “The only thing that needs to die is our mistaken belief in separation, the habit of seeing our human body-mind as existing separate from the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.”

Stillness, the open awareness of what simply is, would appear to be all that is needed: only to give up all of our effort and striving, and quite plainly and naturally rest in the vast openness of what is – which is all we ever were or could be. It really is that simple.

A gift?

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I have long had the strange sense that the contemplative life has some value, some gift for more than its practitioner. It is the most useless way to live; and yet it is in some obscure way essential. Why is this?

The title of the ancient Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching is usually translated as something like “the book of the way and its power”. Perhaps there is a clue there, without meaning to get too fey about it. In Chapter 23 of Charles Muller’s excellent online translation:

Therefore there is such a thing as aligning one’s actions with the Tao.
If you accord with the Tao you become one with it.
If you accord with virtue you become one with it.
If you accord with loss you become one with it.

The Tao accepts this accordance gladly.
Virtue accepts this accordance gladly.
Loss also accepts accordance gladly.

To become one with just what is, one is at one with both presence and loss, with being and not being. It doesn’t feel like anything; but sitting still, something moves. I don’t know what it is, but somehow it draws from the emptiness that is the way itself, the ground of what is and is not. Not known, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.

Coming to be

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Time is things coming to be, that is all. It moves, or so it seems to us, in the patterning and unpatterning that is life and death. All we are ourselves is just this coming to be; bright patterns on the river surface, flickering for a few or many moments and then gone in a swirl, or settling gently back to the quiet of some pool under the dappled shade.

How could it be otherwise? How could we be master of our fate, we who are nothing but the moments of what happens to be? What could be happier than to see that we are free at last from the menacing years and the straitened gates, free to be all that we have come to be, and nothing more?

Sitting quietly by the window, in the light of the little lamp across the room, there isn’t anything but this stillness, this peace without seeking. This, for now, is all there is, and all there needs to be. What else could it be?

[The second paragraph is an answer of sorts to William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’, from which I have borrowed some images.]

Fade into emptiness

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[F]or a period of time each day, try to sit in shikantaza, without moving, without expecting anything, as if you were in your last moment. Moment after moment you feel your last instant. In each inhalation and each exhalation there are countless instants of time. Your intention is to live in each instant.

First practice smoothly exhaling, then inhaling. Calmness of mind is beyond the end of your exhalation. If you exhale smoothly, without even trying to exhale, you are entering into the complete perfect calmness of your mind. You do not exist anymore. When you exhale this way, then naturally your inhalation will start from there. All that fresh blood bringing everything from outside will pervade your body. You are completely refreshed. Then you start to exhale, to extend that fresh feeling into emptiness. So, moment after moment, without trying to do anything, you continue shikantaza…

Even though your practice is not good enough, you can do it. Your breathing will gradually vanish. You will gradually vanish, fading into emptiness. Inhaling without effort you naturally come back to yourself with some color or form. Exhaling, you gradually fade into emptiness—empty, white paper. That is shikantaza. The important point is your exhalation. Instead of trying to feel yourself as you inhale, fade into emptiness as you exhale.

Shunryu Suzuki, not always so

To the conscious self, emptiness will always feel like death. But in emptiness that which is unnamed, aside from words, is free for once. Elizabeth Reninger:

It may take weeks, months, or even years to unwind certain psychic or physical contractions and break free of old habits and beliefs. But unlearning and release can also happen in a single moment of aesthetic rapture, or with a deep belly-laugh from understanding a joke, or from the dizzying mental meltdown of fully grokking a paradox.

In such moments, we’re left in a “space” characterized by an unspeakably sweet kind of knowing, a spaciously vivid awareness that is sometimes likened to the experience of a mute person tasting candy. The only thing that we might be able to say is “Ahhh . . .”

Out of such moments—these gaps between thoughts—arise a natural innocence, curiosity, and spontaneity, along with the deepest kind of contentment. If only for a moment, we are at home.

Home is in fact the emptiness we so struggle against. The way things come to be, the patterns on the surface of the stream – they are only moments in emptiness, points of light on the water. There is no thing to find: the sweet essence itself is emptiness, inexhaustible, yet quite outside “is” and “is not”: the safest place there is.

Just get on with it

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Teachings can be most profound, but those who listen may not understand. Never mind. Don’t be perplexed over profundity or lack of it. Just do the practice wholeheartedly, and you can arrive at real understanding—it will bring you to the place the teachings talk about.

Ajahn Chah, Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away: Teachings on Impermanence and the End of Suffering, from an extract in Tricycle magazine

So often on the contemplative path we read different teachings, different people’s accounts of their own journeying, and we wonder, “Am I doing this right? Is there another way I should be walking? Would that work better?” and if we’re not careful we can find ourselves skittering off down another byway, wondering why nothing seems to work for us like it seems to for everyone else.

Really there is no problem. It has taken me years to realise this, but there is no teaching to find, no teacher to follow. There is just the practice. Teachings are good in themselves, but no teacher can teach anything more or less than she has come to experience herself. All she could do was practice, and it is all we can do ourselves.

Just sitting seems too easy. It isn’t. It is the hardest thing we’ll ever have to do; but it is also the simplest, and the loveliest. All the words come down to this: just get on with it.

Mistakes

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Part of the wisdom of spiritual soulful self-presence is to be able to let certain aspects of your life alone. This is the art of spiritual noninterference. Yet other aspects of your life call urgently for your attention; they call to you as their shelterer to come and harvest them. You can discern where these wounds are in the temple of memory, then visit them in a gentle and mindful way. The one kind of creative presence you could bring to these areas is compassion. Some people can be very compassionate to others but are exceptionally harsh with themselves. One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit again the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging. This art of integration is very precious. You have to trust your deeper, inner voice to know which places you need to visit. This is not to be viewed in a quantitative way, but rather in a gentle, spiritual way. If you bring that kind light to your soul and to its wounded places, you can effect incredible inner healing.

John O’ Donohue, Anam Cara (with thanks to What’s here now?)

I have found recently that this process of discovery and forgiveness is something that has been happening, unbidden, in my own practice. Memories arise, and arise again, despite the usual recourse to the breath. Something like O’Donohue’s “inhabit[ing] again the rhythm you were in at the time” seems to take place of itself, and somehow through this sequence of arising and returning a healing appears to take place. For me, certainly, this is not a willed thing, by the way; it happens (I use the word advisedly) within the flow of practice, not in place of it.

I am aware of the tentative nature of my own words here. (Interestingly, I only stumbled across the passage from Anam Cara on the ‘What’s here now’ blog some time after the process had established itself, and found John O’Donohue’s description uncannily close to my own experience.) This is a delicate process, and not a thing I could ever have envisaged, still less willed, consciously for myself. (Initially, it appeared no more than a distraction.) The normal turning back to the breath, despite the sometimes overwhelming emotional energy of these memories, seems to accomplish something very like O’Donohue’s sense that “[i]f you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself.”

The mistakes and their wounds of the past are unavoidable anyway. They happened: no amount of regret will change that. In any case, they were part of the sequence of cause and effect we have come to inhabit merely by the accidents of our birth and our place in history. The love that is inherent in the mindfulness of our practice was always waiting for just this chance; now at last it can do its own work of bringing us to rest.