Category Archives: Contemplative practice

Outstaring the ghosts

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One of the perennial questions of the contemplative life is, what is it for? What possible use is it? Isn’t it merely a solipsistic, “self-actualising” activity, or some kind of relaxation technique aimed at producing a pleasant, stress-free state of mind, or even a quest for some kind of drug-free psychedelic experience?

Benignus O’Rourke writes:

The psalmist says, ‘You hide those who trust in you in the shelter of your presence.’ For ‘hide’ we might read ‘heal’. To sit with with our buried hurts and pains in the presence of the Lord is to allow ourselves to be healed by him. We no longer become involved in trying to sort them out, nor do we recoil from them. We sit quietly. We are beginning to have the confidence to outstare our ghosts.

Sometimes when people meditate or pray without words they are accused of trying to anaesthetise themselves to deaden their pain. But what we really do in our quiet prayer is to face the pain, engage with it, and transform it into energy for loving.

Benignus O’Rourke, Finding Your Hidden Treasure: The Way of Silent Prayer

and Cynthia Bourgeault tackles the problem head on from a more academic perspective:

What tends to go missing when spiritual practice is secularized… is precisely that rich and multidimensional context in which mindfulness as “present moment awareness” flows seamlessly into mindfulness as authentic spiritual remembrance. In a secular container, mindfulness tends to become privatized, appearing as a set of personal coping skills or personal wellness benefits. But in its original spiritual setting mindfulness is irreducibly relational and ethical. Its fruits are not wellness, personal longevity, or neuroplasticity. They are compassion, equanimity, and love. In contrast to the various secular and scientific models (extensively documented in this article), the spiritual model gives central place to mindfulness as “the awareness of and familiarity with an ethically oriented ultimate reality that makes human wholeness possible.” It is only against this backdrop that notions such as “remembrance” and “unity” make any sense whatsoever…

While reestablishing this wider spiritual context is certainly helpful to a fuller understanding of mindfulness practice, with Centering Prayer I believe it is essential, for apart from its kenotic grounding, the practice remains basically unintelligible. In secular mindfulness there is at least a motivational initial entry gate through which some benefit is to be accrued thereby, be it stress reduction, better attentional skills, or lower blood pressure. But kenosis and self-surrender really have no cultural starting points; apart from a direct apprehension of the great mystical traditions of imitatio and remembrance in which the practice is embedded, Centering Prayer remains stubbornly counterintuitive.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer

The contemplative life in its inner solitude and hiddenness – for it is hidden from our own discursive intellect within as well as it is hidden outwardly – is in some ways actually lived for others. Our inward life brings us, not always willingly, to confront aspects of being human that many would rather avoid.

Karen Karper Fredette and Paul A. Fredette once wrote,

Suffering is part of the hermit’s vocation. One of the most acute forms is to never know whether one’s chosen lifestyle is worthwhile or has any value for others. Hermits enter into the darkness, the dusky cloud of unknowing, and walk without any light beyond that which is in their own hearts. Often, unbeknownst even to themselves, they have become beacons for others.

The ghosts we outstare are not our own merely; somehow in the silence of our practice we find ourselves confronting the ghosts of those we live amongst, touching the shadows that our present age of fear and division casts across all our lives; touching, as for instance did the monks of Mount Athos during the years of the Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s atrocities, the dark skirts of chaos and cruelty that brush continually against our civilisation. Yet our inwardness does tend always to stillness, to wholeness of mind and spirit and to peace.  It is really that peace we seek for those with whom our lives are inextricably caught up, just by our being the frail, temporary human things we are.

[Parts of this piece have been rewritten from a post of the same title  on a previous blog in 2018]

Weltschmerz (ii)

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Conflict, turbulence, uncertainty, violence, deprivation and upset are nothing new. During the time when Chan (early Zen) Buddhism was developing in China, when Linji was alive, during one decade, two-thirds of the population died from war, famine or plague. During the lifetime of the great nineteenth and twentieth century Advaita sage Ramana Maharshi, who spent most of his life in silence, doing nothing and simply being present, there were two world wars, the rise of Hitler, the holocaust, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Spanish Civil War, a global pandemic (the Spanish flu), the creation of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, the independence of India and the partition of that country into India and Pakistan, a division that also involved violence, conflict, mass displacement and death. The human world has always been filled with disagreements, power struggles, violence, persecution, plagues, famines, injustices and wars. Empires have come and gone, millions have died.

People have responded to this in many different ways. Nondual traditions such as Zen and Advaita are two of those responses. Social service work and political organizing are another. I think of Zen and Advaita as being akin to those musicians on the Titanic, and I see political and social service work as being more like those trying to save the ship or ready the lifeboats. All these actions have their place…

Joan Tollifson, Stormy Weather

It’s odd, perhaps, but after all these years I still sometimes worry whether I am doing the right thing as a slightly eremitical contemplative, or whether I should be out there on the streets as some kind of activist, or volunteering in some local social enterprise. You would think that by now I would be at peace with my own choice, if choice it is. (Actually I don’t think it ever was a choice; temperament and circumstance have given me the place I find myself in. I have merely to get on with it.)

Joan Tollifson goes on to quote from her own earlier book, Bare Bones Meditation,

As I see it, meditation is not merely a quest for personal peace of mind or self-improvement. In involves an exploration of the roots of our present global suffering and the discovery of an alternative way of living. Meditation is seeing the nature of thought, how thought constantly creates images about ourselves and others, how we impose a conceptual grid on reality and then mistake the map for the territory itself…

Meditation is listening. Listening to everything. To the world, to nature, to the body, the mind, the heart, the rain, the traffic, the wind, the thoughts, the silence before sound. It is about questioning our frantic efforts to do something and become somebody, and allowing ourselves to simply be…

Meditation is a powerful antidote to our purposeful, growth-oriented, war-mongering, speed-driven, ever-productive consumer civilization, which is rapidly devouring the earth. We retreat in meditation not from reality, but from our habitual escapes from reality. Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize. But meditation is much more (and much less) than all of this. Meditation is not knowing what meditation is.

I find this such a healing reminder amid the clatter and panic of the news media – not to mention the social ones – that I feel like printing it out and keeping it next to my heart. Of course we are intimately, intricately connected, one with another, and all that we do affects every one of us. To sit still in the storm is perhaps the single most powerful act we can contribute; it just doesn’t feel very powerful, because we are so used, so addicted, to purposeful action, discursive thought, polarised and polarising emotion. To the ego, meditation is doing nothing. The ego is right. Nothing, though, is what needs doing.

Sitting still like this, the webbed patterns that connect us all become clear, like bright wires against the dark; all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right, and our presence now is all that is needed. It is all that was ever needed; it is what we have been given, our work and our home, both of these.

Something in the air tonight

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Recently, I have begun to appreciate air again, like a fluid, filling the lake beds of empty rooms, valleys, unused spaces… Sitting still, you can feel the air surrounding you, feel its weight, the lovely column of clear presence all the way from the thermosphere down, to wrap softly around limbs, press the skin of the face softly against the bone beneath, carry the song of that sleepy robin across the hollow depth of the garden to the open window of this room.

When I began meditating in earnest, I entered through the path of Zen. In this tradition, enlightenment is often described as our natural mind, and it’s said that the very act of meditation is already enlightenment. Yet, in Zen the practice is still essential. As Suzuki Roshi said, “enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes us accident prone.” We can’t demand enlightenment, but we can show up and do the practices…

Zen master Dogen said, “enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” This means the barriers of separation between self and other dissolve into a deep sense of interconnection with all of life. When I experience this awakening, I find an indescribable sense of peace and ease, yet also profound compassion for all who are suffering in the world and motivation to be of service.

Lisa Ernst, Lion’s Roar Magazine

Simply to turn up and sit seems to be all that is required. Nothing else is: not concepts, nor understanding, nor doctrine. Just sit still; it is already done.

Silence is the air knowing itself; the bright transparent place it has, that holds us all. Silence is alive with sound, with the singing waves of air; it heals the heart, stills the frantic thinking thing that will not rest. If it comes by accident, then its deliberate loveliness has always been there, only waiting to be found again. Holy, holy, the plain fact of it: that it is. That it is all that is, holds all that is; still, and bright, and true.

Wide-eyed seeing

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Contemplation allows us to see the truth of things in their wholeness. It is a mental discipline and gift that detaches us, even neurologically, from our addiction to our habitual way of thinking and from our minds which like to think they are in control. We stop believing our little binary mind (which strips things down to two choices and then usually identifies with one of them) and begin to recognize the inadequacy of that limited way of knowing reality. In fact, a binary mind is a recipe for superficiality, if not silliness. Only the contemplative, or the deeply intuitive, can start venturing out into much broader and more open-ended horizons. This is probably why Einstein said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination  encircles the world.”

But how do we learn this contemplative mind, this deep, mysterious, and life-giving way of seeing, of being with, reality? Why does it not come naturally to us? Actually, it does come momentarily, in states of great love and great suffering, but such wide-eyed seeing normally does not last. We return quickly to dualistic analysis and use our judgments to retake control. A prayer practice—contemplation—is simply a way of maintaining the fruits of great love and great suffering over the long haul and in different situations. And that takes a lot of practice—in fact, our whole life becomes one continual practice. 

Richard Rohr,  Why Contemplation?

That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? Wide-eyed seeing – the necessity of awakening from the daze of subject/object, inward/outward. As I mentioned the other week, trauma – and the shock of love – can free us, instantly, from the fog of the default internal narrative, the user illusion of the “selfplex” (Blackmore) that occupies our days. But the moment fades; we can even begin to doubt it ever happened – or if it did, that it meant what it seemed to mean in the blazing moment that we were there, present for once, in the utter light of what actually is.

As Rohr says, our contemplative practice is only the way – the only way – that we can sustain ourselves in the presence: in the vastness of the open ground. It will not feel like that most of the time – in fact, it may hardly ever feel like that – but each day’s hour of sitting sustains us in the unknowing from which this wide-eyed seeing can proceed. This unknowing is the hollow place in us where, as in the moments of shock and trauma, what is can touch what we are. It is the crack where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen saw.

Weltschmerz?

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One of the main works of contemplation is detaching from the ego, from the self, from impure motivations of success or power, money or control. That will never stop, but it isn’t really that meaningful unless that detachment is accompanied by an attachment.  What do we find after all the months and years we’ve been practicing some form of contemplation or meditation? Do we have an increased attachment, sympathy, empathy, and compassion for what I call in The Tears of Things the suffering of the world? For the women of Gaza, the children of Ukraine, the starving people of Africa, the poorest of the poor, and all those marginalized in the United States and around the world? If the emptiness of “letting go” is not pretty soon filled up by “holding on” to some kind of deep solidarity with the suffering of the world, I don’t know that it’s Christian contemplation or even meaningful contemplation at all. It seems we’re simply back into private spirituality again.  

Richard Rohr, Contemplation: A Path to Compassion

One of the “side effects”, for want of a better phrase, of my nearly 40-year practice of Christian contemplation was for me a sharp increase in my awareness of the pain of the world; a sense expressed perhaps more clearly than anywhere I have read recently in a passage from a murder mystery by Rebecca Tope:

The low, repetitive bawling was a distant throb of distress that Lilah had never grown used to, even though  it happened every time a cow gave birth. Sometimes, at night, it was unbearable, the bereft mother calling and calling for her baby, the embodiment of despair. Sometimes it seemed to Lilah that in her short life she had been party to a fathomless ocean of pain and misery, that all this suffering was there inside her, barely supressed by her flippant ways and habitual optimism. And sometimes she couldn’t stop herself imagining every hurt and cruelty; every experimental laboratory; every horse used in war; every animal ill-used in the service of man; every creature sent terrified to the abattoir. All of it added up to an entire universe of horrifying anguish, and she had to breathe slow and deep to be able to carry on.

This passage (the wider context of the narrative makes it clear that the character’s experience is not confined merely to questions of animal husbandry, but relates equally to her grief at the murder of her father, and to the inhumanity of humankind generally) gives an extraordinarily clear glimpse into the aching hollow of helpless compassion that contemplative practice opens in one’s heart. For me, at any rate, this inescapable pain was the motor of prayer; a prayer of, literally, grieving with – which is the root of the word “compassion” – rather than “praying for” in the sense of asking a favour of a personal deity.

The standard Buddhist answer to this question is probably the practice of either metta or tonglen; but these too beg the question, how does it work? How can prayer, or some kind of directed sympathy, actually make any difference? Are we not merely kidding ourselves? And if so, are we not better off simply caring for ourselves, retreating into a private, if comforting, spirituality, and tuning out the cries of the world?

Simon Barrington-Ward writes, of the Jesus Prayer,

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am on longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfillment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

How can we make sense of this, if we cannot join with Bishop Simon in his avowedly Christian phraseology? Joan Tollifson:

Perhaps this is what the world needs more than anything else—human beings waking up from the powerful hypnotic trance of ideology, division and apparent separation, waking up to the wholeness and the unconditional love that is at the heart of our being. It may seem that we are small and insignificant, and that this kind of devotion to presence can’t possibly affect the world at large. But we’re actually not small. Each and every drop contains and affects the whole.

We, and all whom we love, and for whom we grieve, are frail, temporary creatures; but we exist, if only for a moment. Isness, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, is the only ground of what we are.

The apostle Paul wrote, sounding for a moment almost like a Taoist, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17 NIV) The ground of being is just that: it is no thing at all; and yet it is the ground of all that is. There is nowhere outside this open ground; no end to its beginning, to the love that holds in being all that has come to be in it. Like Indra’s net, each node – each one of us – “contains and affects the whole.”

A messy business

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[There are] sordid difficulties and uncertainties which attend the life of interior solitude… The disconcerting task of facing and accepting one’s own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos… It cannot be otherwise: for in renouncing diversion, [the solitary] renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and about his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them…

Often the lonely and the empty have found their way into this pure silence only after many false starts. They have taken many wrong roads, even roads that were totally alien to their character and vocation. They have repeatedly contradicted themselves and their own inmost truth…

One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society.

Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions, with thanks to Maria Popova

I have written often enough before here about my own strange calling to a kind of solitude; Merton, with typical honesty, puts his finger right on one of the inevitable difficulties of this kind of life.

For a long time, since in fact long before I had developed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards stillness, and towards this kind of unseen apartness. And, over the years, my more settled contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on one’s inner life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising; on the other hand, their effects on one’s life in the world may be anything but subtle.

Inward solitude, as Merton points out, can be a messy business. Approached like this, as a perhaps inevitable concomitant of the contemplative life, rather than as a willed commitment to what is too often described as a “vocation”, it can often only really be reached after many, at times excoriating, false starts. It seems to be a path unusually unsuited to maintaining a high opinion of oneself!

I suppose that when it comes down to it, what I am trying to say is that the path of inward solitude, or whatever it should be called, is something one finds oneself falling into when everything else has fallen to bits. Only when there is no other way does the way open; and it is the way one has been searching for all along.

Coming to be

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Each morning invites you to be open and aware, as spacious as the sky that passes through you, recognizing “the precious nature of each day,” in the words of the Dalai Lama. No matter how frenzied you feel, no matter how shoved and strangled by the rush of events, you are standing in a single exquisite moment. No matter where you are, no matter how lost, you are standing at the perfect center of four directions. No matter how off-kilter you feel, you are standing in a place of perfectly balanced forces. Even if you feel abandoned by all that might comfort you, you are held in the embrace of what you cannot see.

Kathleen Dean Moore, adapted from Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers, in an extract published in Tricycle Magazine, July 2022

What we are part of goes back and back, and on and on. I’m not sure if it has a beginning or an end, actually. It is indestructible, being just what comes to be, even if that is the coming to be of an ending, or many endings. That balance, that helpless all rightness that underlies all that appears to be so perilous and contingent, is always there. There isn’t anything that has to be done, or refrained from, in order to bring it about. It has always been, before all that has been.

One could go on and on like this, and not explain anything. Words just don’t convey what I’m attempting to say. I suppose they may remind someone, but that’s perhaps the best they can do. I’m often reminded of my frustration when first reading Jiddu Krishnamurti: his words were wonderful, hinting at the very thing I’d been longing for, but there was no practice, no method, not even the suggestion of a pill one might take.

What Krishnamurti was writing about was choiceless awareness, the quality of openness to what is, just as it is, in the instant that it is perceived. Wes Nisker:

Choiceless awareness allows the meditator to see how our experience creates itself; how sense impressions, thoughts, and feelings arise without our willing them; how they interact and influence each other. By engaging the quality of choiceless awareness, we can extract ourselves from the contents of what we think and feel and start to explore how we think and feel.

The tool, the means to choiceless awareness, the thing I’d been looking for all those years ago is vipassana, which at its simplest is really no more than mindfulness. “Vipassana, where you’re taught to cultivate a quality of mind called ‘mindfulness’… [is] simply a state of clear, non-judgemental, and undistracted attention, moment by moment, to the contents of consciousness.” (Sam Harris, on the Waking Up app)

Now, mindfulness is a word that has come to be used, and misused, over and over for most of this century. Nisker writes (ibid.) a few pages later, “As mindfulness spreads into many corners of our culture, it would be unfortunate to forget the original and most significant use of this power of mind—as the key to self-awareness and spiritual liberation.”

To sit still, watching no more than the in and the out breath, hearing no more than the sounds from the window, feeling the weight and presence of the body against the good earth beneath the building, noticing thoughts as they rise and fade; nothing else is needed. It is just that simple, and yet it is the work of a lifetime. Of course it has to be learned, like anything else, and there are better and worse ways to begin. I’ve included an Advice page on this site.

Sometimes the darkness…

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I know that many people are feeling worried, anxious and unsettled these days. The world can be a scary place, and human beings are fragile organisms, vulnerable to all kinds of pain and painful circumstances. We naturally seek security, comfort and control, and in search of this, we often turn to addictive pleasures, comforting beliefs and obsessive thinking, none of which really deliver the well-being and the certainty for which we long…

Sometimes it eludes us and the darkness overtakes us, but if we stop and allow everything to be just as it is, if we tune in to the stillness at the very heart of our being, our apparently separate self may dissolve into the boundless aware presence that we truly are. We may discover that the “me” who seems to be suffering, or alternately “getting it” and “losing it,” is nothing more than a mirage, and that the darkness has no actual substance…

We can get very lost in trying to figure this all out mentally, trying to understand it, grasp it, get control of it, and so on. But the essence of this so-called awakening is very, very, very simple. It’s not complicated, mysterious or exotic. It doesn’t require years of training and study. It’s not in the future or the past.

It’s right here in the sounds of rain, the taste of tea, the dazzling light sparkling on the still bare branches, the aware presence beholding it all, the openness of being. It’s nothing other than this one bottomless, centerless moment that is what we are, this wholeness that has no outside or inside, this presence that is most intimate, closer than close, and at the same time, boundless and all-inclusive…

Perhaps this is what the world needs more than anything else—human beings waking up from the powerful hypnotic trance of ideology, division and apparent separation, waking up to the wholeness and the unconditional love that is at the heart of our being. It may seem that we are small and insignificant, and that this kind of devotion to presence can’t possibly affect the world at large. But we’re actually not small. Each and every drop contains and affects the whole.

Joan Tollifson, from her Substack

Sometimes the darkness does overtake us, even at the best of times; and this is not the best of times, as the news media delight to remind us. (You can’t blame them: it’s in their perfectly understandable commercial interest to keep our hearts in our mouths.)

Of course the trouble is that one feels so helpless; there is little or nothing one can do, practically, and absent a convincing doctrine of supernatural intervention, it doesn’t seem to make sense to pray – though this may actually be the heart’s instinct, interestingly enough. But practice, once one stops telling oneself that it is useless, is in fact anything but useless, as Tollifson explains. The world’s idea of “useful” ain’t necessarily so. We are told that a president or his sidekick “matter”; a naval rating, a junior librarian, a pensioner in a retirement community, don’t matter at all. It isn’t true.

Each of us is a human being; each of us is a precious and only life; each of us “contains and affects the whole” just as much as any other. There is no such thing as an insignificant person. Waking up from the nightmare sleep of either/or, left/right, right/wrong; waking up to the bright ground of what is, to the inextinguishable love at the very heart of being itself… Maybe, after all, “[m]ore things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of…”* or by something very like contemplative prayer, at any rate.

*Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

Trauma and vastness

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Trauma, damaging as it is, may also provide the ground for opening the mind. When the body is in pain and shock, the thinking mind can quiet and open to a vivid experience of vastness. A moment of suffering can free the mind to realize the truths of human existence: our interconnectedness and our impermanence.

Grace Schireson, Naked in the Zendo: Stories of Uptight Zen, Wild-Ass Zen, and Enlightenment Wherever You Are

This is perhaps the extremity of what I was trying to write about yesterday: the open acceptance of whatever is simply as it is, without wishing it otherwise, trying to change it or make it stop.

In the course of a long and somewhat varied life I have encountered both physical and emotional trauma – though not, I’m relieved to say, both at the same time – and what Roshi Grace writes here does seem to be true.

I remember clearly the accident that ended my farming career; at the very time that I was severely injured, a vast and spacious freshness opened around me: a sense of limitless possibility opened out in the exact instant that all choice was taken from me and I became no longer a grown man in my prime, but what they call “a victim”. In that moment I was free. In some respects at least, that freedom has never left me.

So what is it that happens at times like these? I think the essence of it is probably that the thinking mind, the little mind that comments, describes, evaluates from dawn to dusk on a normal day, is suddenly, decisively, stilled. Something has happened that is too big for it to even pretend to comprehend or to control, and it simply drops out. In that precise instant, the light and the vastness of the open ground suddenly flood in, overwhelming all else, and in the midst of disaster there is perfect peace.

Of course such extremes of practice cannot, must not, be repeated. (Perhaps, though, one may glimpse something of the addictiveness for some people of taking certain kinds of risk?) But such a moment is unforgettable; taken in the context of an established practice, maybe it can provide, what? A yardstick? A seamark, perhaps. Something to steer by; no more than that, and yet, vitally, that. Now, at least, one knows that it is there, that it is possible to be there oneself. That then is the gift, the treasure the dragon was hiding; and it is beyond price.

Embrace everything

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Significantly, the gaining of knowledge about spirituality is not the same as a commitment to a spiritual life. Jack Kornfield testifies: “In undertaking a spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain our path is connected with our heart. In beginning a genuine spiritual journey, we have to stay much closer to home, to focus directly on what is right here in front of us, to make sure that our path is connected with our deepest love.” When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit. We recognize divine spirit everywhere. This is especially true when we face difficulties. So many people turn to spiritual thinking only when they experience difficulties, hoping that the sorrow or pain will just miraculously disappear. Usually, they find that the place of suffering, the place where we are broken in spirit, when accepted and embraced, is also a place of peace and possibility. Our sufferings do not magically end; instead, we are able to wisely alchemically recycle them. They become the abundant waste that we use to make new growth possible. That is why biblical scripture admonishes us to “count it all joy when we meet various trials.” Learning to embrace our suffering is one of the gifts offered by spiritual life and practice. 

Spiritual practice does not need to be connected to organized religion in order to be meaningful. Some individuals find their sacred connection to life communing with the natural world and engaging in practices that honor life-sustaining ecosystems. We can meditate, pray, go to temple, church, or mosque, or create a quiet sanctuary where we live to commune with holy spirits. To some folks, daily service to others is affirmative spiritual practice, one that expresses their love for others. When we make a commitment to staying in touch with divine forces that inform our inner and outer world, we are choosing to lead a life in the spirit. 

bell hooks, Tricycle Magazine February 2025

It’s very strange. Our instinct is so clearly to avoid suffering, to snatch our hand away from the heat, to stretch the aching limb; and while these may be good instincts, reflexes – even the stretching! – they don’t seem to apply to the spiritual life. To accept, observe, even to welcome the suffering that is an inevitable part of being alive is at the very heart of our practice.

To stay still, to avoid nothing – merely to bear witness – is, from the point of view of thought and feeling, absurd. And yet to remain still enough to see that thought and feeling themselves are the object of experience: then that which experiences the mind itself is simply awareness, pure, unbroken, underlying all that is thought and felt, all that suffers. It is the ground itself – unchanged, unchanging, unnamed; from which all change proceeds.

The way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears] begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it…

[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing” [Dzogchen]

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance