Tag Archives: practice

Beyond the fences

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Many of our institutions are struggling to seem relevant these days, that includes the church in its various forms. There are many reasons for this.

One reason is that for a long time religious institutions, such as the church, have tried to maintain a monopoly on access to the spiritual. ‘Come here’ they say, ‘do this’ or ‘read that’ and you can access the divine; the spiritual realm. Institutions as gatekeepers.

One of the great shifts in recent years has been the growing realisation that spirituality is not confined by a set of walls or dogmas, increasing proportions of society have come to see that they can perceive or experience the spiritual beyond the confines that the institutions have appeared to present. Beyond the fences that they were told were unclimbable. This loss of monopoly has added to the difficulties experienced by other institutions, making some of the religious institutions that rely upon it appear as if they have no relevance beyond that of cultural belonging. Gatekeepers are pointless if fences are illusions.

Simon J Cross – Weekday meditation 2/7/2021

For far too long I have tended to believe in the gatekeepers and their narratives of the borderlines. For far too long I felt, albeit unconsciously, that access to the spiritual, or at least to meaningful spiritual practice, depended upon making the right choice of gateway, at least on finding the gateway that was right for me, a gate for whose lock I had the key.

Sufficient introspection would have told me I was wrong, but there never seemed to be a gap for sufficient introspection. Being part of a religious institution put constraints on that kind of introspection, kept me thinking in the well-worn tracks of the (in my case Christian) doctrine and praxis I knew so well, effectively limiting my conclusions to those that would fit within the fences they defined.

The past 16 months or so, with churches and the places where people meet largely closed, have proved those fences to be illusory. The barriers between the selves I have seemed to be have proved illusory also: there is no longer any unavoidable incompatibility between thought and experience, between hope and grace.

In an article on the Secular Buddhist Network Robert M Ellis writes, “I do not describe myself as a Buddhist, because that process of practical examination of what works is far more important to me than loyalty to any tradition. Instead, I describe myself as a ‘Middle Way practitioner’ – where the Middle Way is understood as a universal principle that can be found both in Buddhism and in many other places.”

I am not sure that I would even describe myself as a middle way practitioner (with or without capitals), still less a Buddhist, these days. (I rather like the way Sam Harris, in Waking Up, avoids handing his key to that gatekeeper.) There must be many of us Einzelgänger and Einzelgängerinnen out here now, beyond the fences, and I’m coming to suspect that we don’t need to form communities, adopt labels, and things like that. We will find each other if we need each other, and just as the current pandemic that has given so many of us space to breathe is a fact of our time, so too is the internet that enables me to publish this post at the click of a button.

Istigkeit

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I have written elsewhere here (Opening the ground) of the beginnings of my awareness of what really is, lying under the old apple trees in the orchard of my childhood home, as an unassailable refuge, a still place beyond thought or striving, there always.

Tara Brach writes,

[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.”

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, Ebury Digital 2012 (pp. 315, 317)

When I was in my early 20s, in company with a very close and trusted friend, I undertook a short series of trips over a couple of weeks, using 250mg doses of synthetic mescaline. These were powerful, even profound experiences, entirely sober and devoid of what would popularly be thought of as “psychedelic” effects. We covered pages and pages of lined foolscap notepaper with closely written notes and curious geometric diagrams recording our experiences. I mention these just here because the one phrase that kept recurring, wherever we travelled, was “no thing”. Whatever avenue we explored, whatever sunken lane of the mind we entered, led to “no thing”. We wrote it, over and over again, in our notes, labelled the centres of our many diagrams with carefully drawn arrows, “no thing”. We were at a loss to explain the utter, luminous profundity of this expression either to ourselves or to each other. But it was the source and ending of all that is, and of mind itself, that much was plain.

Of course outside of a conceptual framework beyond the ability of either of us to construct back then – we could not square what we had experienced with any religious or philosophical system then familiar to us – we could take this no further, and it slipped away, displaced by plans and desires, and the imperatives of everyday life.

I recall this psychochemical experiment now because the remembered experience forms, for me, a kind of bridge between my childhood experience slowly recovering from meningitis in that sunlit Sussex orchard, and the kind of meditative recognition Tara Brach describes in the passages quoted here, from the final chapter of Radical Acceptance. The (often unremembered, consciously) energy of these and similar experiences, both within and without any formal contemplative framework, are what I have lived for, really, all these years. Most certainly, they are home, beyond any thing.

One of the points I keep coming back to, and which attracts me so strongly to secular Buddhism, above other paths, is the way that these central events have always seemed to strike me outside of formal religious or intellectual disciplines, however deeply rooted in practice they now are. Emilia Fogelklou (she writes of herself in the third person):

But then one bright spring day – it was the 29th of May 1902 – while she sat preparing for her class under the trees in the backyard of Föreningsgatan 6, quietly, invisibly, there occurred the central event of her whole life. Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ‘empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.

The first words which came to her – although they took a long time to come – were, ‘This is the great Mercifulness. This is God. Nothing else is so real as this.’ The child who had cried out in anguish and been silenced had now come inside the gates of Light. She had been delivered by a love that is greater than any human love. Struck dumb, amazed, she went quietly to her class, wondering that no one noticed that something had happened to her.

Qfp 26.05 – Quaker faith & practice (5th edition) online, Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain

Sangha and solitude

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In classical Buddhism the Three Refuges are the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The third of these is a Sanskrit word used in many Indian languages, including Pali (saṅgha) meaning “association”, “assembly”, “company” or “community”. In Buddhism the term is used more or less narrowly to imply the monastic community, or sometimes more widely to include all people who practice Buddhism correctly, whether lay or clerical. (Wikipedia)

Interestingly, Tara Brach chooses to redefine the three refuges as awareness, truth, and love: “The three facets of true refuge – awareness, truth, and love – come alive as we dedicate our presence to them. As we open to these three gateways, they reveal the one taste of freedom inherent to all paths of awakening.” She goes on to suggest that this implies “a yearning for more belonging” that we can “fully inhabit [as a] refuge of love”. (Reflection: The Three Refuges)

Winton Higgins has some harsh, even sarky, words for those who may decide that the concept of the sangha can be bypassed in our modern world:

After all, they may think, I have access to a plethora of how-to-meditate books and podcasts, and I can even download a meditation app. I can meditate by myself in my own bedroom, where I can also jump online and read or listen to any number of dharma talks. I can listen to dharma podcasts anywhere and any time, even while driving to work. If I want to talk to others about it, I can join an online chat room.

Okay, I understand that in other times and places people needed their sanghas because they had nowhere else to sit in peace and had no other access to the dharma. But it’s not like that any more. Besides, I’m a busy person and can’t afford to be tied down to a fixed weekly commitment (unless it’s for something really important like football training). And finally, frankly, I’m simply not a joiner. Sorry. Two refuges are enough for me.

Winton Higgins, Revamp, Tuwhiri 2021 (p.152)

He goes on to explain that in his view we are dependent beings who discover ourselves in community, in relationship, and that the sangha is best understood as “unmediated face-to-face communication with others who are actually present.” (p.153) Undoubtedly this is correct within Higgins’ own terms, but – leaving aside for a moment the effects of the present global pandemic on our face-to-face possibilities – solitude is an equally vital component of the contemplative life. The Buddha himself, after all, came to awakening in solitude. Stephen Batchelor:

There is more to solitude than just being alone. True solitude is a way of being that needs to be cultivated. You cannot switch it on or off at will. Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it. When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.

For those who have rejected religion in favor of secular humanism, the notion of solitude may imply self-indulgence, navel-gazing, or solipsism. Inevitably, some may be drawn to solitude as a way of escaping responsibility and avoiding relationships. But for many it provides the time and space to develop the inner calm and autonomy needed to engage effectively and creatively with the world. Moments of quiet contemplation, whether before a work of art or while observing your breath, allow you to rethink what your life is about and reflect on what matters most for you. Solitude is not a luxury for the leisured few. It is an inescapable dimension of being human. Whether we are devout believers or devout atheists, in solitude we confront and explore the same existential questions.

Stephen Batchelor, The Art of Solitude, Yale U.P. 2020, loc. 76

Higgins does, I am sure, understand this, for he writes, in his section on “Intensity as a modern virtue” (p.110 ff):

One of the thinkers that Peter Watson gathers into his fold is precisely Martin Heidegger, whom we met in chapter 4. He also identified care (Sorge) as the mainspring of an authentic human life, one intensely lived. Like the Buddha, Heidegger also introduced the tempering value of letting-go (Gelassenheit).

To live intensely must never translate into wilfulness – into our turning into meddling control freaks as we cultivate receptivity. Were we to fall into that trap, we’d be blocking the sensitive exploration of our experience. Thus Heidegger extols calm, composure, detachment, release – letting things be. This principle comes close to the Buddha’s upekkha (equanimity), one of the four vital ‘immeasurable’ emotional tones of the awakening mind.

(op. cit. (p. 112)

Solitude and Gelassenheit (a wonderful word that Heidegger presumably sourced from the 14th century contemplative Meister Eckhart) are to me indivisible. But what strikes me in this passage is the way Higgins connects this with Sorge (care, concern, even worry, for others) with the process of letting things be. There are echoes here of Tara Brach’s “awareness, truth and love”!

I have long felt that there is an immense freedom in solitude. The heart expands, somehow, in this unaccustomed space, and deliberate thought becomes more free and spacious too. Somehow I find myself able to think recklessly about, feel compassion for, even love, people against the mere thought of whom I’d have felt I had to defend myself had I not had this freedom.

Henri Nouwen wrote,

Solitude greeting solitude, that’s what community is all about. Community is not the place where we are no longer alone but the place where we respect, protect, and reverently greet one another’s aloneness. When we allow our aloneness to lead us into solitude, our solitude will enable us to rejoice in the solitude of others. Our solitude roots us in our own hearts. Instead of making us yearn for company that will offer us immediate satisfaction, solitude makes us claim our centre and empowers us to call others to claim theirs. Our various solitudes are like strong, straight pillars that hold up the roof of our communal house. Thus, solitude always strengthens community.

Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey, HarperOne, 2009 (loc. 930)

My own love of solitude was well established long before our lives were redefined by the pandemic neologism “lockdown” – from childhood it has been both a refuge and a source of life to me. Earlier this year I wrote here,

Churches and religious groups seem mostly to be operating on the assumption that once the pandemic is under control, and something approaching normal life is restored, their worshippers will flood back, Catholics to Mass, Quakers to their meetings, everyone to their accustomed place. It may not happen, at least not in the way, or to the extent, that most people appear to expect. The sea change of the pandemic, and the enforced crash course in information and communications technology it has brought, have accelerated a process of secularisation that has been gathering momentum for a long time…

There is no obvious name for what is happening. It seems not to be “secular” in the way religious people might fear, but it isn’t “religious” either, in the way that secularists might assume. It is not eremitical exactly, certainly not in the traditional sense of hermits as ones living in geographical isolation.

Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand untitled: the ground still, and open.

There is much more to explore here, and generous-hearted guides like Winton Higgins and Stephen Batchelor will no doubt have more to teach us as we all come closer to understanding what life will be like on the other side of this present crisis, and we come to face more closely the other crises, social, political and environmental (Higgins is especially good, and deeply hopeful, on this in the final section of Revamp) that are no doubt coming down the pike. Meanwhile, our own practice is our North star. In sitting we can find all we need.

An open question

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It is coming to seem to me that one of the essential qualities of any contemplative practice is just an open attention to what is, without any prejudice whatsoever. The central question (which can well be asked as, “What is this?”) must remain in perfect unknowing: there must be no sense that an answer is expected, still less that a particular kind of answer is expected, one that supports a conclusion already arrived at either by discursive thought or by the acceptance of dogma or authority.

Ask, “What is this?,” then open yourself completely to what you “hear” in the silence that follows… Pay total attention to the polyphony of the birds and wind outside, the occasional plane that flies overhead, the patter of rain on a window. Listen carefully, and notice how listening is not just an opening of the mind but an opening of the heart, a vital concern or care for the world, the source of what we call compassion or love.

Stephen Batchelor, The Art of Solitude

It is just so impossible to enter into this attention when you are worried about the implications – if you are a theist, and you fear a non-theist answer, or an atheist, and you fear a metaphysical conclusion. Answers and conclusions are chimeras anyway, but the practice must be free of them for all that, free from what we might call “heresy anxiety”. The song of Batchelor’s birds, or the hedge at the bottom of the garden where they sing, or the isness that they are in themselves – what is this?

Still watchful after all these years

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Christian contemplative life holds dear a sense of watchfulness: there are Psalms and other scriptures that speak of watchmen on the walls, watchmen who wait for the morning, and so on (Psalm 130:6; Isaiah 21:11; Ezekiel 3:17, among many others), and the concept has its place in most traditions of Christian contemplative practice. This is not quite the same thing as Buddhist concepts of attention or concentration – there is a sense of waiting alertness, of “keeping watch” that I don’t read in most Buddhist texts.

Watchfulness, too, brings with it a sense of stillness, of poised attentiveness that reminds me of the old Zen tradition of asking, “What is this?” As Daishin Morgan says, “To ask, ‘What is this?’ can also be expressed as ‘just look’.”

To be still is grace; and inside that gift is gratitude. True stillness is nothing less, really, than open awareness: a place into which come sense data, the movements of the mind, traces of feeling, memory. The mirror remains unclouded. Stillness allows that to be seen, opens to light.

I am, as an aside perhaps, profoundly grateful to the emerging secular dharma. The knowledge that there is a growing community of practice that does not depend upon religious traditions, or on the acceptance of either dogma or the teacher/disciple relationship (however open it may be to learning from whatever source proves nourishing) is something I missed in my early dharma investigations in the 1970s. Growing up as I did outside of formal religion has left me much more comfortable outside of its traditions, whether Christian or  Buddhist. From here, where I am, I can simply ask the question “what is this?” without needing to look for an answer that fits.

Paying attention, keeping watch – the heart too is open in stillness, and that is a solitude, a place apart from which compassion can extend, for which I am increasingly grateful – more so as the long days of this springtime pass into early summer.

Resting in the ground

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Practice often seems an arduous thing. We all too easily fall into a default attitude of stress, as though our practice seat were something like a gym or an examination hall, as though there were something to prove. And indeed there is a sense of discipline (which in fact is sometimes used as an alternative term for practice) required, but there is another side altogether to our regular sitting that is too often missed.

Awakening is not something to achieve, not a goal to reach or a structure to build. It is no more than a wiping of the mirror, a clearing of the breath of anxious grasping and hunger.

Our continuing life is a response to conditions, as well as being simply itself. Even grass and trees respond to conditions, even a rock and the whole earth are constantly responding. That response depends upon the conditions. Just so with our own minds. To rest in things as they are gives rise to a response, just as an in-breath gives rise to an out-breath. The key thing about awakening the mind that seeks the way is that this response will arise from a genuine acceptance of the conditions, and that includes one’s own limitations, such that the response is what conditions call for. This is very ordinary and it is the action of saving all beings before saving yourself, because the response is no longer driven by fears and desires. The energy to respond is life released from the inhibition of fear and desire.

Morgan, Daishin. Buddha Recognizes Buddha . Throssel Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

At times nothing more is required than to rest in the ground of all that is, to be held in the gentle, unbreakable grasp of isness. Morgan continues (ibid.)

This kind of response is the action of a Buddha. In practice that is a person who gives without being concerned about achieving anything or being recognized, although they may appreciate these things if they come along. The ability to respond selflessly can never be the possession of any self. Giving oneself like this is faith. Faith, giving and the realization of one’s connectedness do not arise in a sequence. There is a simultaneity of all of these things that are just the nature of reality. There is no path to this reality, we can only precipitate ourselves into this that we already are.

This self-gift in faith is a place of rest deeper than any other. Faith like this is not belief in something, some proposition or other requiring assent: it is nothing more than allowing what is to be. Whether just sitting, or in the resilient grasp of the Nembutsu, it is no more than that.

Open Awareness

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In Sōtō Zen there is a practice, Shikantaza, which is derived from a Chinese term in Caodong Buddhism, usually translated into English as “Silent Illumination”, or “Serene Reflection”. Mary Fowler, however, in a now out of print book translates it as “open awareness”, which seems to me a much better, less other-worldly translation.

Daishin Morgan:

Zazen or enlightenment os not about finding a particular state of mind, for all states of mind are fleeting and cannot be relied upon. When you know who is sitting, you know sitting Buddha. This expression is a bit strange; why not say sitting like a Buddha? I prefer to say sitting Buddha because there is nobody sitting like a Buddha; there is just sitting Buddha. That Buddha never stops sitting, but we must awaken to her presence–not that sitting Buddha is either male or female…

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

Morgan, Daishin. Sitting Buddha. Throssel Hole Press. Kindle Edition

The openness here is the openness of just being: there is nothing to achieve, nothing to become. All that is necessary is to cease deceiving ourselves.

The wish and its call

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Everyone would like to make sense of life, but for some people the need to explore life’s meaning cannot be ignored. This need may have been awakened in us by experiencing particular events, or it may have been felt for as long as we can remember. To know such a call is to feel its insistence. Having felt it, one can hide by running to distractions of one kind or another, but whenever there is a pause in the business of life, it is there awaiting our response. This call is the greatest blessing imaginable, and it sometimes feels like torture. Even though it makes so many demands, we would be bereft without it. When we are able to acknowledge the presence of the wish, then the wish sets all the priorities of life. The insistence of the wish drives us to understand the wish itself.

Morgan, Daishin. Buddha Recognizes Buddha, Throssel Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

These words of Daishin Morgan’s remind me once again that this wish, or call, is the centre of my own path – that it “sets all the priorities of life”. Sometimes this can be confusing, since this thing, call, wish, karma, call it what you will, seems to take no account of normal human priorities. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why those afflicted with such an impulse seem so often to take themselves off into monasteries, or into solitude. Daishin Morgan goes on,

It is the wish that draws us to meditation. We may have rational reasons for meditating and undertaking Buddhist practice, but I suggest that what calls us is something much more fundamental. It may be that we have no explanation – all we know is that there is something here of the greatest importance, and that we cannot let our lives go by without exploring it to the full. Buddhism does not contain it, and no path defines it. And yet we need guidance and some frame of reference to work within. Idealism may suggest we can manage without a commitment to any one path, but experience shows such idealism is easily subverted by one’s ego. Even though we can entangle ourselves in the technicalities and structures of a religion and so mistake the finger for the moon, sooner or later the wish makes itself felt, perhaps as a nagging doubt that impels us to stop fiddling around the edges and really commit ourselves to the wish. When that happens, the duality of the wish and its frame of reference dissolves.

The current pandemic has, as I hinted in one of my first posts here, refocused this question of entanglement in a novel way. In my last post, I suggested that the search for a language for our calling may well be an underlying cause for so many of us to seek out an established religious route for our path, and so it may. But there is also the question of discipline, for certainly discipline is required, in the first place to allow the call to set the priorities of our life (not an easy thing to allow), and then to keep at it in such a way as to give the practice time to do its work in us. This discipline is most reliably mediated by a community of those engaged in the practice too.

Classical Buddhism in all its schools speaks of taking refuge in the Three Refuges: The Buddha, the fully enlightened one; the Dharma, the nature of reality regarded as a universal truth taught by the Buddha; and the Sangha, the community of Buddhist monks and nuns, and sometimes Buddhist laity. There is a similar conception in Christian contemplative life, seen clearly in Benedictine and Carthusian spirituality, as well as in the Orthodox monastic traditions surrounding the Jesus Prayer, of community as a place of shelter as well as of commitment. The contemplative path is not always easy, and sometimes it is demanding, and a community can offer support and comfort – refuge, shelter -at times when it is most needed.

The pandemic has shattered many of our established forms of community, especially for laity, who do not usually live in community in the way that monastics do, and have traditionally depended on their local church or temple, or meditation group, for support. Much of this contact has, of necessity, moved online. I suspect that some practitioners may have adopted, more or less intentionally, an effectively eremitic approach. I described some of my own gropings towards this in the last real post on my old blog.

Where is this leading, in practice? I’m not sure. There is an immense amount of teaching and shared experience available online, as well as in books – Daishin Morgan’s own being good examples – and an online eremitic tradition has been simmering under  for some time, Paul and Karen Fredette’s Raven’s Bread Ministries being the most obvious site. Perhaps the odd blog post like this one may create ripples, too, and may help the growth of connections between individuals and communities. We shall see.

Looking for a language

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All contemplative traditions seek, in one way or another, to look past the shifting pattern of thoughts and emotions which we take to to be ourselves, and to know directly that which is unthinkable, and is.

But thinking is what we always do, if only to find some way of pointing out the ineffable, of showing others the beginning of the way to this unconditioned treasure. But it is always difficult, and painfully easily misunderstood, as contemplatives have long found to their cost in their dealings with religious authorities.

I think the reason why most contemplatives are in fact allied with some religion or another may be that, not only do we ourselves find the way to our own contemplative practice within a religious tradition, but within that tradition we find a path that others have walked, a thread others have followed, and a language with which to talk, and more importantly to think, about contemplation and its purpose. In many traditions contemplative practice is seen and experienced as a form of prayer, which comes with its own questions, and its own ways to think and talk about them.

One of the difficulties with treading a secular contemplative path is that these frameworks of tradition and language fall away. This is of course a great freedom, but it is easier perhaps to see what it is a freedom from than it is to see what it may be a freedom to, because of the sheer difficulty we have in finding new words for that which is beyond words, and in looking for ways to understand what we have perceived directly.

Happily, in most cases, bereft of a traditional Buddhist, Christian, or whatever language for contemplative experience, with all its baggage of doctrine and metaphysics, some have turned to Western philosophy, or to neuroscience, for paradigms. Those who are trained in these fields, Susan Blackmore, for instance, or Sam Harris, have made contributions that I for one find useful to say the least. Others, like Stephen Batchelor, seem to work more nearly by pruning the language of an existing tradition to express a secular practice, repossessing well-tried (in Batchelor’s case Buddhist) words to chart a secular path.

I am very late to the game. My four decades, more or less, of broadly Christian contemplative practice have left me missing their rich tradition of expression, and the depth of thought and teaching that underpins that tradition in both the Eastern and Western church, and in the great body of writing that predates the Great Schism of 1054, and, come to that, in the Quaker way since the 17th century in England.

I am finding it hard, as readers of this blog may have noticed, to pick up an alternative framework in which to think and write about practice and experience. I don’t have an alternative expert language, like the philosophers and the students of consciousness, and yet there is a sense that my own stream, my own practice and its fruits, has not gone astray so much as found a deeper bed on its way to the sea. The question is, how to talk about it?

Straight and Level

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In her recently published book on the secular dharma, The Buddha for Modern Minds: a non-religious guide to the Buddha and his teachings, Lenorë Lambert writes, on dealing with the problem of instinctive reactivity,

The challenge is to bring mindfulness… to this process so that we can see the mechanics of our own dramas being created. However, our mind takes the shape of what we rest it on. So being with the unpleasant process we’ve whipped up here makes us feel … unpleasant. We react by avoiding it somehow. Instead, we need to learn to hold our seat in discomfort, to be with it. Think of a rider on a horse-in-training. The horse is skittish and scared of the new experience of having a human on its back. It’s flighty and it bucks.

A skilled rider can hold their seat, that is, stay in the saddle, even though the horse is bucking around. Psychologists call this ‘distress tolerance’, the willingness to experience discomfort rather than ‘act out’ (do something ineffective out there in the world… to get rid of the unpleasantness).

Lambert, Lenorë. The Buddha for Modern Minds: a non-religious guide to the Buddha and his teachings (p. 154). Flourish Press. Kindle Edition.

My own unsought image for the process has long been that of the World War II torpedo bomber pilot, whose job it was to hold his aircraft straight and level, at a precisely determined height low over the water, come what may, until he reached the release point, a few hundred yards from the target. Regardless of anti-aircraft fire from the target ship and her escorts, regardless of enemy aircraft attacking from above, regardless of shell-splashes endangering his aircraft, he held his course. Frequently an aircraft, if it made it to the release point and pressed home the attack, would be so badly damaged it never made it back safely to base.

There have been times in my life, as there are in anyone’s, when some such image as this has been the aptest to come to mind. But distress tolerance has another, far quieter side, that too easily remains unseen. To stay still, in the midst of turmoil and loss, to sit with it, often seems a rare gift in our present time. In the March 1 issue of Friends Journal, Tricia Gates Brown writes,

Sprawled on handmade quilts in a grassy orchard, sharing an outdoor, physically distanced visit with my friend Karen under purple pear and transparent apple trees, I am nowhere near a desert. My Willamette Valley farm home is more Edenic than it is barren, devoid, or austere. Yet when Karen, a spiritual director, asks, “Where are the voices teaching us how to be in the desert?,” she put words to a question my heart has been formulating for weeks. We had been cringing at the online events of COVID season: Zoom video conferencing preschool for her daughter; Zoom outdoor school for my fifth-grade goddaughter; Zoom dinner parties; Zoom yoga; Zoom reunions; online plays; online church. We are zooming out.

Am I the only one who wonders if all this screen-staring and cyber-connection replaces anything at all? Real face-to-face connection is irreplaceable. Or who wonders if our online stand-ins are sometimes making us more off-kilter, keeping us from doing the work that might nourish us in this time? …

What if instead of grasping to fill the void, we embraced it? What if we settled deeply enough into this void, this desert, to learn what it has to teach? What if we recognized the powerful, metaphorical spiritual stage of the desert and that many of us are in it? …

It may sound heretical to suggest this: perhaps we should dive fully into this new desert and coach others on being there. Maybe we should stop trying to replace what cannot be replaced: school, social lives, organized groups, church, classes. Some might un-school the kids for a year; learn how to foster well-being while being alone; plumb deeply the question, “Who am I?”; take a full-on sabbatical from training and from organized sacred rituals…

The desert of the heart is an interior solitude, a place of healing as well as of grieving, a straight and level place amid the flying debris of so much that has seemed stable and dear, our “normal” lives. Our practice is our compass. Without it we are lost. Whether insight meditation, the Nembutsu, Centering Prayer or whatever we have found to be our path, this feels more than ever to be a time to sit with it, in the void that was our accustomed selves, and watch…