My (unmet) Aspiration

*Long post alert. Normally I try to keep my posts on the not super long side, but not this time. This one is more of a processing post for me. It’s also a way for me to step into sharing about something that’s challenging for me to share about, hence why I’m not just keeping it just to myself. 

This post is difficult for me to craft and send out into the world for a few reasons. 1) It feels like a vulnerable thing to open up about. 2) It’s important to me to convey the respect I genuinely have for my practice tradition, and not give folks the wrong impression or sow seeds of discord. 3) It feels as though I’m not supposed to talk about this. But as I am interested in being open and authentic to my experience, and also developing the skill of speaking both lovingly & truthfully when it comes to subject matters that are hard to talk about, here I am. We’ll see how this goes. 

I have a heartfelt aspiration to become a Dharma teacher in my spiritual practice tradition, the Plum Village (PV) mindfulness tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh (whom I will refer to as Thay in this post, which means teacher in Vietnamese). And what I am currently processing involves what I see as the very likely possibility that my aspiration will not come to fruition.

Before I proceed, I’ll offer some background reference. As a lay person in the PV tradition, there are three main pathways a person can travel down, if they want to establish deeper roots. The first is to formally receive the Five Mindfulness Trainings in a trasnmission ceremony, which can be offered by a lay Dharma teacher or the monastic community during a retreat. The first stage is quite simple and not much is required other than one’s own desire to practice enfolding the trainings into their daily life. Attending a retreat or service where this ceremony is offered is the main logsitical requirement. It should be noted, too, that folks can also choose to practice with the trainings without formally receiving them.  

The second pathway is to formally receive the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, which means you are becoming a core member of the Order of Interbeing (or OI member for short). In brief, the current process of becoming an OI member involves finding a lay Dharma teacher who will mentor you, and spending at least one year working with them directly. Ordination then happens when your mentor(s) deems that you are ready. There are certain specific criteria that one must meet (such as being actively and regularly involved with a local sangha), and one must also wait at least one year after receiving the Five Mindfulness Trainings before aspiring to become an OI member. One of the main roles of an OI member is to be a sangha builder (oh, and sangha means spiritual community). 

The third pathway involves becoming a Dharma teacher. I’m not sure what the percentage is, but I would guess it’s well over 50% of OI members who don’t move onto this third stage. Whether it’s because they don’t have interest in officially holding the mantle of teacherhood or they stop being active in attending sangha or they’re simply not ushered forward by a senior lay Dharma teacher (which is what’s required), many OI members don’t become Dharma teachers. As a logistical point, typically one must be an OI member for at least 10-years, before potentially becoming a Dharma teacher apprentice. 

I was placed on a Dharma teacher apprentice path by my local senior Dharma teacher 6 years ago, before I had my official 10-years in as an OI member. I ordained as an OI member in 2007, at the age of 28, so I’ve been an OI member now for over 15-years. Since being told I was on this pathway, the process & criteria involved for becoming a Dharma teacher have been frustratingly undefined and unclear to me. I’ve been in a state of mild to moderate confusion for 6 years. It’s not been great. 

On Not Gaining or Attaining

In my over 20-years of being a group facilitator and program director for my home sangha Be Here Now, which has been meeting every Monday night since the fall of 2002, I don’t recall ever hearing from someone that what prompted them to join our group (whether once, twice, or on-goingly) was that their life was going so amazingly well, and they had such an abundance of free time, that they decided to have a go at meditation just for the fun of it. I trust there are folks out there who fit this bill, but I haven’t met any of them. Also, I reckon this group of people is hella small.

What I’m saying is, most people (myself super included) approach the practice of sitting meditation with some kind of attainment-mind in active pursuit. We come to the cushion, or to a group of people on cushions, with a goal in mind. Maybe we want to be less stressed out, or feel more at ease in our own skin, or maybe we’re looking to heal after a breakup or the loss of a loved one. Maybe we feel lost, confused and/or lonely and we want to feel less lost, confused, and/or lonely. Or maybe we know we’re looking for something but we have no idea what that something is. Whatever it is that propels us to the cushion and/or to join a sangha, it’s a normal, natural part of the deal to start out with the idea of wanting to attain something, whatever that something is for us.

A bit of backstory to this post, before I proceed. I was inspired to craft a blog post on non-attainment based on a couple of well-paired readings I happened to engage with the other morning. The first was from Suzuki Roshi, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “If you make your best effort just to continue your practice with your whole mind and body, without gaining ideas, then whatever you do will be true practice.” The second was from Thich Nhat Hanh, in Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh: “The contemplation on non-attainment is every important.”

Okay, so, hearing these two Zen masters speak about not gaining or attaining, where does this leave us as meditation practitioners who likely started down the path we’re on wanting to gain & attain something? Whelp, here’s what I think the thing is. The thing is, while yes, we start out wanting to gain or attain something, at some point along the way, if we want to be a meditator and an active, involved sangha member for the long-haul, we must learn how to transform out of our grasping mind and into a state of sitting and showing up just to sit and show up. Chances are, if we start out meditating with a grasping mind and proceed to stay in our grasping mind, we’ll eventually stop sitting all together, because the thing we’re grasping for either never comes to fruition or comes to fruition but not in the way we wanted/expected it to or comes to fruition in the way we wanted it to but only for a short burst of time.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T

I feel as though it’s safe to say that respect is something we all desire. We may even consider it a universal, human need (in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, respect is included in the Esteem category, which is tier 4 of 5). In my view, when it comes to human interaction values, respect tops the importance list. 

Here’s what I think. Respect, when it comes to other people, does not inherently involve needing to agree with them, or even like who they are as a person. It also does not mean we need to trust them. There’s a way to genuinely cultivate respect for someone whom we do not agree with, like, or trust. I don’t need to know anything about you in order to respect you. I don’t need to agree with anything you say or like anything you do. I don’t need to trust you or even have faith in your capacity to be a good person in the world. 

Respecting others is about untangling our self from the close-up view and learning how to look through a much wider lens. Having respect for someone else means I can see them – at least for a little bit – in the full & complex depths of who they are. And who they are is just like me, a collage of everything that has ever happened to them, around them, and through them. 

When I am unable to step back from a person’s in-the-moment actions or words that I deem to be whatever flavor of not okay, what results is me wielding my self-righteous sword around like a woman possessed. When I’m operating from a reactive, narrow field of vision, it’s really easy for me to be all like: You’re wrong and I’m right and because I’m right, that means I’m better than you. 

When I am able to step back and see that same person as a collection of causes & conditions, wounds & woes, joys & triumphs, respect manifests without any added effort. Respect is a natural byproduct of seeing someone from a more expansive vantage point, because we have an understanding that who they are is an interwoven compilation of everything else.  

Back in October, driving down through the state of California, my husband and I stopped at a souvenir shop called the Bronze Bear Outpost, which is situated by Mono Lake, not far from Yosemite National Park. In the shop, I browsed through a kids book called What is Respect? by Etan Boritzer, illustrated by Sonal Goyal (see pic above). While reading through the book (and snapping pics of it for later reference), I remember thinking Gosh, this book could benefit us adults too! The book covers some really important things and makes a lot of really good points, and because it’s designed for kids, it’s easy to follow and make sense of. In short, the book instructs us that respect means to care. And I’m not sure I can improve on that. 

I’m still figuring out how to flesh this all out (which is basically what this blog is all about: me practicing how to, ya know, say things), but essentially, respect is about caring about how we treat other people, regardless of all the things that might try to convince us that being mean & judgey is the way to go. 

On Freedom & Liberation

I opened a letter this morning sent to me by my friend Daniel, who is incarcerated at Montana State Prison. In it, he asked if I would write him a poem about freedom. We’ve been pen pals for 5 or 6 years and one of the things we’ve been writing back and forth about lately is poetry. I send him poems I’ve written or someone else has written, and he sends me poems he’s written. 

It’s not often – and by “not often” I mean I can think of only one other time – I am directly asked to write about something in particular. I am intrigued by his ask and appreciate the prompt. 

What came up for me straight away was: Is freedom the same thing as liberation? As a practitioner in a Buddhist-based spiritual tradition, our teachings center around liberation. Simply put, liberation is the ultimate aim of our practice. If we practice in such a way that doesn’t give rise to liberation, whelp, I reckon something is amiss in our approach.   

My very first thought in response to my own question Is freedom the same thing as liberation? was yep! Same thing! But then I started wondering if maybe freedom & liberation are synonymous but only in the ultimate dimension (which is a Buddhisty way of saying: when zoomed out and looking/feeling through the lens of the whole cosmos and the entire realm of lifeforce energy). In the historical dimension, however (which is a Buddhisty way of saying: when zoomed in to our individual life, where the trash needs to be taken out and we need to earn money to live), perhaps freedom & liberation are two different things.

Here’s what I’m pondering: in the historical dimension, maybe freedom involves a certain physicality, whereas liberation pertains to the mind. So, some examples of freedom would be: quitting a job because it’s sucking your will to live; ending a romantic relationship that has been dragging & draining; making the final payment on your car or student loan or mortgage; moving to a new town/city/state/country because you needed a fresh start; regaining the use of your own two feet after months spent on crutches; having your energy restored after a long bout of illness; getting released from prison.

Freedom, in these cases, is the act of being physically removed from something binding or constrictive. If I were bound to a chair for an hour and then someone came along and untied me, I would experience freedom from being restricted to that chair. You get the point. 

Liberation, on the other hand, is an inside job. Liberation pertains to the content and quality of our mental activity and the lens through which we see the world. Liberation does not depend or rely on anything external. 

I am considering, then, that one can experience freedom without feeling liberated, and vice versa. I am also considering that in the ultimate dimension, these states are rather firm and steady, whereas in the historical dimension, they are fluid and ever-changing. 

In the historical dimension, freedom for one person is normalized for another. Daniel’s idea of freedom might mean to get out of prison, whereas mine might be to get out of debt. So freedom for one person is not necessarily freedom for another. Also: the felt experience of freedom tends to wear off and becomes normalized over time. Liberation, while in flux and influenced by externals, generally involves the same basic qualities of felt experience: open, unbound, connected, at ease.  

Or maybe freedom belongs to the historical dimension and liberation belongs to the ultimate dimension. Hmm.