feely feely
Hi.
I thought I’d share with you some insights on aspects of Buddhist practice. These are some of the themes that I’ve felt really fruitful to explore, and things that I keep coming back to. I’m sure you’re familiar with some of them too.
It’s good to play around with parts of our monastic life. Life is an art, and being spiritual aspirants, we are both the art, and the artist.
Serve
The first one is service.
When you start reflecting that you’re doing all this for others, the whole game of monastic life really changes. The activities you do everyday, the tasks and duties you are assigned, become meaningful inasmuch as they are for the people around you - the community that lives with you, and the generous people who visit and support you every day.
Doing service for others helps you get over the self-interest which is blocking your growth and practice - the behaviours which see you chasing the things you like, and avoiding the things you don’t want to do - which only ever cultivates more preferences, and hence more self.
I see lots of people come to the monastery to have an easy life. Thinking they can cheat the system, they want to kick back and enjoy all the fruits of other people’s efforts while contributing very little themselves. This is usually justified with sentiments like: ‘the real work is the meditation’. But there’s more to it than that.
The beautiful thing about monastic life, if you choose to embrace it and see it as a valuable object lesson in your growth, is that many of the choices you used to have are taken away. In the form of work, this means that on any given day I have no idea who I am going to work with, or what I am going to do. Today I might be weeding with a good mate, tomorrow, cleaning a toilet with someone I dislike. The point is that it doesn’t matter what you are doing; what matters is the attitude you bring to the work.
Lots of people want to craft a little corner for themselves in monastic life, but one must be wary of creating these little nests of definition as they can be traps that limit our capacity to create a flexible and dynamic mind - and that kind of mind is much more valuable for your meditation anyways.
There is no separation between the mind you cultivate in the work you do, and the mind that sits on the mat to become still to go within. It’s the same mind. If you can clean a toilet and smile, with the reflection, ‘May the next person that sees this toilet notice how clean it is, and may that brighten their mind,’ then you’re exactly where you need to be.
Hold your Heart
The meditation brochure had a beautiful tanned model sitting meditation in full lotus position next to a waterfall. Her angelic white blouse was lit with warm mottled sunlight filtering through the forest canopy, and she had a smile on her face that looked like she was plugged into the secret truth of the universe. When I saw her I imagined a sharing circle, trauma-informed discussion, and group hugs. Everything was gonna be OK.
Instead, here I am alone, cold, at some ungodly hour, with the wind lashing at my face and the icicle of a tear forming in the corner of my eye as I pace back and forth on my walking path like a caged animal, watching my nutcase mind loop into another circuit of pointless interior hallucinations. This was not in the brochure.
As great as monastic life is, and as much as I wouldn’t swap it for the world, at times it can be really hard. In spiritual / meditation circles, we also have this wonderful thing called spiritual bypassing, which means that when you feel like your life is a shit-cake, you have to put an icing on top of pretending it’s not, so as to appear like you’re crushing it at all times.
I’d rather just be real.
There are times when you just need to hold your heart. I often find myself just lying on my bed and doing this (often ‘cos when it’s hard this is probably the only thing I can manage to do). I breathe and tell myself it’s going to be OK, even though I have no idea if that’s true. I try and be kind to myself and remind myself that I’m still on the path, that these memories of the past that haunt me will fade, and that [insert corny life affirmation here].
It does help though. Just don’t fall into the trap of wanting to leave, thinking that you can’t do it, that you’re not good enough to practice, that who the hell are you to even try and get out of this mess, that blah blah blah - all those lies that Māra whispers to you when you’re down, ‘cos that’s the kind of guy he is.
Forget Māra. You got this.
Study a little, Practice a lot
‘Study a little, practice a lot’, is a little saying I took from Bhante Sujato. I really love it ‘cos it reminds me to put what I’m doing into context.
I’ve got a creative mind. I was an artist in my former life, and hence I have the kind of mind that gets obsessive when inspiration takes hold. I’ve always struggled to not let these forces take over and swallow up my practice. To be honest, I still suck at this. This elusive thing called ‘balance’ that everyone has talked about my whole life continues to seem about as real as Bigfoot.
What I have learnt though is more self-acceptance around the moods that take hold of me, and that it’s OK to have a ‘muse’ in monastic life. The muse can come in many forms, and can be a powerful source of energy and joy.
For example, by learning Pāli, when I read a sutta out loud and let its meaning seep into me, I reflect that I am using my mouth to form pretty much the exact words the Buddha spoke. By speaking them myself, it’s like he is speaking to me still, he is speaking to me through me, his path is my body, they are one.
Another example is memory work. Understanding that the third stanza in the mangala sutta - ‘Bāhu-saccañ-ca sippañ-ca…’ is best remembered as the image of Casper the friendly ghost saying ‘Bah!’ (to remember the sound ‘Bāhu’) and scaring the heck out of a small fat Asian child who spits out the bubble tea he is ‘sipping’ (for ‘sippañ-ca’) is a much more engaging way to learn chanting. It also has the extra advantage that you never forget it. Mnemonics teach you how your mind works, as well as being uproarious fun.
The Buddha strikes me as someone who was a creative, lateral thinker. By engaging with this aspect of myself I not only embrace a strong part of who I am, but I emulate the Buddha. It spills over into practice too - a dynamic mind can solve roadblocks that come up, and you think of new ways to work with the mind, which makes the meditation juicy.
Practice Mettā
I think in modern society, especially those of us not growing up with Buddhist values, we’re kinda starved for self-love. We all know this.
I’ve found mettā practice is by far the quickest and most reliable way to cultivate happiness in this monastic life, which is so essential for being able to stay in robes. It doesn’t have to be your bread and butter, but I think it’s essential for anyone looking to meditate. You need to get into your heart and out of your head.
One thing I learnt from my teacher Ajahn Brahm is that meditation is a ‘feely feely’ practice. You feel your way deeper into stillness. When the mind starts to truly quieten down, the heart opens up and you feel whole and connected, like you’re coming home. Mettā helps this process no end, and although you can develop this feeling without a formal mettā practice - as the heart will naturally open the more you open to the present - cultivating a formal mettā practice is so wonderful because it feeds the mind the love that it so needs and craves, it’s like a warm nourishing balm for the mind, it’s very healing.
I could go on all day about mettā, but it’s best to just try it. I’d recommend looking here.
Go Analog
One of the best choices I’ve made since stepping into monastic life is to let go of all digital devices.
When I first came to the monastery I had a phone and a laptop. Initially, I sent my laptop away to my Mum, then asked for it back. It was only after I had done this back and forth sending it away and asking for it back thing another four times in 12 months that I realised that maybe, just maybe, I might have a little addiction to technology. So the last time I sent it away, I never asked for it back again.
Your phone is eating your brain. No matter how much you think you’re in control of your usage of these things, the billion dollar industries and all the well-studied and endlessly-funded psychological warfare they use to keep you hooked in, are, unfortunately, far smarter than you’ll ever be. So don’t be naive - you’re an addict and it’s much more than you realise or care to admit.
Everyone has to come to their own choices with this, but for me, the only option was to go analog and get rid of my devices altogether. It wasn’t easy mind you, I still have my days where I feel like a crack addict needing his fix of just something (anything!) to watch, or read, or consume.
The more time passes though, the more I’m so grateful for not being plugged into the matrix. In my little hut I have a book of suttas, and a little Leitner box with cards for memorising stuff I find inspirational, some paper and pens, and that’s it. If I wanna study, I go to the library and use a computer there, but my hut is my silent space, and no digital device is welcome.
Try it.
Ditch the Routine
I’ve never been able to keep a routine anyway, so not having one was pretty easy.
There’s something cool that happens when you just decide to live in the present moment as much as possible. You start to listen to what you need and follow that compass, instead of being some Buddha-boot-camp drill-sergeant ordering yourself around all the time, or setting alarms every other hour and treating your waking hours like you’re cooking a turkey or something.
Time is control. It’s the currency of control freaks. Other than being somewhere essential, like an appointment or a work meeting - does knowing the time (or the temperature or whatever) really add anything to your experience?
I use the sun on my walking path as a sun dial, and the nature of the light in the trees around me as an indicator of the changing seasons, and hence changing dawn and dusk. By ditching the abstract notion of ‘time’, your mind opens up to the natural elements around you, and you start to navigate your way through the day in all sorts of ways you didn’t think were possible before, such as when certain birds start calling out, for example.
Once you get used to doing that, you find that you can tell the time pretty accurately anyways. I have a clock but I’ve blacked out the time and I only use it for alarms. I’m usually able to tell the time within about 15 minutes without it anyways which is enough to keep appointments and be where I need to be.
More importantly though, ditching time creates a completely different flow to your life. You move with the world, rather than in some solipsistic Cartesian box. This is the way we used to move as humans. That might seem like some long-lost language of primordial humanity, but don’t forget that human beings have been in their present evolutionary state for the last 100,000 years. We are the same as our ancestors, this is all still baked in to who we are, we just have to listen again.
Keep Good Company
Monastic life isn’t quite like anything else you’ll encounter. In lay life, you can’t choose your family or who you work with, but if things go pear-shaped you can leave and go live by yourself. If you’re in a relationship or a friendship and it’s not going well, same goes for that too - you have mobility and a large degree of choice in who you interact with, and on what terms.
Monastic life isn’t quite like that. It’s kind of a strange hybrid of a workplace, a sprawling semi-dysfunctional family, and intimate relationships. You’re living with, working with, eating with, talking to, the same people every day, and especially if you’re a junior monastic you can’t really just up and leave, because you’ve decided to follow the Buddha’s recommendation and stay with your teacher for at least five years.
Something happens to people in monastic life. This little echo chamber we all live in creates the conditions where it’s very easy for the mind to become petty and small, for it to start ‘sweating the small stuff’ and for us to go on hyper-critical overdrive. People start getting overly involved in each other’s business, because, well, there’s just nothing else exciting going on a lot of the time. This is something to keep an eye on, and if you find your mind doing this, it’s time to remind yourself that the Buddha wanted us to cultivate a mind that is large, not one that is obsessing over which side of the cushion your neighbouring monk put his bowl today.
We can waste so much time fault-finding the people around us that we end up creating a lot of tension and resentment in our mind, and miss the path. It’s a dead end.
I’ve spoken of some things already that can keep us open, but a really important one is choosing to keep good company. Hang around people that make you feel good, that make you feel inspired, that lift you up. If people want to drag you into their petty little micro-dramas consider it a gift, because you’ll have to learn the art of setting boundaries, and protecting your own values and ideas of good friendship. This assertion can be done with sensitivity and respect, but it needs doing because otherwise your mind starts getting shaped to be small and you feel like you’re living in a panopticon. No-one wants that.
Monastic life can be lonely. There’s no doubt about that. In the end, the people that come to this place, largely want to be left alone. That doesn’t mean that we can’t connect to good people and cultivate good friendships, learning to hold them with lightness, and with little expectation, just enjoying them for the time we have, as we are blessed to be in the company of good people.
That’s it.
- Peace.