I’d like to hold up a very interesting article I read by
Ajahn Viradhammo in the most recent Buddha-dharma magazine, summer 2013, in his article “Unlimited Heart.” I recommend reading the whole article. It was straight to the point of
practice and practicing in a household, not in a monastery.
He seems to have a very clear understanding of how to work
with what he calls, “self-referencing” and learning to have stability in your
“bearing witness” process to life.
All this wonderful practice council was in an article about being a care-giver for
his ailing mother for 9 years in which he lived in her condominium, which as he
describes, “was a bit of a workout for a
monk.”
He writes that lay practice brings out the “heart” of
practice. Living with people that
you love and taking care of them, brings out, quite naturally, a kind of
self-sacrifice that may be hard to find if you live in a monastery or if your practice is self-referenced as
“my practice, my practice, my
practice.” He writes:
“One of the dangers of Buddhism is that it’s
such a clever system of teaching and so beautifully laid out. Its intellectual structures are second
to none; they are all very elegant and fit together nicely. This makes it easy to remain engaged
with Buddhism just on an intellectual level. I think we all contemplate the difference between doctrine
as something that awakens and doctrine as dogmatic position-taking.”
We can use the Buddha teaching reflectively,
using language and awareness to awaken.
Reflection is mirroring our experience rather than believing things
intellectually with a host of positions.”
Just reading that, brings me back to myself, my habituated
habits, my devotion to the dharma as I go through my days. It is not an intellectual view of my
life but how I actualize what I “think I know” in my daily activities.
He writes that in Western Buddhism we don’t emphasize, “giving up or self-sacrifice” and if we
do try it, it is usually from a place of obligation or duty and therefore burns
us out. How can our “giving” come
from a different place in ourselves?
“Oddly enough, one of
the ways we can learn to come to that sense of self-sacrifice is through
meditation. Meditation is a very
personal affair; you just sit there on your cushion, quietly watching your mind
or your breath. But in meditation
there is an opportunity to no longer be a person willfully trying to do
something, become something, figure something out, or get somewhere. I found questioning that sense of
self-referencing, making an inquiry around effort and will, very helpful…..we
can discover a sense of spacious witnessing. That’s a huge lesson in understanding the space of the
heart, which is peaceful.”
“If you’ve trained in
qualities of wakefulness that are not willful and don’t have a constant agenda,
becoming, getting rid of and all the other self-referencing habits,
and if you have a kind
of consciousness that can become more and more timeless, present, and
empathetic, you’ll begin to find something in yourself that gives deep faith
and trust. You can’t really trust
your emotions or your personality, but you can trust the witness of and
listening to emotions because it’s something that allows life to present itself
as it is.”
He emphasized that while taking care of his mother, he sat a
lot, often morning and evenings and perhaps midday. In that way, he could really monitor where he was at. What emotional stresses had he picked
up? What did he need to process,
let go of, right now? He called this
- maintenance-work-awakening. He
encourages us to bring the cultural reminders of silence and stillness into our
lay life. That could be an altar,
your spiritual disciplines and friendships or sangha.
“My own sense is that
there is something profoundly beautiful about human consciousness, that we have
this tremendous potential to realize the deepest peace. That seems to me to be the whole
meaning of this human existence. In
giving and serving, I find social meaning. But I know all the issues of burnout. If giving is our raison d’etre, if
that’s all there is, it’s a recipe for disaster, because the giving is not
balanced with inner silence and clarity.
But if giving, self-sacrifice, is balanced with a sense of witnessing, wonderful
things are possible.”
Labels: Ajahn Viradhammo, bearing witness, Judith Ragir, lay practice, mindfulness, self-referencing, self-sacrifice, service