To keep your Dharma practice lively, it’s important to regularly identify the “edge” of your practice. This is your growth point – the current limit of your understanding and your capacity to embody it. Of course, you don’t have a single practice edge; it might be more accurate to say it’s important to identify something on your growth “perimeter,” or find one of your many edges, so you can focus your practice or have a dialogue with a teacher. I discuss what an edge is, what it means to find one, why this is important, and how to go about it.
Quicklinks to Article Content:
What Your Practice Is Not, and What It Is
Why Is It Valuable to Stay in Touch with Your Edge?
The First Step in Finding a Practice Edge
Your Practice Edge When You Are Suffering
Recently, in Episode 332 – My Guidelines for Deepening Your Zen Practice, I organized my recommendations according to my Ten Fields of Zen. Under Field One, Bodhicitta: Nurturing Your Way-Seeking Mind, I said this:
Meet regularly with your teacher. Aim to meet for a 30-minute practice discussion monthly, at least 10 times a year. Attend formal sanzen (one-on-one meeting) in person whenever you can. This kind of accountability helps keep you from getting distracted and losing touch with your practice. Review these guidelines before your practice discussions. Bring the edge of your practice. If you don’t feel like you have anything to bring, work on that with your teacher.
Subsequently, I’ve changed the practice agreement for my students to read, “Bring at least one practice edge to explore together,” in acknowledgement that you don’t have a single practice edge, but more of a “perimeter of growth.” I find most people are at something of a loss for how to find an edge in their practice, at least at first. Many folks mention that they aren’t sure they have anything to bring to their meetings with me and sometimes feel like they’re wasting my time.
Even if you don’t feel drawn to working with a teacher (Episode 332 says more about that), it can still be valuable for you to periodically identify the edge of your practice. Maybe you can aim to do this when you go on retreat, or at other significant times in your life such as the new year. Maybe you discuss your practice edges with good Dharma friends, or journal about them. However you go about it, what is the “edge” of your practice?
What Your Practice Is Not, and What It Is
First, let’s start with what a practice edge is not. It’s not some kind of flaw, shortcoming, or problem to be solved. It’s not about your incomplete understanding or your inability to manifest your understanding in your everyday life. If you think of your edge as a flaw or limitation, you’re likely to fall into one of two traps.
In the first trap, you cast yourself in the role of the inadequate student of the Dharma. This isn’t helpful. Any view of yourself is limiting and only partially true, whether you decide you’ll never be able to achieve liberation, or you think some perfected future version of yourself will be capable of it. Labeling yourself as inadequate compared to a teacher, or others, or some ideal, is just a story that impedes real progress.
In the second trap, you resist identifying your practice edge because it feels counterproductive. Why are you seeking out some limitation, you wonder, when what you want is deeper acceptance and peace of mind? Why dredge up some problem, confess to some sin, or whip up some longing for greater understanding? From experience, you know that it’s generally unhelpful to set up some goal, thereby casting your current state and place as insufficient.
It may help to reframe your practice edge from limitation to growth opportunity. Or, as I discussed in Episode 333 – Buddha Is Like an Old-Growth Tree: Practice as Human Maturation, as an opportunity for moving forward in a beautiful process of lifelong maturation. Sometimes, of course, you’ll have real problems, and it will be obvious to you where your practice edge is. Other times, things will be going relatively well, and it may be more challenging to get a sense of where you can still grow, mature, and deepen your practice.
Ultimately, your practice edge isn’t a problem to be fixed, it’s where your vital life question arises. At its most fundamental, this is a wordless question, an attitude of wonder, a sense of lively tension. From where you sit, what lies beyond your edge is still unknown, unclear, or not fully integrated. Finding the edge of your practice is an encounter with the great mystery of life. Another term for it is the Great Doubt, or the undifferentiated doubt mass.
Once the question takes the shape of words, it first manifests in the most basic existential inquiries: Who am I? What is this? What next? How? When you’re really in touch with your edge, you experience a sense of urgency. Not a panicked urgency, but one that brings energy and attention to the unfolding of your life. You experience it throughout your body, not just up in your head. You care. This caring isn’t about obtaining something external to you, and it isn’t about achieving some result. It’s about the great matter of life and death. Your life and death. What is the nature of this existence you find yourself in? This fundamental question requires a lived response, not an intellectual answer. You will always have an edge.
Why Is It Valuable to Stay in Touch with Your Edge?
What is it valuable to stay in touch with your edge? Why do I recommend that my students arrange to speak to me on a monthly basis and “bring at least one practice edge to explore together”?
I can’t think of any other way for you to sustain your bodhicitta, or the mind that seeks the way. It’s so easy for us to get wrapped up in the activities of life – solving problems, fulfilling responsibilities, navigating relationships, working on projects, enjoying life’s pleasures, and enduring life’s miseries. We forget about the great mystery, about our incredible lifelong process of growth and maturation. Memories of our moments of insight and transcendence fade. When we once again experience true insight, it’s very common to also experience a sense of surprise and regret that we have lapsed into forgetfulness for months and years, living our life pursuing relatively insignificant things and neglecting what matters most.
If we use the metaphor of the old-growth tree, you might ask whether your process of growth and maturation won’t simply continue to happen no matter what you’re doing. A tree doesn’t make itself grow, after all. Human beings, however, are not trees. As sentient beings, aware of our individuality, we can impede our own growth. Our maturing process must include our mind and heart, and therefore requires our active and conscious participation. Some maturation happens even when we’re unconscious of our practice, of course, but usually not as much.
When you choose to turn your awareness toward the edge of your practice, you make explicit the perimeter of your wonder. You recall your sense of mystery and curiosity. You rouse yourself out complacency, where you figure things are good enough, and you might as well relax and enjoy what you have already clarified. There is no sin in taking this approach to life. The only regrettable thing is not honoring your own deepest aspirations, living your most authentic life, and exploring the limits of your intimacy with the Dharma.
Another valuable thing about staying in touch with your edge is getting comfortable with any associated feelings of humility and vulnerability. You’re actually less vulnerable when you become aware of your “perimeter of growth,” but at first it may not feel like it. It can be uncomfortable when you admit to yourself, or to a friend, or to a teacher, that you don’t know it all, that there are still places of discomfort and longing within you, that part of this great mystery of life lies beyond the sphere of your understanding. Especially because, if you have truly gotten in touch with your edge, you care about this.
A good teacher (or Dharma friend) will encourage you in your process of exploration. They won’t shame you or make you feel lesser-than because you admit you have an edge. They won’t simply offer advice as if they have the answer to your problems. They will have faith in your capacity to find your way, and to learn and grow, and will encourage you in that.
The First Step in Finding a Practice Edge
It’s in zazen that you make contact with your wordless question, or in moments of pure awareness off the meditation seat that are made more likely by zazen practice. To some extent, just a felt sense of your practice edge is enough to enliven your effort and spark your bodhicitta. However, in Zen, we make a practice of explicitly exploring our practice edge, usually with a teacher but, as I mentioned earlier, if you aren’t drawn to working with a teacher, you may do this with good Dharma friends or by other explicit means. How do you move from the wordless to something you can discuss with someone, or put in writing? How can you express the Great Doubt?
In a sense, you can’t express the Great Doubt. However, you can reflect within and search for manifestations of your practice edge(s). These manifestations are thoughts, feelings, experiences, and behaviors that fall short of what we know would be the thoughts, feelings, experiences, and behaviors of a Buddha, or fully awakened being. It doesn’t matter whether complete Buddhas exist, we can refer to this ideal like an inner compass. We know from experience what it’s like to be more Buddha-like: Calm, maintaining the largest perspective, free from the compulsion of self-concern, humble but confident, kind but honest, flexible, authentic, generous without self-consciousness – the list goes on.
Looking for what is un-Buddha-like in your mind, body, and behavior isn’t about holding on to some ideal and beating yourself up for falling short, it’s about identifying your growth points. It’s possible to do this without the slightest sense of shame or embarrassment. At a certain point in practice, recognizing new practice edges for yourself even becomes something of an exciting development. Not that you’re happy to be causing yourself or anyone else suffering, of course, but once you have developed a deep faith that engaging your edge is always enlightening, you recognize a growth point for the opportunity it is.
My teachers often shared a saying, “First you practice for the sake of your own suffering. Then you practice for the sake of others. Finally, you practice for the sake of the Dharma.” I don’t know where this saying came from. I don’t think my teachers made it up because I’ve heard it outside of my own lineage. It may be a modern distillation of some older Chan or Zen teaching. Wherever it came from, I have found it to be true in my own experience so I will use this saying to organize the rest of my discussion about finding and clarifying your practice edge. For the remainder of this episode, I’ll talk about finding your practice edge when you are suffering. In the next episode, I’ll cover finding your edge when you’re primarily practicing for the sake of others, or when you are practicing simply for the sake of the Dharma.
Your Practice Edge When You Are Suffering
“First you practice for the sake of your own suffering.” When you are suffering – physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually – it probably seems clear where your practice edges are. Depending on how challenging things feel, you may feel like your whole life is one big edge.
It may not be immediately obvious, but there’s an important difference between practicing with your suffering and seeking to alleviate it in practical ways. Hopefully, you will be doing both! You are misunderstanding the nature of Dharma practice if you think it’s a replacement for taking care of your life by getting appropriate physical and mental health care, taking medications that support healthy functioning, eating and sleeping well, exercising, being financially responsible, and maintaining supportive human relationships. You ignore the relative/dependent dimension at your peril.
It’s an oversimplification to think of it this way, but you might frame your practical efforts to alleviate suffering as focusing on the “karmic” aspects of your life. Karma is the law of cause and effect as it applies to your behavior of body, speech, and mind. When you focus on karma, you consider both the karmic “package” you have ended up with as the result of a myriad past causes and conditions, including your own choices, and also the importance of your current choices for affecting the future.
There are times to focus on karmic issues and bring them to a teacher. This is primarily when your life is being controlled by your karma in important ways – when it’s difficult for you to sit zazen or engage in any other kind of formal practice because your suffering and stress is so intense. However, be aware that Zen and Zen teachers are not the best source of wisdom and support for karmic or practical issues. You should be honest about your situation so a teacher knows what’s happening for you, but ideally you will also seek help from doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, financial advisors, career counselors, and good friends.
With that disclaimer, then: When you practice with an aspect of your suffering, you focus on insight rather than karma. Again, you are simultaneously taking care of your karma, and at times it may not be clear whether a particular activity is about taking care of your karma or working on your insight. That doesn’t really matter as long as you spend some of your time concentrating on insight.
When you turn toward an aspect of your suffering and examine it with the lens of practice, you reflect on your experience of body, heart, and mind. With stillness cultivated through zazen, you review your situation with curiosity, noticing what follows what. As you do this, you are following the model of Shakyamuni Buddha himself, who intensively examined the arising of suffering and observed, “When the desire for things to be other than how they are arises, dukkha (stress and dissatisfaction) arises; when the desire for things to be other than how they does not arise, dukkha does not arise.”
In the example of suffering you are investigating, what triggers the arising of suffering? After the trigger, what sensations, thoughts, and feelings arise in you? What narratives do you begin generating in your mind? For the time being, try to suspend your judgment about whether these narratives are true. You may find yourself quite attached to them, and it’s very important to get familiar with them, but they only obscure what’s really going on.
Then you ask yourself: What can I do, within my own body/heart/mind, to help alleviate suffering here, regardless of whether anything changes in my situation? What can I let go of here? There is always something you can do. That is insight. That is the nature of practice. Often, however, we fail to discover how we can practice with our suffering because we are so caught up in trying to alleviate it at a practical level. To encourage yourself to open up to insight into your suffering, it may help to remind yourself that just because you find a way to lessen your suffering through practice does not mean you need to stop your karmic efforts to alleviate it.
As you explore your suffering through the lens of practice, you’ll need to engage it as a koan. Just because you identify a situation or even gain some insight into it doesn’t mean your suffering is immediately resolved. Usually, your suffering is alleviated a little bit at a time. You gain some insight, practice letting go, and taste a bit of liberation. Then your karma or situation of ongoing suffering takes over again. You have still more to learn, but this doesn’t mean you should view suffering as a sign of personal failure in practice. Every person deals with a different life. A good friend of mine dealt with excruciating and debilitating rheumatoid arthritis for decades. It had to be the center of her practice, and she learned an immense amount from it. She also often said, “That’s enough, I’d like to learn something else now!” She had to learn to incorporate her own longing and frustration into her practice. There’s no use in comparing yourself to others.
One of the beautiful things about Buddhism is that it acknowledges that we all suffer. It isn’t a personal failing, and suffering isn’t limited to people experiencing terrible circumstances. The Buddha himself was a pampered prince but still experienced existential angst about the nature of life. In your practice you are encouraged to recognize your own suffering, even if you think you shouldn’t be feeling it. Ideally, you can share your suffering with a Zen teacher or good Dharma friend who will not respond with judgment or pity, but who will bear witness to how you practice with your suffering, and the insights you gain from doing so.
That’s it for today… I will be back soon with part 2, finding the edge of your practice when you’re practicing for the sake of others, or simply for the sake of the Dharma.
