337 - Finding the Edge of Your Practice (2 of 2)

In the previous episode (Part 1), I talked about what your practice edge is not, and what it is. I discussed why it’s valuable to stay in touch with your edge, and the first step in finding it. Then I presented the idea that first you practice for the sake of your own suffering, then you practice for the sake of others, and finally, you practice for the sake of the Dharma. I am using this teaching to organize my discussion, and in the first episode I talked about finding your practice edge when you are suffering. Now I move on to the second two motivations for practice.

Quicklinks to Article Content:
Your Practice Edge When You Are “Practicing for the Sake of Others”
Looking at Your Relationships Through the Lens of Practice
Your Practice Edge When You Are “Practicing for the Sake of the Dharma”
1. Ask Yourself How You Truly Want to Live, and Contemplate Impermanence
2. Be Attentive to What Remains Unresolved
3. Ask Yourself What You Have Not Yet Seen

Your Practice Edge When You Are “Practicing for the Sake of Others”

If you keep it up long enough, there comes a point in Dharma practice where your most acute suffering is alleviated – or, at least, you have gained insight into how to practice with it in an ongoing way. You have developed faith in your practice and aren’t thrown into existential angst even by significant difficulties. If you continue to practice, you’ll need to find – or emphasize – a different motivation than alleviating your own suffering.

“Then you practice for the sake of others.” This should not be understood as adopting a mission to save other people or preach the Dharma to them. Depending on the shape of practice in your life, you may or may not end up doing these things, but it’s generally unhelpful to prematurely focus on others when you’re not done with yourself. In fact, some people are eager to take care of other beings as a way to avoid facing their own suffering. Chozen Bays Roshi says that the bodhisattva vow to “free all beings” is really a vow to “free all beings from me.” In other words, when you “practice for the sake of others,” you are still working on yourself: Refining your understanding, untangling your karma, and learning to be more skillful in your interactions with other beings.

You might say, “relationships bring out the worst in you,” but from a practice point of view this is a good thing: The realm of your human relationships will invariably reveal to you where your practice edges are. There will be people you feel aversion to for no apparent reason; people you can’t forgive; people you get infatuated by, intimidated by, and annoyed by. There will be family and friends with whom you have fraught relationships. Despite your best efforts you will be misunderstood and will hurt others’ feelings, if only through what you fail to do. As you navigate the infinitely complex social environment of the different groups you belong to, questions of authenticity, anxiety, assertiveness, belonging, and intimacy will continue to arise. As you seek to parent, teach, or supervise, you will constantly face the limits of your own skillfulness.

Practicing for the sake of others isn’t seeking to become the most popular, beloved, and socially effective person in the world. That’s impossible. Although the ideal of a Buddha is helpful for orienting us – someone who is gracious, kind, flexible, confident, loving, patient, never angry – there really is no single type of being who would be absolutely beloved or effective in all circumstances, for all people. Even if Shakyamuni Buddha was as beneficent as described in the ancient texts, there were probably people who thought he was a bore. In this complicated world of ours, a Buddha isn’t always what’s needed.

So, if you’re not aiming to make everybody happy and erase all social stress from your life, what are you trying to do in practice? Practicing with relationships is simply about expanding your attention beyond your own body-mind to your interactions, hoping to learn from them. Alleviating some of your own suffering frees up significant bandwidth in your body-mind, allowing you to look around and notice the fascinating beings that surround you. The focus, however, is still your own self: Your own sensations, thoughts, feelings, narratives, and behaviors.

Just as you address your suffering at two levels simultaneously, karma (the practical) and insight, you also aim to take care of your relationships at both levels. Sometimes it’s time to make practical changes in your relationships: Negotiate interactions, alter patterns, seek the help of a therapist or mediator, or even end relationships. Sometimes it’s helpful to learn more skillful ways of communicating, take leadership training, or join a parenting support group.

Looking at Your Relationships Through the Lens of Practice

When you look at your relationships through the lens of practice, you go through exactly the same steps described earlier, for when you are practicing with suffering. You reflect on your experience of body, heart, and mind. With stillness cultivated through zazen, you review some problematic or stressful aspect of a relationship with curiosity, noticing what follows what. What triggers the arising of tension, resistance, lack of connection, or conflict? After the trigger, what sensations, thoughts, and feelings arise in you? What narratives do you begin generating in your mind? If you got everything you desired in this situation or relationship, what would it look like? Suspend your judgment about whether your thoughts and feelings are accurate or justified and try to look objectively at the situation. Then ask yourself: What can I do, within my own body/heart/mind, to help reduce stress and increase understanding and connection here, regardless of what the other person involved does? What can I let go of here?

Note: Practicing with relationships in this way does not mean you simply try to reduce conflict by doing whatever other people want you to do and avoiding any behavior they don’t like. That is working at a karmic level, in any case, and it involves trying to remove yourself from the equation, as if that were possible. You will only cause further damage by suppressing your feelings and thoughts, squashing your own authenticity, denying your own desires and fears, or relying on someone else’s responses to you for your own happiness. (Of course, at a karmic level you also are unlikely to cultivate satisfying relationships if you go to the other extreme and demand that others constantly deal with and respond to your feelings and thoughts, desires and fears, and exuberant attempts to assert your authenticity and entitlement to happiness. The middle way is best.)

Ultimately, the persistent difficulties you have in relating to other beings are directly related to your sense of yourself. You need human relationships – the Buddha himself made this clear by designating Sangha, the community, as one of the Three Treasures of Buddhism – but as long as you depend on anything outside yourself for happiness, including other people, true peace of mind will elude you. Your true nature is eternal, joyous, selfless, and pure, but until you awaken to that for yourself, you’re inclined to seek satisfaction from others: A sense of worthiness based on their affection and admiration, a sense of connection based on their reliance on you, a sense of purpose based on the degree to which your activities are valued and recognized by others, etc.

You can find your practice edge by examining your relationships and noting where you are depending on them to meet your fundamental existential and spiritual needs. When you depend on others in this way, those relationships will be complicated by self-interest. This interferes with your ability to truly see and appreciate other people for who they are. In addition, you’re likely to experience a sense of insecurity or even paranoia about the state of the relationships on which you depend. You might think that you will become disinterested in people once you understand your true nature and don’t need them to affirm your completeness, but this isn’t the case at all. There are myriad reasons to cultivate relationships beyond fulfilling self-serving needs.

A practice edge related to your sense of self is generally a very important and fruitful one to explore. Growth in this respect usually comes with plenty of meditation and Dharma study, because that’s what expands your imagination when it comes to your true nature.

How should you find your practice edge and “practice for the sake of others” if you don’t have many – or any – people in your life? The only answer to that is: Get more people in your life or interact more with the people who are already there. To use a classic Zen image: It’s relatively easy to feel enlightened off alone on a mountaintop, but you only know the strength of your practice when you come back down to the marketplace and rub shoulders with other human beings.

Your Practice Edge When You Are “Practicing for the Sake of the Dharma”

To be honest, you continue to practice for the sake of your own suffering, and for the sake of others, your entire life. I don’t know anyone who is perfectly happy all the time and has nothing but completely harmonious, authentic, and intimate relationships. Still, there may come a time in your practice when you reach a sincere state of “good enough” – when your gratitude far outweighs any complaints you have, and when you find plenty of joy in your life. What, then, can motivate you to go deeper in your practice? What can light the fire of your Bodhicitta?

This is when – if you want to keep your practice alive – you should “practice for the sake of the Dharma.” What does that mean? Practicing for the sake of the truth itself. Hopefully, you will have encountered the relief, liberation, joy, and wonder that comes from awakening to new aspects of Reality-with-a-Capital-R and your true self-nature. Your practice can be motivated by sheer love for this process.

Still, it is easy to become complacent if your life is relatively easy, or to become distracted by all the activities in your life. There are many ways to find a practice edge based on love for the Dharma, but here are three suggestions:

1. Ask Yourself How You Truly Want to Live, and Contemplate Impermanence

Reflecting on the brief and ephemeral nature of life, ask yourself how you truly want to live. Focus on the experience and function of your body, mind, and heart. Leave aside questions about how to rearrange the practical aspects of your life such place of residence, livelihood, relationships, and decisions about the future. Before this lifetime is over, how do you really want to be? Also try to leave aside any “shoulds” that crop up in your imagination, whether these came from Buddhism or elsewhere. Try to connect with the still, small voice within you.

Your answer – or answers – to how you truly want to live are going to be very basic and fundamental. They’re not going to be that much different than how other people truly want to live. The answer isn’t about specifics, such as being a good parent, spouse, or employee, or cultivating intimate relationships. It’s not about starting a new project or achieving anything. It’s not about experiencing the world through travel, education, hobbies, music, or various forms of entertainment and excitement. Your answer, if you want to find your practice edge, is about how you respond to each moment. As you go about the activities of your life, what is the state of your body, heart, and mind? To what extent are you in contact with your Buddha-Nature at any given moment, and to what extent are you acting in accord with that nature?

Chances are good that at least one thing on this list will spark your interest:

I want to live with authenticity.
…courageously.
…with profound gratitude.
…with ease and trust, letting things flow through me instead of needing to control everything.
…with a sense of self-sufficiency coupled with an open and generous heart.
…attentively, appreciating each moment of this short and precious life.

Through practice, these kinds of aspirations can be fulfilled beyond our wildest dreams through a combination of karma work and insight. If you choose an aspiration that deeply resonates with you, that naturally inspires you, it can help you connect with the edge of your practice. The process of becoming more authentic, courageous, grateful, attentive, and free is infinite. As the fourth Bodhisattva vow states, “The Buddha Way is unsurpassable; I vow to embody it.” Where is the limit of your ease, trust, or generosity? This isn’t about adopting some ideal and constantly measuring yourself against it, it’s about connecting with and honoring your own heart’s deepest desire.

2. Be Attentive to What Remains Unresolved

Even if, for the time being, you aren’t exactly “suffering,” there are things that remain unresolved within you, such as habits that compromise the happiness of self and others, insecurities, inhibitions, fears, desires, resentments, sadness, judgmentalism, self-doubt, and compulsions.

Zen isn’t a self-improvement project, so how should you relate to these unresolved matters? It would be easy to view them as lingering flaws or sins and decide either 1) that you’re obligated to keep trying to fix them, or 2) that they’re minor enough that you don’t need to bother. Neither of these approaches is what we’re looking for. Instead, you let your unresolved issues show you where your growth points are.

Hopefully, at some point in your practice, you will begin to appreciate your true nature. This is the central point of Zen. You are complete and precious just as you are. Everything you truly need and long for is right here, right now… flaws and foibles, delusions and insights, failures and successes, suffering and bliss – nothing is excluded. It’s the whole picture that shines with luminous suchness. When you understand this, unresolved issues can be faced without a sense of shame or ambition.

At the same time, as Shunryu Suzuki said, “Each of you is perfect the way you are…and you can use a little improvement.”[i] We are never done growing, and the beautiful thing about practice is how rewarding it can be to get insight into your practice edges and learn to move beyond them. It’s not just about ridding yourself of bad habits or becoming a better person, it’s about expanding your sense of the Dharma and your ability to live in accord with your true nature.

To find your practice edge, you can ask yourself like this:

Where am I still feeling alienated from myself, or from others?
Where is the limit of my ability to extend Metta, or goodwill, to others, unconditionally?
What habits of body, speech, and mind still cause me to be caught in karmic patterns instead of being mindful and free?
When do I feel sad, angry, discouraged, anxious, depressed, resentful, or insecure?
What desires do I find myself chasing?

Once you identify a practice edge, you investigate the same way I described investigating your suffering. To some extent, doing this as part of your practice “for the sake of the Dharma” is just a matter of degree; the unresolved issues you are looking to better understand may not rise to the level of “suffering,” but they are still important opportunities for growth. Often, investigation of your unresolved stuff leads directly to – or requires – a deepening of your realization of the Dharma, so it’s best done within the context of continued zazen and Dharma Study.

3. Ask Yourself What You Have Not Yet Seen

Even after a lifetime of practice, you will never exhaust the previous two approaches to finding the edge of your practice. However, at times you may also want to find your practice edge by asking yourself what you have not yet seen.

The best way to explore what you have not yet seen is to engage in Dharma study. You can do this alone, or – better yet – with a Zen teacher. This doesn’t mean academic Dharma study where you try to accumulate knowledge or grasp the teachings intellectually. This means delving deeply and slowly into one teaching which is at first obscure to you, until it opens up.

Frankly, our imaginations are limited. It might be easy to study Zen for a few years and conclude you more or less understand it. This is a big mistake. I like to imagine the Dharma as being like New York City – vast, varied, rich, multidimensional. We might be inclined to think we “understand” the city because we’ve read a lot about it and watched a bunch of movies that took place there. Of course, our understanding might not be wrong, but it is very shallow. Then we might think we know New York City because we’ve visited a couple of times. Our experience of the city may indeed have been vivid, but after a while we’re just living on memories. (This is analogous to our having some openings in our practice and then sticking the memories in our pocket and carrying them around as pieces of knowledge we possess.)

The kind of direct experience of the Dharma we’re aiming for is, to continue the analogy, like living in New York City – becoming more and more intimate with it, until it’s a part of us and we’re a part of it. Until we’ve seen it in all kinds of weather, all times of the year. Until we’ve been happy there and sad there, fascinated and bored there. Until it would never occur to us to claim to understand the city.

The Dharma teachings from our ancestors describe territory you have not yet perceived and have not even been able to imagine. Ironically, of course, when you awaken to the Reality pointed out by our ancestors, you realize it has been there all along, so this is where my analogy of exploring new territory falls apart. Still, few of us know how to see beyond the limits of our current understanding and experience. We don’t know what we don’t know.

To find your practice edge in the teachings, find a classic Zen or Buddhist text – that is, one that has stood the test of time and dates back at least 150 years. Better yet, have a teacher who knows you assign you something. Choose something relatively short – a koan, or a teaching poem like the Sandokai, an essay by Dogen or some other Zen or Chan teacher, or one chapter of a larger text like a sutra. Wrestle with the text, reading it over and over, chewing on the words, interpreting the imagery for yourself, and inviting it into your zazen. Then, the only way I know to be sure you aren’t just settling into an intellectual understanding is to allow yourself to be tested on your relationship to the teaching. Do this with a teacher (this is what koan practice is all about), or perhaps through formal question-and-answer with fellow students.

Finding your edge through Dharma teachings is not about idle curiosity. Remember, your edge is something you deeply care about. It’s directly relevant to you and your life, even if you can’t say exactly how. For example, if you are studying Chan Master Hongzhi’s line, “inner illumination restores wonder,” it’s not very fruitful to arrive at an understanding that seated meditation practice (inner illumination) helps people appreciate their daily life more. That’s obvious. If you’ve chosen this line, it should resonate with you at a deep level. You want that wonder. You recognize a practice edge in the way your wonder is dampened by the thought that you’ve seen this all before. You want your true nature to be restored. What does this look like? Can you get intimate with wonder? Can you let it fill your whole being? And then, can you demonstrate wonder right here, right now?

Remember, you don’t have to frantically run around pushing all of your edges. Zen isn’t a self-improvement project. What’s valuable is engaging enough with your perimeter of growth that your Bodhicitta remains strong and your practice is inspired.