“We call this ‘practice’ and it’s called practice for a reason. We’re practicing how to meet life, how to meet our experience. And meditation is just a simplified way to practice that. We’re not practicing to become good meditators, we’re practicing how to be with our experiences, both the joys and sorrows, how to be with life more fully, with more intimacy, with more possibility for joy and freedom.” – Sebene Salassie
As I’m typing these words, I’m staying at an inn in the village of Mendocino. The property – originally “a private residence for Mrs. Henry Wilson” – was built in 1917 and I’m in a room that receives the early morning sun. At the moment, I’m drinking black coffee and listening to the sound of the space heater beside me and to occasional traffic passing by in the distance. Through the north facing window, I can see magnolia and madrone trees in the yard outside. I’m here on a bit of a solo getaway and I was just re-listening to a dharma talk from a retreat that I attended a few years back. When I heard the words below, I pushed pause on the recording and wrote them down:
“When we’re in an environment of silence, there’s a different kind of listening that can happen. Something can emerge, something can show itself; something that’s in our hearts and in our minds. To me, there’s a kind of purity in that. What does it mean to be willing to stay here with what this mind and body are doing right now? To not turn away but to be here, to stay here? The request, as much as we can, is to cultivate a stillness of body, an openness of mind, and to see what happens.” Max Erdstein, Say Yes To Life
So much of the practice, in my experience, is “seeing what happens” when we meet this life of ours in its barest form, without distraction. In an article called The Weather of Emotion, first published in Inquiring Mind magazine (now out of print), Marie Mannschatz expressed that “Our experience of the inner world structures our experience of the outer world. A deep understanding of our emotional life is therefore the ground for our well-being.” However, as many of us know, acquiring that deep understanding can be, at times, a rough road to travel. That’s just the truth of it. Unadorned. Most of us come to the practice of mindfulness to cultivate more peace, ease and equanimity in our lives; but, as we begin to walk this path, we quickly begin to encounter the first of The Four Noble Truths: The Truth of Suffering.
In his book Dancing With Life: Buddhist Insights For Finding Meaning And Joy In The Face Of Suffering, Phillip Moffitt writes, “The Buddha’s teaching of The Four Noble Truths begins with the injunction that if you are to attain liberation, you must understand and fully experience how your life is entwined and defined by ‘dukkha,’ meaning your mental experiences of discomfort, pain, anxiety, stress, instability, inadequacy, failure, and disappointment, each of which is felt as suffering in your mind. This teaching is referred to as the The Truth of Suffering.”
Sound encouraging? Maybe not. But then again, the Buddha does refer to this as a Noble Truth. Not an Endless Pain And Misery Truth.
In my experience, healing on the path doesn’t begin to metabolize until we start working with the raw material within our hearts and minds. It’s that simple. The gateway to more peace, ease and equanimity involves a willingness to walk through the garden of our pain, overwhelm, fear and heartbreak. But the the First Noble Truth doesn’t imply that we simply lay down in that garden and sink into the soil (although something inside me can find a sense of beauty within that kind of surrender!), it’s more about developing an intimate relationship with our present moment experience so that we can learn to cultivate more clarity, compassion and wisdom in our lives. The Truth of Suffering is tender ground to walk upon but rich in its potential for healing, integration and release.
Right now, as you read these words, Buddhist monks from north Texas are engaged in a Walk for Peace that involves a pilgrimage, by foot, from their home base in Fort Worth to Washington D.C. Many are following this inspiring journey on social media but it has not been without its share of hardship. At one point, outside of Houston, as the monks were walking on the side of a highway, a truck accidentally hit their escort vehicle which, in turn, was pushed forward and injured two of the monks. One monk sustained a serious leg injury that involved being flown by helicopter to a nearby hospital for surgery. Even with such an event taking place, the Walk for Peace continued and still continues. In a recent social media post, the monks reported:
Sometimes, the road we walk is not lined with crowds or filled with welcoming voices. Sometimes, it is just us, the silence, and the path ahead. Peace does not depend upon applause or recognition. It does not require witnesses or perfect conditions. It does not fade when the road becomes difficult or when we walk alone through the mud. Peace walks with us in the silent moments just as much as in the celebrated ones. It is here in the steady rhythm of our steps, in the breath we take while navigating slippery ground, in the choice to keep moving forward when no one is watching. The world may not always see our journey. The path may not always be smooth or clear. But the work of cultivating peace continues — in the quiet, in the challenge, in the simple act of placing one foot in front of the other, again and again.
What forms of peace and letting go might be available to us if we turned our hearts towards the truth of the present moment without resistance or wanting things to be otherwise? What might be possible if we stopped rowing against the current and simply allowed ourselves, in this moment, to be still?
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