Meditation is something that I’m passionate about. What I’ve noticed recently is that it’s self-reinforcing. I love sharing it with people, and the more I do that, I’ve noticed that it helps my life too.
When we share our practice with others, we naturally help them, and they naturally help us. It is strange, because ostensibly we’re doing “nothing.” We’re intentionally doing nothing; sitting still and breathing together. But we’re doing it together, which is really important. When we all go deep, and rest our minds, and do it together, we get closer to others. Why?
I don’t know how it works, but over the last 12 years I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, and I have a hypothesis. I’m an anthropologist in spirit, and all throughout college (when I first started practicing) I learned about all the different ways that human are social beings. We’ll do anything to be with other people: play and watch sports, long and elaborate role-playing games; we’ll even be destructive to get each others’ attention, even if it’s negative attention, we still want it. We crave each other’s presence in our lives.
I think that’s because we reflect each other. We see ourselves in other people. And the funny thing about Buddhist philosophy is that it points directly to the things that are perhaps the most uncomfortable aspects of our lives: everything comes to an end, everything breaks down, order returns to entropy. We don’t want it to be that way, but this is how the world works. This is truth. And when we come together to drop everything, as in meditation practice, we recognize that we all share that reality. Nothing is what we think it is. Life doesn’t quite fit right, like a wheel that doesn’t quite fit its axle, a suit or dress that maybe fits a bit too small in certain parts or maybe altogether. We need a community that recognizes this.
As I’ve formed and joined communities of practice, I’ve noticed this gratitude for others who recognize the need to drop everything. In those communities we share how we came to meditation in the first place, what keeps us doing it, and what insights we’ve gained. There are as many variations of the story as there are humans beings in this world. But the common thread is this: I want something, I can’t get it, so I’m suffering. Even if it’s I want to feel happy, I want to feel normal, it’s still a great relief to hear people speak to the uncomfortable truths of their lives. Our suffering connects us like a great universal loom weaving us togethers like fibers in a tapestry. I found myself saying this recently to a friend of mine I was talking on the phone with who I met through practice: thank you for your suffering. It helped you be there for me.
Suffering is real, it’s normal, it’s an ever-present aspect of the fabric of our human lives. But as human beings, we have the capacity to wake up to what causes that suffering. We also have an opportunity to drop all the wanting, and deluded thinking, and anger that leads to this suffering. And the best way to do that is to enter into community with others who also wish to investigate the roots of discomfort in their lives. We support each other in silence, in conversation, in movement. When we drop everything and just be still, just look, then our suffering gets digested and transforms into wisdom. Wisdom is suffering made useful. And it’s not just my suffering that is useful to me. Your suffering helps transform my suffering, and my suffering helps transform yours.
So thank you. Thank you for having the courage to bury your suffering deep in the compost heap of practice, so that it can transform into wisdom that you can use to help others. We need more people like you.
Thank you for your suffering. Keep up the good work.