Challenges: Rapids In The Stream_2

Meditation practice is not linear. When we enter into a stream or a river it’s pretty hard to walk in a straight line. There is push and pull of the current, boulders and rocks to navigate. So coming to understand that our practice is stumbling around and sometimes backtracking before a clear leap forward is just part of the deal.
A couple of challenges that we will have to address in our practice is perfectionism and the idea of upward progress.

Transcript

So we're continuing on the topic of riding the rapids that come when we enter the stream of practice.

When we're building the muscle of self-awareness,

What happens is we start to really see old patterns that served us at one time but don't really serve us anymore and that we're kind of intentionally trying to step away from and break out of.

And so as we sit,

Often what happens is the past just comes kind of barreling into the forefront of our mind,

All the unfinished business of our life,

The emotional reactions and the habit patterns that we've accumulated really over a lifetime will rise up and it can completely derail our practice,

Maybe even stop us from practicing.

And ultimately,

These shaky moments,

You know,

They're going to keep happening,

But you know the practice is working when we handle them differently,

Maybe with patience,

A gentleness,

A capacity.

When you recognize that the darkness is kind of being made visible and use it as a signal to,

Okay,

Slow down,

Let it come and be patient with ourselves.

This is sort of confirmation that we are opening.

You can be present to the pain and you can be deeply stirred and you can be really confused and that weight that you feel of uncertainty and an inability to let go.

You know,

You can understand that in the middle of the storm.

You understand that you can be with this and you don't have to fuel it.

You don't have to add anything to it.

By adding tension to your attention,

It won't make it any better.

And this recognition is a sign of our growing wisdom.

It's affirming.

Dharma practice,

This practice of meditation that we do,

It's not linear.

You know,

When we think about this simile,

The metaphor of entering the stream or the river,

It's pretty hard to walk into the water in a straight line.

There's the pushing and the pulling of the current.

There's boulders and rocks that we have to navigate.

So coming to understand that our practice is kind of stumbling around and sometimes backtracking before there's a clear leap forward,

Before there's sand in the river and you can walk steadily.

It's just part of the deal and getting clear around that,

That there's going to be the rapids,

The boulders.

And a couple of the challenges,

A couple of these boulders that we will have to address in our practice at some point in different ways because we're different people,

Are the practices or the challenges of perfectionism and the idea of upward progress.

So I just want to spend a few minutes on these this morning.

You know,

With perfectionism,

We just long for it,

Don't we?

The perfect experience or the perfect partner or the perfect house or the perfect vacation or the perfect job or the perfect spiritual teacher.

And when we find them,

We want them to stay that way forever.

We want the house that never,

You know,

Doesn't have a saggy roof and the paint never has to peel.

We don't want to,

You know,

We never want to lose the glow of that beautiful part of the beginning of a relationship.

We certainly don't want to grow old and start sagging ourselves.

And we're taught to seek perfection in everything.

We're taught to seek perfection in ourselves.

Some years ago,

I read this quote and I heard this quote by the novelist Scott Maxwell.

He writes,

No matter how old a mother is,

She looks at her middle aged children for signs of improvement.

Yeah,

Yeah,

I think that happens.

We're conditioned.

We're conditioned to be vigilant.

We're conditioned to be the best.

We're conditioned to be just competitive,

To compete.

We're conditioned to be devious so that we won't get attacked.

All this stuff is conditioned.

And we're conditioned to be down on ourselves.

When we don't meet the standards of perfection that weren't created by us.

It's crazy.

And it's all part of our conditioning.

So one Zen master taught that to be free,

To be really free,

Is to be without anxiety about imperfection.

What would that be like?

Not to have anxiety about imperfection.

To be as you are and let others be as they are.

The messiness in these bodies and these emotions and what other bodies and emotions are doing.

Also messy.

That's the given,

Right?

So to be without anxiety is not to add that quality of wrongness or not good enough.

A story that illustrates this.

It was in 1971 and Ram Dass,

Who we all know is a spiritual teacher,

Was encouraged by his guru,

Reem Kiroli Baba,

To return to the United States from India to teach.

And Ram Dass was really hesitant about this.

He protested and said that he felt too impure and spiritually imperfect to teach.

And so what his guru did is he got up from his wooden seat and he took several minutes to circle around Ram Dass,

Like slowly and carefully peering at him from all sides.

Then he sat back down and he looked at Ram Dass deeply in the eyes and said,

I see no imperfection.

I see no imperfection.

So Ram Dass returned to the United States,

Bringing with him these teachings of pure love,

And he touched the lives of millions of people.

So perfectionism,

I just want to offer you some some clues or some signs when it's running.

When you hear should or shouldn't in your mind,

This is a clue.

Obsessive thinking is a clue.

When we get really busy,

This is a clue.

And in the moment,

Perfectionism is hard to catch.

I have a regular habit of perfectionism,

And generally the only way to see it happening is when I pause.

So I move really slow in my life most of the time so that I can catch it because I know it as a habit pattern.

I have to remember over and over again to be free is to be without anxiety about imperfection.

And then there's the challenge of getting somewhere in practice.

You know,

We have been fed on ascension,

You know,

The drive towards getting above our messy life.

We have this idea in our culture of always rising,

You know,

Always rising towards being successful or being capable or being in control.

Never defeated.

Never defeated.

My friend told me that the president of the United States,

The first thing he talked about was,

You know,

Our economy.

He didn't recognize what was happening in Turkey and Syria with the earthquake.

He just talked about our undefeated economy.

So that's the institutional piece of this ascension.

And we've been given this ideology that ascension is the proper direction in our spiritual life.

What's pure is rising.

It's better.

And ascension and perfection,

They're partners.

I like what Pammy Chodron has to say about ascension.

Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain.

We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top.

At the peak,

We transcend all pain.

The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind.

Our drunken brother,

Our schizophrenic sister,

Our tormented animals and friends,

Their suffering continues,

Unrelieved by our personal escape.

In the process of discovering awakening,

The journey goes down,

Not up.

It is as if the mountain points towards the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky.

Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures,

We move toward the turbulence and doubt.

We jump into it.

We move towards it however we can.

At our pace,

Without speed or aggression,

We move down,

Down,

Down.

And with us move millions of others,

Our companions in awakening from fear.

Our companions are sitting in the Zoom box right next to you.

We've been taught and conditioned about what's not welcomed.

There's these huge parts of ourselves that don't belong.

And we do a pretty thorough job at exiling these outcasted parts of ourselves,

The parts that don't measure up.

What we're learning is that we can only belong truly when we bring all parts of ourselves.

We bring the inferior into our conversations,

The outcasts.

We bring that into our marriage,

Into our friendships,

Into our community.

That's when aliveness and living in the world really begins.

When we can move towards these parts without an agenda,

Without trying to fix them or change them or improve them,

That's how they become integrated into our being.

So the invitation,

The offering is to become friendlier to our own life,

To become aware of our drivenness.

It's the drivenness that we cling to,

To be better,

To ascend to this perfectness.

And to just start connecting in with the,

You know,

Stay close and mindful to what's moving behind that drive,

Moving in the depths,

Because that's trying to invite your attention into the shadows and the edges.

There's so much richness in the shadows.

Many of you know the poem by Rumi called The Guesthouse.

And I encourage you to look it up or print it out and put it somewhere where you can see it,

Because it holds so much of what I'm describing this morning.

And I'll close with it.

So I encourage you to listen,

Listen with the ears of your heart and see how this lands for you.

This being human is a guest house,

Every morning a new arrival,

A joy,

A depression,

A meanness.

Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor,

Welcome and entertain them all.

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep our house empty of its furniture,

Still treat it like an honorable guest.

He may be cleaning you out for some new delight,

The dark thought,

The shame,

The malice,

Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Thank you for your consideration and your kind attention.

Reviews

Excellent. Thank you, Lisa!

I am right here. That is all that matters. Thank you! 💞💝🙏

Profoundly helpful and thought-provoking. Thank you very much for sharing this 🌟