The Long Way to Peace,
Re-Centering the Dharma It's a lovely thing to find relaxation in meditation.
When I began practicing,
That was the only thing I thought meditation was for.
That's what the app sold me.
Peace,
Calm,
Serenity,
Good vibes.
In some ways that worked.
My practice changed the way I related to my body and my mind in profound ways.
But it didn't change the way I related to my world and the suffering I felt until my practice met the Dharma.
I've come to know the meaning of Dharma as the natural way things unfold.
But it's most commonly known as the teachings of Gautama,
The Enlightened One,
Aka the Buddha.
Before meeting the Dharma for myself,
It was like trying to grow flowers without dirt.
This is a common move in the West,
To teach Buddhist outcomes without naming Buddhist teachings.
The wisdom is still there,
But the lineage is scrubbed clean.
Some of the most influential breakthroughs in modern mental health come directly from these teachings of the Buddha.
But you'd never know it,
Though.
The serial numbers have all been scratched off.
Here's a few.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction,
By Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Internal Family Systems,
Or IFS,
By Dick Swarch.
Then there's ACT,
Or Acceptance Commitment Therapy,
By Stephen Hayes.
Or DBT,
Or Dialectical Behavior Therapy,
By Marshall Linhan.
There's so many of these.
The list is pretty long.
And to be fair,
This wasn't a con.
It was a strategy.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has been open about the fact that he trained the practice on purpose,
So it could survive in hospitals,
Universities,
And ordinary life without getting dismissed as flaky.
He says,
I bent over backwards to make sure that mindfulness wasn't Buddhism,
That it wasn't New Age,
That it wasn't Eastern mysticism,
So that it would be acceptable in mainstream.
And in his writing,
He talks about how one of a possibly infinite number of skillful means for bringing the Dharma into mainstream settings.
Now,
That move definitely opened up doors for millions of people to practice.
But it also created a Western environment where people can receive half the Buddhist outcomes,
While never meeting the whole Buddhist Dharma.
In the Western world,
We like our shortcuts to peace.
But we should beware of shortcuts to peace.
Today,
My practice looks a bit different.
It still offers a great deal of peace and calm,
But not in the way it once did.
It feels more like that scene in the Christian Bale version of Batman Begins,
Where he trains to become some kind of samurai in the League of Shadows.
You remember this?
Then he goes back to Gotham,
Still as Bruce Wayne,
And meets his deepest fear,
Bats.
He descends into this dark cave,
Surrounded by thousands of bats,
Engulfed by the very thing that once paralyzed him with fear.
He doesn't fight them.
He doesn't escape.
He stands still in the middle of it all,
And rises from that walking nightmare as the Batman.
For a long time,
My meditation practice was the opposite of that.
If anything distracted me—noise,
Discomfort,
Restlessness,
Big emotions—I thought this wasn't a good meditation.
The conditions were quiet,
Clean,
And serene.
I thought the practice was a failure.
Now I've come to learn that my distractions aren't distractions at all.
If everything is calm and pleasant,
If nothing is tugging at me,
It's usually when the practice produces the least amount of insight for me.
The discomforts,
The interruptions,
The agitations,
Those aren't distractions.
They're—they are the curriculum.
They are the entire curriculum.
They are the entire point.
What I'm learning is how to include everything.
To be open and flexible like seaweed on the ocean floor.
Bending,
Swaying,
Moving with turbulence,
Rather than rigid like a dry twig in a windstorm that snaps the moment the pressure gets too real.
Off the cushion,
This has changed everything for me too.
My practice now teaches me that the things that scare me,
The rooms that I want to leave,
The conversations I want to exit,
The sensations that tell me I can't be here,
Those are the exact practices where my power is waiting to teach.
Those are the places where true peace is forged by fire.
So instead of bolting,
I'm training to stay.
Instead of numbing or drugging or rolling,
I'm training to feel.
Instead of running,
I'm training to stand still.
If I can stare the things that I'm convinced I can't do in the eye,
The things I'm sure I can't live without,
I learn my power.
That's when my meditation practice meets the dharma.
It's a much longer road to peace and a bumpier road too.
But the calm I'm learning now doesn't come from forcing myself to relax.
It comes from allowing myself to wake up.
From opening the eyes of my heart instead of armoring it.
This is what is called the bodhicitta or the awakened heart.
The willingness to stay present with what is,
Even when it's uncomfortable or frightening or feels impossible.
I don't practice so that I can escape the world anymore.
I practice so that I can stand fully inside of it.
And these are some times right now in life where finding a way to stand still is difficult.
Like Bruce Wayne,
Without the muscles or the money or the samurai moves,
I'm discovering I can do all kinds of things I thought that I couldn't every day.
And by learning that,
I can be still in the very places I want to run from.
I found a deeper,
More sustaining,
Almost supernatural calm.
The kind the dharma has been pointing to all along.
