Kitchen Sink Dharma

Waking up requires us to make some space, to find somewhere safe and quiet in our lives to explore. We need some stability from which to practise.  

If we can broaden our concept of practice so that it's not just about finding time to sit once a day, it changes everything. We find that in every moment that we're fully present to life with our hearts open, there's nothing missing. We have everything we need. Awakening doesn't require perfect conditions. It only requires a willingness to practise, to cultivate, to open up to that possibility.  

It's possible to see the path as a process of refinement, of perfecting even, but it's a good idea to leave our perfectionist tendencies behind if we can. We can train ourselves, get to know ourselves, explore our inner lives and cultivate peace, all of which will help us. But there's not even an ounce of happiness to be had from trying to create a perfect self.

A great deal of our mental bandwidth is taken up with craving. We don't recognise how much it organises our lives. It externalises happiness and makes us perpetually restless, a hostage to conditions. One skilful way of responding to craving when it arises is simply to bring it into awareness. We can then start to question it and understand it better. This is a recording of a talk for Insight North East from May 2024.

Our inner struggles often go on longer than they need to, but eventually they fade. Like everything, they're impermanent. Our clinging and reacting can't be sustained indefinitely. The ability to notice that, to watch our reactivity fade, is a powerful practice. We can't always observe it arising because we're too caught up in it, but we can notice its fading.

According to the Therigatha, the verses of the elder nuns, the Buddha showed concern and respect for women when no-one else did.  Since then, Buddhist lineages have tended to view men as being spiritually superior to women. Masculine energies and modes of practice have taken precedence over feminine ones. Despite this, many people are now actively working for change and exploring how they can restore the balance.

It's helpful every so often to ask ourselves what we're doing and why we're doing it. What habits are we reinforcing and what kind of life are we building for ourselves? What it is that we're cultivating? And if we have a spiritual practice of any kind, maybe to ask ourselves whether that practice is helping us to respond to our world more skilfully. The Buddha's teachings encourage us to hold our practice lightly. To apply what we've learned in a practical way, not to encumber ourselves with it.

Often the path requires us to embrace apparent contradictions. Some of our practice has to be understood from different perspectives, depending on how we're going to apply it. Training ourselves to stay with the opposites helps us keep our minds pliable and open. It counteracts our tendency to fit everything we hear into our existing world view.    

One way to practise fearlessness and a more open, receptive relationship with our world is through the Brahmaviharas, also known as the heart practices. These four qualities of friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity describe our potential for emotional and psychological freedom. They're capacities that already exist in us. By cultivating them, we're making them our natural home.

The Buddha's disciple Ananda appears throughout the early scriptures as someone who was faithful, humble and above all, human. In many ways, he wasn't the perfect monk. There are occasions when his sensitivity and his expressions of grief seem at odds with the Buddha's teachings on non-attachment and impermanence. His honesty makes him an excellent role model. It's easy to get uptight and self-absorbed about our practice. If we can be completely honest about our imperfection, our complete lack of enlightenment, the times when we lose our equilibrium and the times when sadness overwhelms us, then we open up to being fully alive.

There are parts of ourselves that we choose not to share with the world, patterns and beliefs that we don't want to acknowledge, even to ourselves. If you ever notice yourself reacting or becoming lost in rumination, there's an opportunity to learn about yourself. It might be time to shift your attention from the outside world back inside.

In our meditation practice we're not trying to rise above the raw and messy. We're not trying to transcend our humanness. We're practising opening to our tenderness, our vulnerability, our sensitivity, our insubstantial nature.

Our experience of body and mind is constantly changing. That means our sense of self keeps changing. There's nothing solid to hang on to. Our need for security means we spend a lot of time and energy trying to hang on anyway, and that clinging generates a lot of our suffering and dissatisfaction. With practice, we start to see just how insubstantial the sense of self really is. We see that it's just part of the flow of experience.

The Pali word ‘saddhā' is often translated as ‘faith', but a better translation might be ‘trust' or ‘confidence'. Saddhā conveys a willingness to engage in and commit to practice. There's no need for belief in a higher power or a deity because saddhā is grounded in direct personal experience.

Just as we can bring mindfulness to the body in stillness, we can bring it to the body in movement. With movement meditation, we're practising away from the traditional mode of just sitting still.  Feelings in the body and feelings in the mind are intimately connected. Awareness of one supports awareness of the other. Movement in one supports movement in the other.

Whatever feelings we refuse to accept will simply keep agitating us until we accept them. Purification happens when we stop, listen to the body and allow feelings to be just as they are. If we keep doing that, over and over again, the habits of reactivity and clinging are gradually eradicated.

One of the reasons we practise meditation is to train ourselves to handle all of the ups and downs, from the smallest irritations to the greatest sorrows in our lives. The teachings on the seven factors of awakening, which can be seen as a map of the territory, describe a series of steps that lead us to a place of steadiness and resilience.

The unconscious mind is incredibly powerful. It has the capacity to process information more quickly and more efficiently than our conscious mind. But it can be prone to errors and biases. Emotional resistance clouds our intuitive wisdom. We're more likely to be misled by feelings if we're putting a lot of energy into our sense of self. Knowing a little about how the mind works helps us to see more clearly. This is a recording of a talk given to Insight North East in June 24.

When we meditate, we find out things about ourselves, like how easily we're distracted. Sometimes when we have difficulty concentrating, we're simply unwilling to accept what's happening right now. What's really going on is avoidance. By sensing into the energy in the body, we're tuning in to the present moment. We're saying ‘this is what's happening, right now, and it's fine'.

As humans we have a natural negativity bias. We're acutely sensitive to things that upset or trouble us. Our capacity for gratitude and appreciation counteracts this. Acknowledging the good in our lives supports our sense of wellbeing and makes us less prone to depression.  

Expecting pleasant feelings to remain stable means fighting against reality. Everything that arises passes; feelings change, often within a few seconds. And yet still we react and cling as though our lives depend on it.

We're not meditating so that we can rise above all that's wrong in the world. Sometimes we have to engage with it. Sometimes we have to speak out against what's unjust, and not from a place of hate and anger, but with openness and compassion. This is the challenge of our lives.

In our culture, saying someone is harmless isn't necessarily considered a compliment, but it's a big deal in early Buddhist teachings. There's a protective quality to the teachings on goodwill and non-harming. Harming other beings harms us, just as helping others helps us. The consequences of our karma, in other words our actions, can be long term.  This talk was offered to Insight North East in April 2024

Your habits aren't who you are. When you notice yourself reacting to something, it's just a pattern, a movement of energy. It's not who you are, it's a fleeting reaction. One minute it's there, the next it's gone. You don't have to identify with it. To see that is to be free.

Our need for security shapes the way we live. Most of us take refuge in our own home, our possessions, our bank account and there's nothing wrong with that. We can mostly rely on our home to keep us warm and comfortable, our car to get us where we want to go, but we can't rely on these things for more than that. They're not going to offer us lasting peace and happiness. They're not going to make us feel complete. If we put unrealistic expectations on anything, we'll be disappointed. This talk was offered to Insight North East in March 2024

If you notice that you're lost in repetitive thinking, it's not a bad thing at all. It's a perfect opportunity to learn and grow. The instruction is simply to recognise, without judgment, what's happening: ‘This agitation has arisen and, like everything, it'll pass'. And gradually, it loses its grip.

We can take responsibility for our intentions and our actions. We can try to live ethically. But we can't control everything that happens around us and neither can anyone else. If we understand this, there's no place for ill will, there's no blame. The only thing that makes sense is compassion.

We can't change the way we are through willpower alone. But we can patiently observe our experience, knowing that our essential goodness is there, watering it, nurturing it, giving it space to grow. This takes us much closer to our deepest intentions than willpower ever can

The idea of ‘letting go' comes up a lot in the Dharma. We're taught that our suffering comes from our tendency to grasp and cling. Letting go of suffering isn't achieved through an act of will. It happens when we cultivate certain qualities, from which our suffering and stress start to fall away by themselves.

  Most of us get agitated many times during the course of a day. It's part of being human. We often respond to stress in ways that make it worse. If instead we practise  reconnecting with the body and breath, we learn to release unhelpful patterns. We learn that it's possible to live with steadiness and openheartedness, no matter what happens to be going on around us.

Most of us hide our demons, even from ourselves. Even if we're ashamed of our anger or frightened of our vulnerability, it's always possible to work with those energies and learn to relate to them differently.

We exist in the midst of a flow of phenomena and we're part of that flow. Everything depends on everything else and everything contains everything else. Seeing reality in this way, as an infinitely vast net of interconnected phenomena, is to view the world through awakened eyes.

Anxiety affects how we perceive the world; it can take all of the joy out of life. We can train ourselves to respond to anxiety and stress by developing the habit of mindfulness, by learning to calm ourselves, by bringing the attention to the breath & body when we're having a small meltdown. That way, when the bigger stresses arise, we already have a set of skills we can employ.

Mindfulness of breathing is a simple practice; there's no need for complicated instructions. We simply return to the sensations of breathing gently and gracefully, over and over. It's also an incredibly powerful practice. Early Buddhist teachings describe how mindfulness of breathing can take you all the way to full awakening.

Mindful speech is a form of spiritual practice. The teachings on how we speak to each other are there to open a sense of enquiry. In other words, working out what's helpful and what's unhelpful, what causes agitation, stress and suffering, and what alleviates it.

Everything is impermanent, everything arises and passes. Nothing can offer us lasting satisfaction. And there is no fixed, permanent thing called the self, just a number of processes constantly shifting and changing. Understanding this on a conceptual level isn't enough; we only liberate ourselves by observing it in our moment-to-moment experience.

We tend to be drawn towards drama. It generates a sense of aliveness but it's also exhausting. Mindfulness helps us become disenchanted with our dramas and our reactivity so that we can start to make peace with ourselves.

Early Buddhist teachings encourage us to live a life with intention and not to wander aimlessly, always reacting to our experience. If our intentions are kind and compassionate, our actions are going to be skilful. They'll lead us to a liberated, awakened life.

Nothing appears out of nowhere; everything arises out of previous conditions. Everything, no matter how solid it appears to be, is simply process. This is what we call emptiness. The point of understanding and knowing emptiness is to relieve our distress. Once we truly see emptiness, we no longer have to carry the burden of hostility and dissatisfaction around with us. Instead, we can relax and enjoy our world.

We all carry a burden. Generosity is a practice that lightens our burden. It helps us to understand that we're all interconnected with each other and with the Earth. It opens the heart. We don't have to feel generous to incline towards generosity, we can just get on with it.

We live in an incredible time for cross-pollination of ideas, including ideas about how to live in this world, with access to more information than ever about religious and spiritual traditions. For anyone looking for a practice, there's no shortage of options from which to choose a path. However, at some point, if we really want to wake up, it's important to stop window shopping and to start engaging seriously with one practice.   

Mindfulness of breathing is taught as a direct and simple approach to waking up. It's always available to us, not just when we're practising formal meditation. It's available at the traffic lights, in the supermarket or when we're stuck behind a computer screen. We can practise it anywhere, anytime.

In Buddhist teachings, fire is used as a metaphor to describe reactivity. Much of our waking life is spent burning with discontent. Fire is also the element of transformation. When we learn to engage with this cycle of confusion and pain, we can use it as fuel for awakening.

Entering the stream means starting to see through delusion and believing, knowing that things can be different. To enter the stream means to embrace life and change the way we live. Life is no longer blocked; it starts to flow.

This path isn't about living in a perpetual state of bliss. It's about being in the present moment, whatever that happens to look like. Walking in your bare feet sometimes. Sleeping on the hard ground. If we're really going to benefit from our practice, we have to be prepared to engage with the earth as well as the sky.

When you first started meditating, did you notice how hard it was to still the mind with all that mental chatter going on? As we practise meditation, we learn that it's possible to stabilise the attention, to calm the mind and to train ourselves in mindfulness.

Buddhists talk a lot about suffering, but a joyful attitude is at the heart of the whole awakening process. So is a passionate engagement with life. As soon as we stop generating misery and drama, joy is there.

Pain is a process, it's not solid, it's more like a verb than a noun. Instead of identifying with the pain as our pain, we can breath into it. We can allow it to arise and pass in its own time. We can make it our teacher.

We already possess the capacity to be truly at peace, in the present moment. Inside each of us is a great well of happiness and contentment. We tend to think that a particular experience, an external circumstance will make us happy and complete. But external conditions are a pale reflection of the capacity for true contentment that exists inside us.

The world makes multiple, relentless demands on our attention. We live in an attention economy and it's constantly agitating us, often without us even noticing. Where we direct our awareness is up to us. The choices we make can have a profound effect on our precious minds and on how we experience the world.

Sometimes meditation feels effortless and other times even just showing up to meditate is really hard. The good news is that it doesn't matter that much whether your practice is sweet and sublime or an uphill battle. If you can get the balance of effort right, it'll lead you towards freedom either way.