On the one side, I'm inspired this morning by the fact that in the literature of the world's great spiritual traditions, you don't see a lot of ordinary people doing ordinary practice, day-by-day, with consistency, and consistent results.
What do we see instead? Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and fasted. Rumi gave up all the trappings of his life and acted crazy/drunk. When the Buddha got renunciation, he left his wife and child. Many of the early Buddhist masters and yogis also ran off from their lives to live in austerity. The Christian desert fathers did so too. Ascetics from the Vedic traditions seem to imply that the world is impure, and the way to reach spiritual realization is by enforcing a separation from it.
The early Buddhist Geshes (Spiritual Teachers) advise us to practice as if our hair was already on fire (from being reborn in the hell realms of that tradition).
Personally, I find the stories of these past and current masters to be very inspiring, but in our modern interpretation, they miss an important element: That these great Beings were often seen to have a specific "karma" or life path that required they practice in this way. Other masters, with different "karma" like Marpa, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, lived as householders, ran a business, and still communed deeply with the spiritual world.
Modern Teachers, too, sometimes advise their students to take up a more conventional life, rather than go in for the granduer that is invoked by extreme spiritual athleticism.
In the Zen tradition, there is a lot of talk about being "ordinary", not letting ambition sink you into a type of attachment, and yet there may be many Zen practitioners who feel that unless they are doing multiple hours of "meditation" every day on their cushion, or multiple retreats per year, they are not really practicing.
The truth is, that there is a kind of survivorship bias in the stories we read. Those masters who "succeeded" are the ones who get to tell their tale. The countless beings who tried to go off in a cave and meditate but died don't make the history books. The ones who went without sleep in favor of their Zazen sitting but developed an anxiety disorder instead of a Kensho (experience of realization) are not spoken of as much.
I think we need to start speaking of them. When the only rhetoric about spiritual practice is that the harder you try, the better the results you will get, people will think that if their spiritual practice is not bearing fruit, the answer is to just try harder. And if trying harder doesn't work, or pushes you backward in your practice, the answer must be that something is wrong with you.
The answer, I believe is in the slogan given by the Daoist master Share K. Lew, when he said: "Daoist way is not forced." To me, I interpret this to mean that one must go along with things as they are, not trying to force things to be different. If you see that you have the "karma" to be a householder right now, with people depending on you, with debts to pay off, then that is your spiritual practice. When you settle into the fact that you may only be able to do 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening of formal meditation, you can finally relax wondering whether you are a "real" meditator. You can set realistic results, and judge your progress by the numerous scientific studies and anecdotes from other practitioners.
Above all, you can let go of the notion that there is a "right" way to do things, and a "wrong" way. There have been realizers of every station in life. Some Sufi masters have a husband/wife and kids, others wander in the desert as mystics. Even others have taken specific periods to do each style and then switch to the alternate. The great Yogi Milarepa had to undergo deep asceticisms and pain to attain realizations, but his master, Marpa was a farmer when he met him.
What if the life-circumstances, mind, and body you are in right now was the perfect one for you to practice with? What if instead of looking for a lesson somewhere far off, you took what life was already giving you as the deepest challenge you could possibly face to your presence, ethics, and worldview? And coming into that deep kind of presence in your life, what if you could set realistic goals, starting where you are, and see yourself succeeding? What if this began to make you happier, more grounded, and better able to serve all those around you? These seem like very realistic and attainable goals to me!
In the next installment, we'll talk about the other side of being realistic, not setting your goals too low... until then, happy cultivating!
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