Post one of ten, in section Buddhism
Dharma
the basic principles of cosmic and individual existence; the mystery and intelligence that permeates all things, including you
Dharma practice is about getting directly in touch with the true nature of experience. It’s worth recognising that this is a difficult and counterintuitive thing to do for a lot of people.
An aspect of how dharma practice can be counterintuitive is that we live in a culture where people are socialised to believe that learning happens from reading books or from listening to someone standing at the front of a classroom.
This is very effective at transmitting a certain type of knowledge, but it requires cutting through this idea if you want to get intimately in touch with your true nature or the true nature of the Universe.
For practice to be meaningful, there needs to be a balance between lots of different ways of getting in touch with experience, including things like personal practice, transmission, inspiration, stopping overefforting, listening to other’s wisdom, learning practical tools and knowledge, and developing intimacy with your direct experience.
There are lots of things in experience that stop you from being present, and I think that the amount of complexity and hard work it takes to be present means that often people prefer to listen to other people talk about Dharma than to practice it.
Teachers and practices that help you live in a way that truly invites more depth, intimacy, and clarity are important in the process, and it’s good to be careful not to get this confused with people who just have clever-sounding ideas.
Meditation Practices
There are a lot of tools and techniques that can help you become more present with experience, and the level of nuance and depth at which they can be applied tends to get richer and more interesting as time goes on.
The best practices are pretty simple at their core.
An analogy for learning a lot of meditation skills is like learning to walk. In theory, walking is a very simple skill, but once you are capable of it, it creates almost infinite possibilities of where you can go. In the same vein, something like a simple noting practice can open up doors in experience that can take you to all sorts of interesting and unexpected places in experience.
Some practices and insights, like Vipassana noting and the three characteristics, are fractal in their nature. They’ve been developed by someone who has experienced an aspect of true nature that applies at every level and can be used at any phase of the path.
“The level of complexity and richness and detail would just keep going”
David Lassiter, from our conversation about Long-Term Vipassana Retreat
Therapy
Some therapy tools are as helpful for providing insight into true nature as meditation practices, and I feel it’s important to include this in a holistic understanding of dharma. A large part of experience is emotional and subconscious, and depth psychology gives you the tools to be able to awaken these aspects of experience. They are a direct route to wholehearted presence, which most meditation practices don’t facilitate.
Working on the emotional level in a skilled way and purposefully engaging with the depths of the inner world is just as vital to seeing true nature as meditative insights.
The development of modalities such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy has opened up a lot of possibilities for deep practice in a therapeutic context.
The success of most traditional talk therapies largely hinges on the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the client. In comparison, IFS has an underlying mechanism that people can continue to work with to develop more presence in the same way as with a meditation practice.
IFS is designed on the basis of people having a kind of Buddha Nature or fundamental goodness at their core, which IFS calls ‘self-energy.’ Through the process of self-inquiry, you are moving towards more capacity for openness, presence, and clear-seeing (being in self-energy) and slowly removing layers of the things that keep you out of this.
During an IFS therapy session, the therapist models self-energy and holds space for the client to get in touch with this in themselves, much like a Dharma teacher might model being in connection with Buddha Nature (or some kind of deeper truth).
Over time, the client accumulates the tools to explore and engage with the fullness of their inner world, including integrating parts that keep them out of self-energy. This can lead to deeper insights about experience as well as the capacity to be present in a more direct way, much like a meditation practice.
For example, once you have done some guided IFS therapy, you can understand that you have these aspects of yourself in your inner world:
- ‘Exiles’ or feelings that you don’t want to feel
- ‘Managers’ or parts that have a job to manage reality in some way
- ‘Firefighters’ or parts that are there to rescue you when unwanted exiles are coming to the surface
- And ‘self-energy’ or the part of you that is open, loving and spacious
IFS gives you some methods for working with these different parts in order to get insights from the different aspects of your being and create more self-energy.
People who don’t do any therapeutic work in their practice tend to have big shadows in experience. There can be a distinct lack of real self-energy available in people who are trying to avoid true vulnerability and openness through their spiritual practice.
In communities with people that do a lot of meditation and very little therapy, ‘meditator parts’ or ‘awakened parts’ can be very common. People are secretly trying to control experience while imitating the language or ways of being of ‘someone who is awake’.
If you would like to hear more about how therapeutic modalities and specifically IFS can contribute to awakening, I recorded this podcast with Joost Vervoort.
Synthesis
There’s enormous potential for meditation practices to be synthesised with depth psychology. There is a quality and depth of opening that can only happen when both are combined.
To get a flavour of this, there are a couple of really powerful examples of where Buddhist practices and depth psychology practices have been combined really skilfully.
One is the Feeding Your Demons practice, created by Tsultrim Allione. It combines aspects of Gestalt Therapy with Chöd. If you’d like to try it, here is a session run by Chandra Easton at the Berkeley Alembic.
Another is the Warrior’s Solution retreat, by Ken McLeod. It uses Vajrayana Buddhist practices combined with visualisation exercises designed to work through subconscious patterns that keep you out of empowered presence.
“Freedom is not a state; it is a process. It is something you are, not something you have. In freedom, there is a continual releasing of reactive material as it arises in each moment of experience.”
– Ken McLeod
Synthesising the insights and realisations from Jungian style depths with Buddhist awakenings is a large part of what my personal process was about. The realisations that come from combining both views open up new possibilities for wholeness and presence in people.
Creating practices that transmit this way of being is an area I’m continually exploring and is, in part, where the practice I created – Shared Imaginal Practice – emerged from.
What Is Dharma?
One thing to be mindful of is that the dominant Western scientific paradigm offers people a certain way of being in the world. It has a very narrow perspective on what reality is and a very limited idea of what it means to be human in this world. Its methods of teaching and transmitting information tend to reflect this.
There are other paradigms that offer different ways of being, and it’s worth understanding that the environments that people practice in, the way that people treat each other, and the deepest truths that people believe all radically change what Dharma and practice look like.
Being in touch with Buddha Nature (or true nature) is not about having a certain insight or perspective on the world; it’s about how experience flows when it is not distorted by fear, greed and resistance.
Buddha Nature can be felt when aliveness can naturally flow in its own deepest truth and dignity; it is what remains when strategies can be left behind and you are in direct intimacy with experience. Being Buddha Nature is the capacity to see things clearly and the capacity to be present with the full spectrum of experience, including pain, without collapsing or turning it into identity.
Being in touch with Buddha Nature is being in touch with the uncompromising truth of reality.
Getting more deeply in touch with Buddha Nature happens through a number of means. For example, by people learning to sit with themselves in silence and pay attention to their experience without reacting or needing to express anything; through people being invited to explore their shadow and unlock new emotional depths and insights; or by people being invited into new experiences that they couldn’t have imagined were possible before.
It can also happen through many other both explicit and subtle ways that can take lifetimes to refine and can come from many different sources, but ultimately are judged as effective by the question, ‘does this lead you into deeper intimacy with and clear recognition of true nature?’