Community

Hello!

We were on an Order of Interbeing retreat at the Deer Park Monastery this past week. The three of us from the Sangha House went, as well as some other friends from the LA Compassionate Heart Sangha, to meet with about 40 young practitioners from around the country (and continent) who came to explore becoming lay monastics in the Plum Village tradition. It was a blast. Here are a few photos.

We we will resume our regular schedule this week with meditation Wednesday evening, 6/11 at 7 PM.

Now, on to a reflection from Garrett.

In November of last year I got into rock climbing. Or rather, I got back into it. My friend and Center for the Working Poor community member Brandon finally prevailed on me, and I joined the gym he goes to. Climbing is a uniquely social sport. For one thing, you’re only ever really climbing a fraction of the time. The rest of the time you’re resting, lounging, chatting. At the same time, the routes are creatively challenging, and it helps to get the “beta” from another climber, i.e. to see how they solve the problem. Finally, in top-rope climbing, your partner literally has your life in your hands, and around their waist. They hold the rope that catches you when you fall, and maintain the tension that keeps you from landing on your neck as you are lowered back down the wall.

In fact, I have even gotten Liz to go climbing with me a handful of times over the last several months. She’s new to climbing, but she’s fearless getting up the wall. One hand over the other she pulls herself up the sheer face. Coming down is a different story. Burned into my mind is an image of her halfway up the wall, clinging to the hand holds: arms exhausted, unable to climb further, and yet unable to let go. With good reason. Every cell in your body says not to let go, with millennia of evolutionary history on its side. And yet, to get down, you’ve got to let go. You’ve got to fall. You’ve got to trust that your partner has got you. Eventually, Liz told me that letting go wasn’t the problem. She was embarrassed about screaming as she fell. She could let go, but wouldn’t be able to stop from screaming as she fell. I guess we can only override one instinct at a time.

After climbing for an hour or so, Brandon and I typically hit the gym’s sauna. Sitting in 160, 170, 180 degree heat for 15 minutes is a spiritual practice. It requires surrender, detachment, and resets my body and my mind. There's a 15 minute sand timer on the wall, and we turn it over when we enter, and are more than ready to leave by the time it’s done. However, to my surprise, I’ve noticed that when I go to the gym by myself, and enter the sauna afterward, I’m not able to make it the full 15 minutes. Something gets in my way. My stamina is strangely decreased, and I am at my limit after 10 minutes. Why? How is it that my stamina changes when Brandon is sitting next to me?

I’ve been realizing just how much I need community to discipline me, to school me, and to do anything with longevity. The truth is I am still learning to admit that I need other people. In my adolescence and young adulthood, I felt separate, different. I wanted to be different, too. Uncompromised, to stand apart from this blackened world. I couldn’t get enough distance between me and this ignorant, incomprehensible disaster. I wanted to be a philosopher — one who knows, safe, above the rubble and the confusion and injustice. But now somehow I have peace in my chest, and the certainty of my own profound frailty, and am learning to admit it: I need you guys! Ignorant and limited as you may be, I need you. I am no better or different. I need this world, with its vulgar and profound, ignorance and wisdom, and its rooms of ordinary heroes, in which I take my place. One end of the rope circles your waist, and the other mine.

I developed a meditation practice 3 years ago, just as I was getting into 12 step recovery and after attending a 10-day Vipassana meditation course. During the course, you meditate for 10 hours a day. At the end of the course, Goenke, the teacher, recommends continuing the practice in civilian life by meditating one hour in the mornings, one hour in the evenings, every day. In the months after my course, I followed his advice in my own measure, meditating mornings and evenings for 30 minutes. On the occasion I didn’t sit at the start of my day, I noticed it. I felt more scattered, restless, obsessive.

At the same time, I intuited that in order to go deeper in the practice and to maintain my practice with longevity, I would need to find a community to practice with — a search which led me to the Compassionate Heart Sangha and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village tradition. I’m thankful for that intuition, which has since proven correct. To my dismay, regret, and ultimately resignation, my daily morning meditation practice has completely fallen off. I actually find myself unable to sit in the mornings, or in the evenings, by myself. The only time I am unable to sit, it seems, is with my Sangha on Sundays, the Sangha House on Wednesdays, and in the 3 minute silent meditations that start my 12 step meetings.

On the other hand, my life has become full and meditation suffused within it. With work, projects, service, relationship, the Sangha House, I have so many points of contact with reality, and meditation comes into them all — the stated purpose of sitting. Goenka speaks again and again of the “continuity of practice,” and indeed I meditate while driving, washing the dishes, and talking with my housemates. A lot of times, I arrive in the moment. I contemplate interbeing with peace and wonder. I am working on meditating while working. Nonjudgmental compassionate awareness has become something I live — with my sponsees, my housemates, myself. Sometimes I sit, but as Whitman says, “I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four.”

At the same time, I am now meditating in the evenings again. Absent the ability to sit by myself, I guess, I am finding ways to increasingly sit with others. After two months of tumult, we finally reached a point in settling into the house that we could establish an evening meditation routine. 9-10 pm is now our sacred hour. We light incense, spread the matts on the floor, and sit. Tonight, I came down the stairs, saw my roommates practicing, and joined them.

So help me in letting go of my independence, the fantasy of independence. Allow me to integrate what I know, that I need other people to motivate myself, to discipline myself, to stay in it. I need their wisdom and affirmation and reflection. For better or for worse, we two, for the time, are wedded. And this is one of my hopes for the Order of Interbeing, the order with a path for lay monasticism in the Plum Village tradition. I hope that it will stretch me, and form me, provide me with the relationships I need to stay in it, to be on this journey.

Just don’t expect me not to scream as I fall.