waking up hurts

This is aimed at a general audience of spiritual practitioners, but I think it offers some good pointers about the expectations most everyone brings to their practice about hoping that it will be an escape from the things they don't like, and while it may be liberating in the long run, the process involves fully engaging with pain, hardship, suffering and our so-called shadow stuff:

www.eomega.org/learning-paths/body-mind-...k-waking-up-can-hurt

That's very useful, thank you

A good article!

The most difficult thing about talking about pain and suffering is to neither deny the necessity of it (spiritual and psychological growing pains) nor deny that many of us wind up indulging it (becoming a "holy spiritual basket case" and needlessly martyring oneself to no benefit to anyone). We can sometimes convince ourselves we're doing the former, but be blind to the fact we're doing the latter. That's when spiritual friends and teachers become important, to help us see our own needless drama.

It's very convenient to say spirituality is the way out of pain and suffering or that pain and suffering is the way into spirituality, but actually they may or may not be connected, depending on the situation. Frankly, that's a big part of the insights that comes with spiritual maturity. There's a better sense of when to dive into sensations of discomfort, even cultivate them to greater intensity, and there's times to forget about it and have some milk and shortbread cookies. And even with insights, it still might not always be clear what is needed. Accepting that uncertainty is a kind of spiritual maturity, too.

Needless drama ftw.

Ona Kiser wrote: ftw

(which version of ftw are you using here? I always read it as "f**k the what?", as in "I am experiencing intense befuddlement due to your illogical statements", but I'm not sure that's right. I see the urban dictionary has a few other definitions...)

For The Win.

I figured that was more likely than my thought or f**k the world

I really appreciated that article. Thank you for sharing it, Ona.

There can be such an immense disconnect between what we expect and what actually happens in our practice; not to mention what others say SHOULD happen as a result of our practice. Maybe that last point is the most problematic for many practitioners. I know it's ruffled my spiritual feathers on more than a few occasions, but I digress...

I've heard a few teachers say/ask, "The Buddha's awakening solved his problem. What's yours?" And I think there's a lot of validity to that question. While there may be some common themes to this awakening process, we also bring a lot of other variables into the mix. Maybe some of the things old Gautama considered "suffering" are sources of meaning and purpose for someone else, whether in his day or our current times.

This may be even more or a digression, but this topic reminds me that it's not only important to have others involved with your practice, but also that those others deeply care about you. "Care" is a loaded term that deserves more unpacking than I'm willing to engage in at this moment, but I think (maybe, hope) the general point is well taken.

The link has an interesting backstory, perhaps. There's a sort of Christian spirituality that is - to my mind - a bit on the comfort-practice side, in that it tends to emphasize gentle, sweet Jesus who loves us, and though it teaches awakening (or "spiritual transformation"), it tends to be fairly weak on the part of engaging with unpleasantness, understanding how weird things can get, or pushing yourself anywhere that doesn't make you happy. Anything to do with rules, renunciation, the Crucifixion, or anything else challenging or unpleasant is de-emphasized. They encourage a sort of heart-felt devotional practice, romanticize various monastic practices, and bring in a bit of gentle Eastern stuff (mantras, etc.) I have been on a couple of Centering Prayer-type retreats that had some of this tone. They intend, I think, to be welcoming and accessible by making everything sound kind of friendly, groovy and nice.

In the context of a private forum I participate in, where many of the participants have this sort of background, several are close to waking up (by my guesstimate) or have woken up recently. One of them shared the link, as she thought it clarified so well the unexpected way things had gone. "Not what I signed up for!!"

Vajrayana has its kick-ass heroine saint-- Machig Labdron

Ona Kiser wrote: The link has an interesting backstory, perhaps. There's a sort of Christian spirituality that is - to my mind - a bit on the comfort-practice side, in that it tends to emphasize gentle, sweet Jesus who loves us, and though it teaches awakening (or "spiritual transformation"), it tends to be fairly weak on the part of engaging with unpleasantness, understanding how weird things can get, or pushing yourself anywhere that doesn't make you happy. Anything to do with rules, renunciation, the Crucifixion, or anything else challenging or unpleasant is de-emphasized. They encourage a sort of heart-felt devotional practice, romanticize various monastic practices, and bring in a bit of gentle Eastern stuff (mantras, etc.)

This touches on one of the things that I found didn't gel for me with the viewpoint of this article - my 'home' tradition, so to speak, Burmese/Thai Theravada, really emphasises feeling a lot of pain and suffering and staying with it no matter what. And so there's a heavy focus on doing long, intensive retreats - which, for most people, will bring up a lot of pain, suffering, and difficulty - and staying with them. Which is a great lesson, and one that I don't think can be learned another way, but I don't think it's necessary for awakening per se, and it often has a rather masochistic and even uncompassionate tendency (Student: 'I'm experiencing unbearable levels of fear, sadness, depression and physical pain.' Teacher: 'Did you note it?')

For me, it was certainly intense psychic suffering that brought me to wanting to wake up, and to a dedicated spiritual practice in general - but, that suffering also meant, and means (when it arises now, which is sometimes but not like it used to be, at least at this point in my life) that I clung very, very hard to my practice as such, to these kinds of intense approaches, and to my fantasy of what awakening would be - in other words, a lot of spiritual bypassing. i think to some extent I had to let go of that intense suffering at a certain point on the path - not that it doesn't recur at times - but the catch is, that can't be done by will, otherwise I would have been able to do it in the first place and wouldn't've had a problem - it's like a matter of grace, where at a certain point things don't work so badly that you're directed somewhere else, but that involves a paradigm shift that previously would've been unacceptable.

I note also that the examples given in this piece are actually about the suffering of intensive retreat, not the suffering of awakening as such. And this:

if we have the view to become a doctor, our vision guides us through financial burdens, physical and emotional difficulties, and any obstacle that gets in our way. We know it is difficult and involves sacrifice, but with a strong view we forge to the finish line.

seems like naive capitalist individualism to me...

I also find it interesting that the Buddha taught Enlightenment as 'the end of suffering,' whereas many Buddhists don't seem to see this as a realistic goal anymore. I don't see it as such either, these days, but then I no longer identify as a Buddhist. The Buddha obviously experienced physical pain (there are suttas where he asks someone else to teach because his back is sore, and a beautiful one where he suns his back in the evening rays) and also found certain activities bothersome (the episode straight after Enlightenment where he first thinks he won't teach because it will be too much of a hassle). On that note, I liked the latter part of the article more than the former...