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Dharmette: Gil's Story Pt 2 (4 of 5) Release and Continuing Practice

Hello and welcome, as I continue some of the practice stories from my life. I feel quite blessed, quite fortunate going back over my life to review how much of my adult life has been spent in the world of Buddhist practice. Somehow when I was young, I gave myself to that. I was going to be a monk. So, it was an act of renunciation of sorts, that this was going to be my life. And I'm amazingly surprised how well, or how wonderful, this life has been as a result of that.

There's a teaching, or a saying, that "practice the Dharma and the Dharma will protect you." Sometimes it's worded differently: "protect the Dharma and the Dharma will protect you." But I think what represents my life is "practice the Dharma and the Dharma somehow will protect you, guide you, provide for you." I suppose if you take that too literally, it becomes a little bit superstitious, but it certainly represents well the good fortune I've had to be able to live this life.

As I've said the last few days, in 1985 I went to Burma to do an eight-month retreat there. It was probably among the happiest continuous times that I've been in my life. I practiced alone, mostly in my little room, and did walking meditation in a veranda-like, semi-open enclosed area, just a hallway in front of my room. So I didn't go very far away, hardly walked around the monastery even, and I just gave myself over to this practice. Somehow I settled into a deep place that felt amazingly rich, spacious, expansive. I didn't feel like I was limited to my little room. It didn't feel claustrophobic. It was the opposite. There was this whole sense of expansiveness, expansive awareness if anything, and a lot of joy. To be able to sit and be with it day after day had a big impact on me. I relaxed and settled something very deep inside of me, and that's one of the functions of regular meditation. It allows something to settle deeply.

Looking back at that time, the eight months in Burma, I was certainly guided by U Pandita^[1], but I was even more guided by an inner compass, an inner sensibility, sensitivity that grew during that time, where I became sensitive to where the movement was to greater freedom and to greater letting go of tension, letting go of any extra effort that was not needed. Having that sensitivity and that guidance went really well.

I started sitting for three hours at a time. Back then my hearing was good, and I had a watch that I could set a timer on to go off every 30 minutes. Because I sat for three hours at a time, I would get fairly concentrated, but every 30 minutes I would have it go off, and then I would pull myself out of the meditation to review what had just happened, where I was at, because I had to report to the teacher what was going on in meditation.

So, I'd review, pull myself out after 30 minutes, still in meditative posture and eyes closed, and just kind of review what was going on in the meditation. And then also check in with myself. Was there any tension in my mind, in my way of being aware? Was I leaning forward, or pushing, or straining a little bit with my consciousness? And if I was, I would relax and soften, and then I would dip back in, go deep into the meditation again. It was almost like I was dipping underwater again. And then I would practice for another half an hour, come up for—I don't know how long it was, maybe a minute or so at the most—check in, review, go down, and continue.

That was an important process, to not just stay in the meditation but step back and get the bigger picture of it, the bigger sense of it, to see where there was some kind of subtle tension in how I practiced, how I was aware, and to relax that. This movement of seeing all the extra tension that was there, and seeing it more and more subtly as I got quieter, was where the door opened to understand tension or contraction. As I got more peaceful and joyful, it got more and more subtle.

I also became much more receptive to the deeper wisdom that arose. One of the remarkable things that happened for me was I was doing walking meditation, and I had a lot of joy, a pervasive feeling of well-being. As I was walking, I thought about something, and I wasn't really paying attention to the content so much, but paying attention to the experience of thinking. I could feel that that thinking itself—that kind of thinking I was doing was ordinary, nothing wrong about the thinking—but it had a very subtle tension, a kind of suffering, a kind of discontent, a kind of irritation or agitation in it.

I was surprised to see that the subtle thoughts had that as well. An ordinary mind is not going to see that because things are so busy. But I said, "Wow." And then I thought that maybe everybody's thinking has that in it. And I thought, "Wow, if that's the case, the amount of suffering in this world is so much greater than I ever could have imagined." I was just kind of stunned by the magnitude of suffering. I knew the world is full of suffering. It's part of the reason I was meditating, was to be able to respond in some kind of way to the suffering of the world and make a difference. But it was so much larger. I was kind of blown away. It was this deep insight into suffering, the human experience of it. But at the same time, I had all this joy, and the combination of joy and seeing suffering... I wasn't a victim of that insight. I wasn't troubled by it exactly. It wasn't a heavy thing to experience. I was really struck by how these two, the joy and happiness and seeing suffering deeply, when side by side, could support each other, allowed the joy, allowed me to see the fullness of it. And that was quite a lesson for me.

Another lesson in Burma, not just Burma but in Thailand and all the places I did Theravadan^[2] studies in Nepal, India where I went a little bit, was the phenomenal generosity. No one ever asked me for any money to pay for being on retreats, being in the monastery. There was one monastery where they wanted a dollar a day because they bought special food for the Westerners, and so I went along with that, but for the greater part there was nothing. Eight months in Burma when money was never discussed, never expected. And not only that, but when I got sick, doctors came to see me at the monastery. At some point I had a dental issue, and a dentist came to see me there. It was like anything I needed. People wanted to support the practice. I felt so supported and such a recipient of generosity.

What I was deeply moved by was an old woman who came to the monastery. She looked quite poor to me, and she walked up to me. At some point I was ordained as a monk there in Burma. So at this point I was a monk, and she handed me a piece of chocolate. I thought, "Wow, she can't have much money, the way she looked, in rags, but she really wanted to make an offering to me." And I took it to be she wanted to support my practice. So I was inspired, "I have to practice better because of her. I have to give myself over more. This is serious. I'm not just practicing for myself, I'm practicing for her and for other people." I was so inspired by the generosity with which I was held and offered. I feel eternally grateful, and in a certain way, my years of teaching have been repaying that generosity or passing it onward and forward, inspired by it.

So I sat there in Burma with U Pandita for these long, long months, and somewhere in the middle of there I was very, very still and something inside let go. I didn't let go. Something just released. In the wake of that release, it got my attention more than anything I've ever seen before. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, even though there was no seeing. There was no light, but it wasn't dark. It was so peaceful, so settled, that it felt like everything kind of settled and disappeared in a way that I'd never experienced before. And after that, I felt so different. I felt that something had come to completion. Something had finished, something was freed.

That made a big impact on me, that something deep inside released. If you remember when I did my first 10-week retreat in Thailand, I didn't really understand the practice exactly, but with the concentration and the stillness I attained, I touched something very deep inside that became essential for me to touch again. I had no choice. It was almost like a dark night of the soul at times. And so in that release in Burma, I think that's when that was touched again. Not only touched, but somehow was let go.

I continued practicing in Burma for another four months, and slowly my concentration waned, and slowly it felt like it wasn't the right place to practice anymore. My relationship with the teacher U Pandita didn't seem like he quite understood me anymore; we were operating in translation, we had an interpreter. So after eight months there, I still wanted to practice more. I didn't feel finished, but I wanted to practice with English-speaking teachers. By that time, I'd met Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg; we had practiced together in Asia a bit, and so I decided I wanted to go see them at IMS^[3], Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, to sit the three-month retreat with them. So I asked to disrobe as a monk, because I was a new monk and I didn't feel like I was trained to be able to go into public as a monk, and returned to the United States. With the idea that I came back, I think, in May, and with the idea that I would go in September to the three-month retreat on the East Coast. And that didn't quite work out, and that's the story for tomorrow, and how the practice then continued.

So, thank you very much, and hopefully I can finish enough of this in the next two days so that we all feel complete. Thank you.