Still Point Meditation: The Practice of Practices

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

Episodes 29 & 30

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As we’ve explored on this blog and on Mindfulness+, there are many ways to practice mindfulness. But there’s one practice in particular that I might call the practice of practices, and that’s still point meditation.

In order to understand the still point it's helpful to first say a word about polarities. When I say polarities I mean a pair of interdependent opposites — opposites that rely on one another to express the fulness of their qualities. A classic polarity, for instance, is masculine-feminine, and if you think of the Yin Yang symbol from Taoism, you can get a feel for the way that masculine and feminine are in this eternal interwoven dance. The quality of the masculine is in the feminine, and the quality of the feminine is in the masculine.

We all tend to favor one side of a pole over another. When it comes to the polarity of masculine and feminine, for instance, think about your own life, your own self, your own mode of expression. Think if you tend to exhibit more masculine qualities in a given moment or more feminine qualities. The masculine is associated with more hardness, more directness, more agency, more assertion, more structure, more hierarchy, for example. The feminine associated with softness, with yielding, with receptivity, more relational than hierarchical. You can just notice where you find yourself in a given moment in a given day. Maybe more one or the other. Maybe more a balance of both, maybe you're not sure — it depends on the moment and situation. The point is that we all have certain habits. We all show up in the world in a certain way, and reflecting on polarities can help us see which side we favor and which qualities we're neglecting, or not manifesting as fully as we could.

Another classic polarity is agency and communion. Some people really like to feel their own agency, their own autonomy, their own individuality. I personally relate to this one. I feel like often times I'm kind of a lone wolf hanging out in my meditation cave, writing books, avoiding contacting the world. When I get into a rut, I can really get into the agency side of things. On the other side of the street, however, there's communion. This is the side that is relational, that knows itself through community, through relationship, through being in service, through being accountable to others. 

One more classic polarity I could name is control and submission. Maybe you feel more comfortable when you're in control and you can steer the outcome of your situation, or maybe you have a personality where you like to align with a strong leader — somebody or something you can trust and just submit to that. Some of us tend more towards control, some of us tend more towards submission. 

At the deepest level, we need all of these qualities. None of them are better than the other. It's the masculine that animates the feminine and brings it more fully to life and vice versa. Without communion there's not meaningful agency, we're just in isolation. And if all I do is control, I become a control freak. I'm a tyrant. But if all I do is submit, then I'm a groveler. I'm spineless.

In other words, the poles represent extreme qualities that when left to their own devices become pathological, they become problematic. 

So, how do we avoid spilling over into pathology?

That’s where the still point practice comes in. When we're in the still point — when we're resting in a quality of open spaciousness, pure potential — our lives become intuitive. We can be receptive to exactly what the moment calls for. For example I have a tendency towards agency, towards wanting to express my individuality. But If I'm perfectly centered, if I'm at the still point in this meditative space, I might be present enough to recognize that what the situation really calls for is communion. Maybe at the level of personality and habit I want to just be alone and spend the afternoon reading and writing, but when I open up my awareness and I move into the still point I recognize that my brother needs my help, that he needs someone to be present with him, to listen to him. And so it draws the communion out of me. 

What does this process look like in practice?

Let’s explore. As you read the meditation below, to yourself or with a group, you can intuit which qualities could be of most benefit to you in raising the quality of your life, improving the quality of your presence, and showing up in increasingly skillful and appropriate ways in the world. Like a chocolate connoisseur could point out the different flavors — the different subtle notes of fruitiness or a smoky quality in the chocolate — I’ll point out different qualities in your awareness. These qualities are already there, so you don't have to try and imagine them or stretch for them. You can just relax and enjoy who you already are at the deepest level.

Still Point Meditation Script

Take a moment to settle in, letting the body organize in a way that feels effortless, allowing you to relax, but also to be alert and present.

You can start by bringing awareness to the entire physical body, noticing the shape of the body, the posture. And you can bring awareness to the breath, noticing the in-breath and the out-breath, noticing particularly on the out-breath the way the body softens, lets go. With each out-breath the shoulders fall, the chest sinks, the belly softens.

And notice in this moment that you can notice. Notice that you're aware. You may be aware of many things, but the fact is that at the heart of this moment and this experience, you're aware. Moment to moment the objects of your awareness will change. One moment aware of a thought, the next moment aware of sensation in the body, then a sound. But notice that while the objects of awareness will change, the prior fact of awareness does not. You're always aware and you can be aware that you're aware. Just take a moment to rest in this quality of presence.

When you're concentrated, your awareness is focused. When your mind wanders, your awareness opens up and expands. But in any event, you're still just aware. You're always present to something. Presence is at the heart of who you are.

And the mind can endlessly evaluate how things are going in this moment. How my life is going, am I doing well, how this meditation is going, am I doing it right? Notice that beneath the level of these distinctions, these appraisals that the thinking mind makes, there’s a quality of profound trust in our experience. You can trust yourself. You can trust the very ground of being in this moment. Trust that whatever's happening in life in this very moment that you can meet the moment just as you need to. Notice any resistance to this quality of trust. This can be a more challenging aspect of the still point to access. Notice any tightness, any distrust, any mistrust, any fear — and you can trust all of that, too. Trust all of that response is exactly what needs to come up in this moment and to be felt, to be experienced.

Notice at a subtle level in this moment a tendency to want to control how the meditation is going, to steer it to arrive in a certain place. And notice a part of you that's willing to submit to exactly what's happening, a part of you that doesn't need to steer, doesn't need to exert. And at the still point between control and submission you can sense a quality of deep peace. Profound peace. A peace beyond any description, a peace that passes understanding.

And notice a quality of rest that naturally comes forward. What I like to say about the still point is that it's not something we're reaching for. It's not something artificial to us that we're grafting on, but rather the still point is who we are at the deepest level. In this case you can notice the quality of rest. You can allow the physical body to rest and to be soft. Allow the mind to rest. You can allow thoughts to flow in a calm stream. 

Whatever the conditions of the body in this moment, whether you're incredibly comfortable or incredibly uncomfortable, whatever the conditions of the mind, whether your mind is empty and peaceful or full of different thoughts and agitated, or a little of both, notice the quality of stillness, of spaciousness, beyond push and pull, beyond what's pleasant and unpleasant. Notice at the deepest level of who you are in this moment, there's a natural quality of contentment. You can just rest in this moment and allow yourself to be deeply satisfied, calling off the search. No seeking.

And notice that the more deeply you touch into this quality of rest, the more able you are to just accept this moment and all of its rewards and gifts, all of its challenges. This quality of acceptance, the ability to just be present, naturally arises. Just take a moment here. Totally at rest, fully present, to everything this moment is, exactly as it is. 

Allow yourself a final moment to experience all of these flavors together, like a fine banquet. A quality of presence. A quality of rest, profound rest. Contentment independent of any conditions. A deep sense of contentment, of "everything is okay.” Transcendent trust. Whatever the conditions of life in this immediate moment and beyond, you can trust yourself to respond. Trust the ground of being. Trust your own basic goodness and the basic goodness of life. Notice how new these qualities feel in the moment, endlessly refreshing themselves, and at the same time notice how familiar they are. Feel how in a sense they've always been with you, always been right here at the heart of all experience.

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As we close the meditation you can leave a door open for yourself to come back to this place, to access these qualities in the still point as often as you need to, as often as you remember to. 

To learn to really embody and express these qualities is infinitely subtle. It requires our steady intention to come back to it again and again and again.

See, Feel, Hear Meditation: How to Escape the Matrix

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

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The Matrix came out in 1999 and rocked the cinematic world with its metaphysical implications. There’s a famous scene in the movie, where Morpheus, a mentor character of sorts, sits down with the main protagonist, Neo, and describes the false reality called the Matrix. Morpheus tells Neo that you feel the Matrix when you go to work. You feel it when you go to church. You feel it when you pay your taxes. In other words, it's everywhere. It's all around us but we don't see it. We don't realize that we're always in this Matrix, which is obscuring reality from us.

At that point, Morpheus offers Neo a red pill or a blue pill. The blue pill will lead him back to sleep — back in to the Matrix where ignorance is bliss. The red pill will reveal to Neo the true nature of reality.

It’s an iconic moment in Hollywood. But for me as a mindfulness practitioner it points to a profound truth: namely that all of us live in a matrix.

Now, I’m not going down the road of saying that there is some nefarious alien race that’s using human beings as batteries to power their civilization. Where I’m going is much cheerier than that.

What I want to suggest to you is that the matrix we live in as human beings is invisible to us if we don't have the ears to hear it or the eyes to see it.

This matrix we could call, simply, see, hear, and feel.

What do I mean by see, hear, and feel? Well, notice in this moment your experience. Notice that your experience will be some combination of seeing (what's in the visual world around you), hearing (what you can hear in your environment), and also feeling (how you're feeling in the physical body).

And on a more subtle level, irrespective of what's going on in the external environment, you can notice that you can see, hear, and feel things from an internal perspective as well. Namely, with the thinking mind, your thoughts come up as internal images, which is a mode of seeing. Internal sound is often mental chatter, which is a form of internal hearing. And we could say that emotion is a kind of subjective feeling. It's a feeling in to our unique personal experience.

It's remarkable, but the entire spectrum of human experience (external and internal) can be broken down into these three sensory categories: see, hear, feel. We take for granted what is so natural to us. To have this breathing, feeling, moving human body, to see and to hear, to think and to dream and to anticipate the future and reflect on the past. These are things we do so innately that we don't think about them as special. And we certainly don't think about seeing, hearing, feeling in a given moment as a matrix that holds us captive.

But what’s so potent about a mindfulness practice is that when we actually witness all of this happening — when we bring our awareness to seeing, hearing, and feeling on an external and internal level — we start to realize that these things constitute the building blocks of our human experience. And what’s more, when we're aware of them we bring them into our awareness as objects of awareness and then experience a degree of freedom from this matrix.

We're not just what we see, hear, and feel. Most significantly, and here is the kicker for you mindfulness practitioners, when we are aware of seeing, hearing, and feeling as awareness, we are free from this matrix.

This can be difficult to comprehend at the level of the mind. So let’s practice and extract ourselves from this matrix in order to taste the freedom that a mindfulness practice can uniquely offer to us.

For this meditation you don't have to be doing anything special. You can sit in silence, of course, but you can also keep doing exactly what you're doing throughout your day. Whether you're driving a car, out on a walk or cooking a meal, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because this matrix of see, hear, feel is always present.

Let’s bring our attention to it.

Meditation Practice

Go ahead and take a couple of big breaths. You can let them out with an audible sigh if that helps you relax, if that helps you feel more deeply in to your body.

Start by bringing awareness to the feeling body. Notice how all of the physical body is feeling in this moment. Just allow awareness to evenly cover all of your physical being. As you attend to this feeling component of experience, you can note to yourself in your mind: feeling is happening. Feeling is happening. And just let it happen. Be aware that feeling is happening and just allow that feeling to happen the same way you allow clouds to form and dissipate in the sky above. In other words, you don't have to interfere with it. You can just let it happen.

You can notice where sensation is the brightest, the loudest. Notice where sensation is the dimmest, the quietest. But simply, be aware that feeling is happening. And from here you can shift your awareness to hearing. Hearing all the sounds about you in the world. Even hearing the silence if there's no sound apparent. On a more subtle level you might hear thoughts in the mind like internal talk, chatter, commentating. Just notice. Hearing is happening. And you can just let it happen, resting as the awareness that witnesses the hearing, witnesses the feeling. Are sounds in front of you, behind you, to the left, to the right, above, below, inside, all around you? Note to yourself: hearing is happening and you can just let it happen.

And you can bring awareness to seeing. All of the visual world all around you. Notice what you can see out in the world. Perhaps your eyes are closed and you're aware of mental images flashing across the mind's eye. In any event, seeing is happening. And notice that you don't have to do the seeing. The seeing just happens, and you can let it happen. And you can continue this way, monitoring with your awareness — see, hear, feel. In a given moment are you more aware of seeing or hearing? More aware of hearing or feeling? And you can just note to yourself: seeing is happening. Hearing is happening.

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This concludes our brief tour through the matrix today, everybody. If you find yourself feeling wound tight like Neo, and you're needing to unplug, this is a great and simple exercise that you can do on the go, any time, anywhere. Notice as you deconstruct your experience — as you go from being imbedded in this matrix of sensory experience to taking the position of awareness, of the witness, seeing is happening, hearing is happening, and feeling is happening. And what is it that's aware of seeing, hearing, and feeling? As you do this, you'll realize that awareness is aware and awareness is already free.

Guided Healing Meditation With Script: How Mindfulness Turns Problems Into Solutions

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

Listen to this episode here.

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Whenever I teach mindfulness, I see a recurring scenario with a lot of students. They're busy people, and it's difficult to free up a few minutes a day to meditate. They'll do it, but it's difficult and feels like a sacrifice.

That’s completely understandable. We already do so much in life, and now we have to figure out how to cram one more thing — a mindfulness practice — into our day?

We might think, “If I'm going to meditate, it better be good. It better be pleasant, better help me relax and enjoy my day. If not, I'm out of here."

So we sit still and notice it takes us a minute to settle in — or maybe longer than a minute. The body’s uncomfortable. We're tense. We notice we've been carrying a lot of stress. We're achy, and we hurt in places that we didn't even notice until we sat still. If that's not bad enough, we notice the mind's also uncomfortable. It's chaotic. Thoughts are racing, and it feels like our mind is a wild animal thrashing around in a cage. We look at the clock. It's only been three minutes, and it just feels like torture.

This is a really common scenario. We might think, "I want mindfulness to reduce my stress. When is it going to reduce my stress and make me a happier person?” We want our mindfulness practice to pay dividends, but we're confused because sometimes our mindfulness practice is the most unpleasant part of our day.

This is what I want to help you recognize: Our unpleasantness, if we identify it for what it is and if we use it, becomes exponentially healing.

What do I mean by that? I mean that when we notice discomfort in the body or agitation in the mind we can experience it as the release of deep sensation from the bones, from the deep tissues, from our very cells. We can see it as a process of letting go of all this stress and pressure we’ve accumulated.

We might sit in meditation and experience busy thoughts jumping from thing to thing to thing, and we can recognize that the mind is starting to empty itself out, to purge itself of content we just don't need. In certain moments it's like a volcanic eruption. And if we can trust it, we let go of things we've been carrying around forever.

A few years ago, I was deep into a long meditation retreat when out of nowhere I heard an inner voice like a drill sergeant of shame barking in my ear saying: "You're doing it wrong!"

I hated the voice and how it felt in my body. It seemed like every ten seconds for several days this inner drill sergeant was barking in my ear, telling me: "You're doing it wrong! Pack your bags! Go home. You're no good at this practice.”

It was crazy — and so believable. There I was in isolation, in silence, not talking to anybody. There was no shoulder to cry on. I just felt this barking in my inner ear for days and I thought it was going to drive me mad.

Then, one day my body just relaxed. Something really deep let go. There was no memory associated with it, no specific childhood memory I was trying to let go of. It was just that as soon as my body let go, the voice totally vanished and I was in a different space.

It’s an example of how the body and the mind heals itself. How it purges itself of content that’s deep down. And when we actually confront that content — when we're willing to hear it, see it, feel it, experience it fully — we give it the opportunity to be experienced fully. Then, like rubbing alcohol burns clean and leaves no trace, there's nothing left after. There's nothing but nothing. And that nothing is incredibly rich and rewarding.

If we can recognize this process and see that it's going on, we don't get upset with ourselves when our practice isn’t perfectly blissful. Instead we realize that there's something deep in us that needs out and by sitting still and spacious, we can let it out and let it go.

So today I want to talk about a really important aspect of mindfulness that has taken me many years to really detect and notice that it was going on and to appreciate it at deeper and deeper levels: that is the role of healing in mindfulness practice.

Let’s explore the aspect of healing in a mindfulness practice. How can we stay present to a challenging experience? How can we let go? How can we allow challenging experience to erupt, to be felt, and then let go?

Here’s what such a practice might look like.

*Guided Healing Meditation Practice*

Start by settling in to the posture. Let the spine be straight and breathe into the entire physical body, flooding every last cell with oxygen and relaxing deeply with each out-breath. Let go of any waste, anything you don't need.

In this particular practice period, focus on being very still. The body might become uncomfortable, and you might be tempted to move and fix it, to move away from the pain and back towards pleasure. Of course, if you're in a posture that might actually damage your back or your knees, you don't want to sustain such a position. But short of that, I want you to just notice discomfort and see if you're able to welcome it, to feel it, to encounter it.

With each out-breath you can just keep letting go, becoming even softer, creating a space where sensations can arise from deep in the body and release. Imagine that your awareness is like the wide open sky and body sensations — pleasant and unpleasant — are just cloud formations coming and going. Forming and thinning out. And similarly, you can notice thoughts in the mind. Often when we're sitting still, we experience our thoughts as a problem. We wish they would go away. We wish we could have a moment of peace and quiet. But what if you just let thought totally flow as effortlessly as blood flows through the veins? You don't have to dive into a thought or elaborate on it. You also don't have to suppress thought and try to prevent it from arising. You can just let go of the struggle. Let the mind run. Let the mind begin the process of emptying itself if only for a few moments.

Rather than responding to physical discomfort or mental agitation with frustration, you can respond with a quality of recognition, of gratitude that the body is beginning to heal itself at the deepest levels. The mind is emptying itself out. You can just let this happen. You can make space and awareness for this emptying out, this healing process. And if you only have one minute to practice today or any other day, you will be one minute lighter.

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This healing process can happen as you practice mindfulness. You’ll find that often times what you interpret to be a problem is, at a deeper level, actually a solution.

An Introduction to Vipassana Meditation: The Art of Seeing Separately

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

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When you taste a piece of chocolate with a connoisseur who has a discerning and mature pallet, you get a completely different experience than you otherwise would. The connoisseur might point out that the cocoa beans in a particular piece of chocolate are from a place in Madagascar where juices from citrus fruits have leached into the soil and flavored the bean. The moment you hear this, you may actually start to taste that citrus fruit. You become aware of the complexity of the taste you're experiencing.

It’s a simple example of vipassana, the Pali word for mindfulness, which literally means “seeing separately.” That is, when you taste chocolate under the guidance of a connoisseur, you start to pick up on the different strands, the different notes, the different nuances of your experience. Those nuances might show up in a fruity, smokey, or salty piece of chocolate.

Another way to understand vipassana might be to think about a time when you noticed you were kind of cranky. Maybe you were in conflict with somebody — your spouse, partner, a friend, a colleague at work. At some point in the conflict you may have noticed, "Hey, wait a minute, I think I'm just hungry.” Or maybe if not hungry, then maybe you notice you just didn't sleep very well and so you're irritable. In either case, you have a moment of clarity where you realize you’re not actually bothered with the person you’re speaking to so much as your body just needs some rest or a sandwich.

The point is that when we don't bring clarity and precision to our experience, it all ends up getting lumped together. We’re grumpy but we have no idea why. But then when we bring a microscope of awareness to our experience, we get clear on the different elements that are coalescing to produce that experience. We realize, "Okay, I'm a little bit hungry and that's causing me to be cranky. My colleague just asked for this project a few days earlier than it was originally intended, and that set me off. Let me take an early lunch break, and let’s talk about the best way to solve this situation after lunch." It's as simple as that.

And as I described with the example of eating chocolate, vipassana (or mindfulness) also elevates our fulfillment. When we bring greater clarity to our experiences, we enjoy them more, even if the experiences are already intrinsically rewarding. Our sensory experience becomes richer and more rewarding.

Vipassana Practice

In some meditations it's desirable to find a quiet place where you won't be interrupted — a place where you can really settle in. But mindfulness practice can be done anywhere at any time. So I'm going to invite you to continue doing exactly what you're doing, whatever that is. You might be sitting still in a quiet room or a crowded room. Either way works for this particular practice.

I want you to start by just noticing the way you feel in the body. Noticing physical sensation. Often times when we notice physical sensation we spontaneously move in to a posture that allows for more alertness and freedom. So if you're moved to adjust your posture, go ahead and do that but just notice how the body's feeling in the moment. Notice physical sensation. Where is sensation the brightest? Where is it the most obvious? Allow this sensation to flow and be as it is, to be felt. Notice where sensation is more dim and quiet. Notice the parts of your body that you can't contact as readily and just bring more awareness to these places. Not trying to change anything or create sensation but just breathing and noticing.

Now notice the quality of your emotions in this moment: your mood, how you feel. If you're aware of emotion in the body, where do you feel it? What quality does it have? Is it intense emotion or is it more subtle. Notice what space the emotional energy takes up in the body. Notice its shape: is it changing? Is it wanting to spread? Is it wanting to get smaller? Does the emotion extend beyond the borders of the physical body? Does it radiate out into space? Or is it more inward? Just notice.

Go ahead and let that go and bring your awareness to hearing. Just marvel for a moment that you can hear at all. Notice what you can detect in front of you, behind you, to your left and right, below and above you. And notice that it's not just sound that you hear but also silence. As sounds come and go, they arise from silence and back to silence. And so you can appreciate not just the sound around you, whatever it is, but you can also appreciate the silence to which all sound returns.

Letting that go, you can notice what you see. Again, you can marvel that you have eyes to see at all. This world of objects, a spectrum of colors, play of light and shadow. Notice that the eyes automatically discern shape and color. And as you shift your head one degree or turn your eyes one degree this way or that, the whole visual world shifts into a new scene, a new sight, a new moment. Notice how the world changes moment to moment even if it's only your perspective changing. Your eyes shifting slightly. And you can put them all together now.

Finally, notice the entire feeling body. Ears that hear. Eyes that see. Track these different components clearly in this moment. In this moment an experience coalesces. Whatever your experience in this moment, let it be that.

In practicing vipassana we’re not trying to produce a special experience but rather become more clear and more open to this very moment, open to this ordinary experience that is given to us.

Forbidden Fruit: The Cross-Pollinating of Buddhism and Mormonism

By Thomas McConkie,
Author of Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis & Founder of Lower Lights School of Wisdom

***

Most people know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in downtown Salt Lake City. What many people don't know is that during the late 1990s the largest order of Zen Buddhism in the world outside of Japan was also headquartered here, on a street called South Temple.

Both traditions have had a profound influence on my life.

I was brought up in an LDS family, but around the age of 13 I developed an allergy to the local culture: the strict dress code, the endless rule-making and rule-following, the dour adulting masquerading as true happiness.

I didn’t expect after leaving that I would ever come back to worship with the Mormon community. But 20 years later, here I am. And I’ve begun to notice something surprising, something I didn’t expect to see or feel.

But first, a little background.

After leaving my religious community behind, I needed something to fill the aching spiritual void. With a little help from my Zen friends on South Temple I became a devoted meditator. I felt like I’d won the spiritual lottery. Though meditation was challenging for me from day one, the fruits of the practice were immediately evident.

Gradually, like dripping water over stone, I gained insight into what Zen Master Dogen Zenji meant when he wrote, “to study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self…” In other words, through the systematic training of meditation over many years of dedicated practice, I learned, in true Buddhist form, to see through the illusion of the separate self.

Maybe that sounds like so much mystical mumbo-jumbo to you. But I assure you it’s a very ordinary experience. In fact, it seems to me now that it’s an experience that we are all meant to have as human beings, a part of our developmental potential and collective future together as a species. Rather than living as isolated, alienated individuals in constant fear of being squashed like a bug, we can come to realize how profoundly we belong to and express Creation through our every breath, thought and deed.

Without realizing it right at first, I found myself looking at Mormonism over the years through this new Buddhist perspective. I saw Mormonism through a lens of deficit. The thinking that kept bubbling up in my mind went something like this: “If we don’t learn to see through the illusion of separation, religious practice will only exacerbate human suffering. We’ll use it to reinforce our sense of separation and wear our religiosity around like an ego ornament.” The famous Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, insightfully called this phenomenon “spiritual materialism.” However, what I couldn’t see at the time was that this perspective of mine was at very best only half true.

After many years of practice, I began to appreciate that as I saw through my felt sense of separation—or fallenness in Christianity—my sense of compassion for all things steadily increased. I realized that to love our neighbor as our self, as Jesus admonishes us to do, we have to first realize that we and our neighbor are in a very real sense one and the same Being.

As an accidental Buddhist practitioner, I was struck from a young age at how supportive meditation was at helping me be a better Christian and to better fulfill the great commandments. Simplistically, I wondered, “why on earth are there not more Christian meditators?!” I must admit I carried that prejudice with me for many years.

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Here’s where things get interesting. As a classically trained Buddhist, I’ve gained life-changing insight into the illusion of separation and how to see through it (to “see through” is the root meaning of the word vipassana, translated in modern English as “mindfulness”). And yet, as a re-activated Latter-day Saint, it remains quite difficult for me to wake up on a Saturday morning and to want to go and shovel my neighbor’s walks after a fresh snowfall.

A friend of mine in the ward (an LDS congregation), a guy I admire and love, recently got divorced. I feel friendship with him, a desire to support him in these difficult emotional times, but still, I struggle to pick up the phone. I’m not saying I won’t pick up the phone. What I’m saying is that I’m painfully aware of my struggle to get up and simply do something selflessly, even after I supposedly realized that the whole world is my “self.”

Enter the Mormons.

These people really do. Having been actively involved in an LDS community in Salt Lake City for the last 7 years, it’s really dawning on me that virtually everything the Mormons do is about doing. Those who will accept a service calling are given a specific task that they are to carry out voluntarily, without compensation, for the rest of their ward. It can range from keeping the meetinghouse clean, to preparing Sunday School lessons for Gospel instruction, to outreach efforts in the neighborhood for members of the faith and those of other faith traditions.

To me, watching Mormons serve in a ward family inspires a bit of the same emotion in me that I get when I watch a highly conditioned athlete at peak performance. Their movements are powerful, graceful, and seemingly effortless. Through years of dedication and training, they have honed their bodies into a living expression of their sport.

We all know that it’s a good thing to do nice things for people. But do our bodies know it? Have we trained the very sinews and bones of our physical bodies to get up and serve? If I had to rate my performance in this category, I’d sheepishly opt for “needs improvement.”

Yet, for all the praise I can heap on Latter-day Saints and their practice of service, I also see a dark side to this path:

In Buddhist terms, when service (and any religious duty) is carried out from the identity of the small self, it tends to be a recipe for perfectionism and eventual burnout.

This is an insight that I imagine would have eluded me were it not for my years of formation in the Buddhist tradition. The small self, the ego, is relentless at claiming glory for itself, constantly announcing its presence, and deeply desiring to be worshipped. When Satan asks Christ to bow down and worship him during Christ’s 40 days of fasting in the desert, it is a reflection of our very ego speaking. It is the part in all of us that believes it is greater than even God.

Until we’ve really confronted this part of ourselves, until we’ve really acknowledged that the ego exists and that there’s nothing we do in life for which the ego doesn’t want credit, it will continue to run the show.

We can train ourselves to serve: walks get shoveled, friends are supported, widows consoled. And don’t get me wrong–no small amount of goodness comes from these acts. And still, there remains an existential knot right at the heart of our being that cannot be undone. The freedom we long to feel—the boundless, selfless Love that is Christ, that is (in Zen Buddhist terms) Kanzeon Bodhisattva, that is too big and holy to ultimately name—eludes us. Precisely because we remain stuck in an identity that will always be too small, too threatened to withstand the sheer awesomeness of this Cosmic flow and power.

I see the people around me serving. I am clear that I have a great deal of room to grow in this area of my personal development. And I am concerned at how compulsively people offer service in order to be good. Whereas the service might flow as an expression of non-egoic generosity and giving, more often I have seen it flow as an “I should do this. We are commanded to do this. I will feel guilty if I don’t do this.” Like a poor beast carrying a burden on its back that it cannot understand, we lug around our identification with the small self. The more we serve, the more inadequate we sometimes feel.

We cannot relax the contraction of the ego (what Latter-day Saints tend to call the “natural man”) through service alone. Perversely, the ego will often use the service it renders as proof of its goodness and worthiness of being loved, only further exacerbating the shame and unworthiness spiral.

Enter the Buddhists.

Over the past two decades, I have been awestruck in quite a different way with my brothers and sisters in sangha (a term for Buddhist community). My friend, Musho Roshi, puts it thus: “you can sit, but you can’t hide.” In other words, if you are faithful to the practice of meditation, it will consistently drive out the ego from its hiding places. It will depose the would-be Monarch and free up the throne for the only rightful Ruler: Big Heart. Boundless, Infinite and Eternal Love. The very Power that gives rise to the Universe itself.

Anything less than this, any identity smaller than this, paradoxically, would be sub-human. We humans, from a certain perspective, are all Buddhas. We are illumined. Our true bodies are the Cosmos itself. We were born to live without limits, even as we voluntarily take on human birth and all the limitations that come with that.

I learned this language, but more importantly, I learned this experience through Buddhism. Through Buddhist practice, I learned to be Big again.

But without training and creating very concrete habits of serving those around me, this “Bigness” doesn’t end up expressing its full potential in a meaningful way:

When meditation and transcendent practice is carried out without a firm grounding in community and service, it tends to be a recipe for spiritual narcissism and escapism.

I would have never suspected this in all my meditative pride. I needed both of these spiritual dimensions in my life. We can call them the way of transcendence and service, Wisdom and Compassion. Whatever we call them, they are two complementary “styles” of spiritual practice, always at risk of flying apart and becoming pathological if not held together in a single embrace.

Of course I understand that there are Buddhists who do really fine service in the world and there are Mormons who’ve done no small amount of disidentifying from their egos. I’m writing in a bit of a diagrammatic way to illustrate a point. Namely, each wisdom tradition tends to emphasize, even specialize in cultivating unique spiritual gifts. Moreover, we live in a day and age where we are more aware of a plurality of traditions than ever before. In this divine milieu, why wouldn’t we exchange more deeply with one another across traditional boundaries of identity? In this way, our weaknesses can truly become strengths, and through our strengths we can help to strengthen others. Together, we can bear new fruit.  

Through personal experience, I’ve come to think we’d do well as Christians to take a page from the Buddhists and really confront our deep-seated tendency to want to prove our goodness, to want to strong-arm God to let us into heaven by the sheer force of our good works.

I can also see clearly now that I would have done well over the years to spend as much time focusing on the very concrete practice of serving my neighbors as I did focusing on how to deconstruct the ego in meditation practice.

Having been a part of both traditions for many years, I notice the tendency in Mormon culture for people to work really, really hard at being good, all while harboring deep insecurities about never being good enough. On the other hand, I notice a tendency in the Western Buddhist movement to privatize the spiritual journey. My meditation practice. My stress-reduction. My enlightenment.

Twenty years after an initial taste, those fruits borne on South Temple continue to sustain me. I am falling more in love each day with the Buddha’s path of self-transcendence, while also learning to embody the path of compassion and healing through Christ. I am slowly putting words to the curriculum that life seems to be revealing:

The path of service (and religious devotion) without genuine realization of the higher self is a path of burnout and perfectionism. The path of transcendence without an attending practice of service is a path of spiritual narcissism.

For most of my adult life, I’ve tended to be more muscle-bound in the transcendence category and rather wimpy in the category of service. It feels as though life is asking me to cross-train; to learn to express the higher self through simple acts of service in community.

I can’t help but wonder what Mormon communities would begin to look like if we injected a small dose of meditative awareness, of ego-transcendence into an already vibrant culture of service.

Perhaps this is one of evolution’s next feats, one of Christ’s next miracles to perform through all of us.

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