Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [31]
Developing wisdom, clarity, basic sanity, and compassion in your life expresses the Dharma of realization. This is your daily work; this is how you make your life sacred. Living the Dharma has always been a challenge for monks and nuns in Asia, and it continues to be a challenge for spiritual seekers in the West today. The relentlessly eternal questions and issues remain with us. How to balance our outer and inner lives; how to take our best intentions and direct them to others; how to maintain a full-time commitment within the context of a complicated world; how to balance compassion with wisdom; how to know the difference between selfless compassion and dualistic pity, between clinging and commitment, between love and attachment, between restraint and fear.
Tibetan lamas like Kalu Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama, who have thoroughly mingled their lives with spirit, seem to be able to embody the Dharma full-time. Through studying with them, I began to see how it is possible to live in such a way. Most of us have a difficult time bringing the Dharma into our lives and mingling it with everything we do. Yet it is doable.
A woman I know named Elise recently had an experience that resonates with many seekers. Elise, a thirty-eight-year-old single mother and lawyer, attended a weekend meditation retreat. When she returned, she felt absolutely transformed. The retreat was so inspiring that Elise vowed to herself that she was going to be a different person: she was going to keep everything in perspective and not get lost in petty office politics and her own ambition; she was going to stop being a demanding perfectionist with others; and she was going to be more patient with her children. These were her new resolutions.
Elise came back from the country retreat center on Sunday night, but by the time her Monday midmorning coffee break rolled around, despite all her good intentions, her mood had fallen apart. On the weekend, the energy of everyone around her had seemed uplifting, accepting, and healing. It was wonderful. Back at her job, however, nothing felt wonderful. It didn’t even feel okay. Instead, everything felt frantic, negative, competitive, and disturbing. To compound Elise’s Monday morning blues, she found herself obsessing about an attractive fellow meditator with whom she’d had minimal contact. She couldn’t stop thinking about whether she should have made her feelings known and couldn’t stop fantasizing about ways to find this person again. While shedding a lot of mental and emotional baggage, she had unwittingly picked up some more. To sum it all up, soon Elise could not help wondering whether the weekend was a total loss.
I certainly understand the way Elise feels; probably we all do. This is a common experience: We come away from meditation or a particularly enriching spiritual experience, or even a vacation, convinced that we have been forever altered; then within hours we are once again unconsciously caught up in some unsatisfying habitual reaction or neurotic tendency. What Elise could realize, what we all could realize, is that this is simply part of the process. What Elise gained from her weekend is a deeper awareness of how she loses touch with her own inner reality and obscures her inner sunlight. Now she has to work at changing herself little by little, until her awareness grows deeper and deeper.
Elise’s problem with priorities, her impatience with her children, and her tendency to form obssessive attachments are all part of her path; Elise’s task is to bring the wisdom of the Dharma into her life to help her deal with