Waking Up Within the World

For many years, I thought I was attempting to have a practice where I was learning about or approaching waking up within the world—waking up within my life. Looking back, though, I think I was mostly trying to avoid life. What do I mean by avoiding life? I mean avoiding my emotions, avoiding different kinds of habit patterns and behaviors I was struggling with, and avoiding challenges in relationships.

I think this is pretty common for those of us who get really inspired by Eastern traditions, be it Buddhism, Hindu-based traditions, Vedic traditions, or Taoism. They all have these elements of practice or ways of being where we sort of leave the world. When I say "world" here, I don't mean it literally—we can't literally leave the world until we die. But you know, taking off to a mountain and all of that.

I did it myself—I was a Buddhist monk for nine years, for those of you who don't know. I spent a good majority of those years in solitary retreat, alone. It was an incredibly useful time, very beneficial, and at the same time, I do see that I was taking an approach where I was looking for some way out from my pain. I didn't want to deal with the pain; I just wanted to get out.

We all have various forms where this sort of approach enters our spiritual practice or meditation practice. I want to encourage you to be open to the possibility that this might be happening for you, or maybe it's not—I don't know. For those of us who, as I said, sort of "drink the Kool-Aid" and go really deep into an Eastern tradition, this can happen at some point in our journey.

I know many of my friends have had very similar experiences. At some point, we realize, "Oh, I can't avoid myself. I can't avoid what's going on." I think now there's a lot of great teaching and information on this, and some cultural translation just has to happen. Buddhism, Vedic traditions, Hindu traditions, and Taoism come from cultures that tended not to dissociate from emotions as much as we do in the modern world, so there are some things to be aware of.

The way we interpret some of the traditional teachings or the ways people went about their spiritual practice might not reflect the reality of what was actually happening. When someone was going into a mountain retreat, they didn't necessarily feel disconnected from the world or disconnected from others. They felt they were in a community even though they were alone. Perhaps they really missed that community from time to time, but they would work with it.

In my personal and emotional struggles, I felt very disconnected from others and the world, and I think this is part of a modern dilemma many of us run into. I have other content on that topic, so I won't go specifically into that issue here. I just wanted to mention it because if we don't become aware of that disconnection, it's very difficult to really have a practice where we genuinely want to engage with the world.

For some of us, it's not an issue. I meet people all the time whose practice is very much engaged with the world, their families, and so forth. But for those of us who really get drawn to more monastic practice, or to yogic traditions and yogis and yoginis who go away into the mountains, sometimes we can have this misunderstanding.

So what do we mean by "waking up"? This is a vast concept in Buddhism, which is the tradition I'm going to speak from. I'm not going to be able to give a complete explanation here, and I don't want to go too far into the weeds, but basically, what we mean by waking up is recognizing that there's a certain fluidity to how we work with our perceptions, thoughts, emotions, life, idea of who we think we are, personality, and identities—a fluidity that we're not allowing. Waking up means entering into that fluidity instead of turning things into ice.

Here's a small example: throughout a day, we don't usually recognize what we take "self" to be because we don't usually look. But when we meditate, we're attempting to look at who we think we are at any given moment and how that exists. We usually identify strongly either with our body, with a certain mood or emotion, with something ideological, a thought process, a belief—and sometimes these are all combined together.

The Buddha very skillfully taught that the body and mind could be split into something called the five aggregates. This is one way to understand that mind and body are not one lump—they can break up into elements that are interdependent and function together but aren't necessarily the same thing. Through this understanding, we can start to recognize how we sometimes associate more with the physical body or more with something abstract, some sense of an identity somewhere.

When we really look for that—when we try to see if that self-identity is solid, permanent, and always exists like that—we're going to find it's not the case. How we identify with a mood is changing all the time and shifting. This brings up the question: who are we? It brings up doubt, and this doubt is very healthy. Through this healthy doubt or constructive skepticism, we can start to enter into accessing awakening in the form of fluidity. I'm using that term—it's not really a traditional Buddhist term, but I'm using it as a way to avoid jargon.

Buddhism doesn't say that self doesn't exist. It's not saying we don't exist, but it's also not saying we exist in the way we think we do. They use the word "illusion" a lot—that things exist in a dreamlike way, like a type of illusion, and that's part of the fluidity. When we recognize things to be arising yet not findable, we start to enter into a little more fluidity with our experience, a little more give, a little more space. We know how to treat things with enough care and responsibility but also how to relax.

I'm not saying that this is the complete meaning of Awakening. As I mentioned, it's a deep dive to describe what Awakening means in Buddhism because we use terms like Buddhahood and Enlightenment that imply certain kinds of omniscience taking place. Nonetheless, I think something more practical for us to work with when we're approaching waking up within the world is this: can we open up more fluidity in how we're identifying and holding reality to be in any given moment, whether that's with ourselves or with an object we're working with, a person, or a relationship?

The "within the world" part becomes a direct engagement—it's not something for the future, it's not something transcendent where we're necessarily going to sail up into the sky. It's just on the ground, almost monotonous and plain. Sometimes it's just boring. I find this is where the radical work takes place. I don't think this is a novel idea—you can find many people talking about this—but nonetheless, I wanted to point it out because there are subtleties to this.

I want to acknowledge that this is very challenging, at least for me, because it means working with things I don't necessarily want to work with. It means working with discomfort. It means that I have to include that—I have to have a practice that includes both the comfortable and uncomfortable things. While this isn't necessarily always enjoyable, I will say I've found the richest parts of my practice here.

I'm not saying that retreat and going to the mountain isn't useful—I don't want to go to extremes here. That's incredibly useful, and if we know how to do that and we're ready for that, it's incredibly valuable. But at the same time, most of us are householder practitioners. We have families, jobs, partners, friends—all of this crazy world that we're engaging with on a daily basis. So why not use it within our practice, or use our practice to meet that—to meet others and ourselves with more compassion and more skill, more wisdom?

The "awake" part has a lot to do with the cultivation of awareness. It has a lot to do with how much we can use the awareness cultivated in our formal practice as a muscle we can access throughout the day, every day. It doesn't have to be for long periods of time—it can be in short moments where we're opening to things and trying to see things more raw, more naked, meaning just seeing things as they are without the constant overlay of judgments and opinions that our mind spits out.

Among the many benefits of meditation practice, this is one of the stronger benefits I advocate for a lot. It's extremely helpful because we suffer less when we're not always activated in our aversion or clinging. At the same time, we're able to act more skillfully and better navigate and apply our spiritual practice to the world—meaning to what's in front of us right now. The world just means what's around you right now. As you're reading this, the world is your experience right now. The world is partly the words on the page, it's the room around you, it's all the emotions and thoughts arising, sensations—that's the world. That's your experience. Sometimes that's more complex, and sometimes it's not.

What I'm advocating for is a motivation, attitude, and approach where I want to wake up within the world. I want to do that through learning to meet even the simple, monotonous experiences of my day, learning to meet even the uncomfortable ones throughout my day. As I usually advocate, we don't go for the most challenging thing first. When you're working with discomfort in your practice, being open to that and working with that through awareness and somatic awareness and different practices, I recommend taking on the small things that you wouldn't think matter that much.

This means working with a small enough discomfort that you don't really care that much about—it's sort of uncomfortable, like a slight body ache or a headache, or maybe just a kind of bad mood where you're not having a huge emotional explosion at the moment, just that you didn't sleep so well. Take that into the path. It's through these very small things that we actually learn to work with more challenging things. Of course, these small things add up—when you add up five or ten of these smaller annoyances, they compound into a big one. As we know in our relationships, often our conflicts with others are influenced by how we're feeling, the moods we're in. That compounds how we interact with someone, so these kinds of things are good to start taking into our path. I'm advocating for working with the easy things—please, why not? That's how we begin to work with things that are more challenging.

Just to recap: Awakening is a big idea. I encourage you to study the Dharma if you really want to understand it. If you're interested in Buddhadharma, it's a very rich topic. I think this question of what Awakening is, what Enlightenment is—it informs our path and informs how we expand or grow on our spiritual path in Buddhadharma. It's a question we're continually asking because Enlightenment is not something you could say is "that" or "this"—you can't even really put it into words. It's beyond concept.

Nonetheless, as we familiarize ourselves with our mind, humanity, comfort, discomfort, and emotions, we start to understand through the Dharma, through study, through practice, the difference between un-awake and awake. That starts to become more clear. Usually in Buddhadharma, Awakening is a process. Sometimes there are teachings on sudden Awakening, but for the majority of people, it's gradual. It's a process, which is actually really useful.

So again, finding more fluidity—finding more fluidity in relationship to our emotions, our thoughts, our behaviors, how we interact with others, finding more curiosity, openness, and ways to not get stuck and turn our reactions into ice. We can pursue that as an aspiration through our meditation, through our awareness practice, and then bring it into the world, bring it into our daily life. I think that's something that is doable and approachable for many of us. Then, as we study the Dharma more, especially the teachings on non-duality and Shunyata, we can start to bring in an understanding and a richer practice of how to work with the nature of reality.