In this passage from Buddhahood Without Meditation, Ken describes, with unflinching honesty, feeling crushed by the difficulties he experienced in his practice. Bitterness took root because he became convinced that doors were forever closed to him. His poignant insights on how to meet bitterness speak deeply to my own experience.
Slowly, over many years, I came to understand how much of my life has been shaped by core reactive patterns. Their reach is terrifyingly pervasive, influencing layer upon layer of decisions and commitments. Then, at some point, the impact of those core patterns came sharply into view. Although I'm less reactive now than 10 or 20 years ago, I'm still living a life shaped by earlier patterns, and by choices I would not have made with hindsight. With that clarity came bitterness, and meeting that bitterness has proved more difficult that I ever imagined.
Ken’s emphasis on view has been helpful. First, his reminder that bitterness has to be experienced fully whenever it arises. If not experienced, it leaches out into interactions and relationships, colouring them in ways that lead away from what we intend. Secondly, Ken highlights the importance of holding open the possibility that a difficulty is not final. It may feel claustrophobic and absolute, like a verdict, yet other possibilities remain. They may be barely visible, no more than a crack in a door. But remembering that tiny crack keeps the heart from closing completely, and an open heart makes it possible for what now seems fixed to soften with time.
From Buddhahood Without Meditation 8
Ken: What kind of beast is a difficulty in practice?
Student: It's an experience.
Ken: Difficulty in practice is an experience.
Ken: I encountered in my own practice and still do, really, really great difficulties. And there was at that point, no way to regard them as just as an experience. It was overwhelmingly difficult. Physically and emotionally I was just crushed. And just to sit there and go, "This is just an experience," that just didn't work for me at all. They were sufficiently challenging, should I say, that I felt that there was no possibility—this was a bit over 20 years ago now—of ever making progress again, that the doors were forever closed. One of the consequences of that was a bitterness in my heart, whose depths I could not even begin to plumb. It was just there.
I was wrong on all accounts, but that took a lot of time before that was revealed. I bring this up for two reasons. One, when I say difficulty in practice is an experience I don't mean this in any trivial or glib way. Even the harshest and most devastating of difficulties is, in the end, an experience.
And the second reason I bring it up is that, even when you don't know it at the time—this is where the practice of view comes in—hold it out as a possibility so that things don't completely close down in you. That closing down is actually quite problematic. I've seen it in a lot of people who've also encountered some difficulties. It's good to keep the door open, even if it's only a crack, and it may only be a crack. And that's why view or outlook is very important.