A crucial task for you as a student is to be clear about your own intention. If you don’t clearly understand what you are looking for in a teacher or in internal work, you will inevitably accept someone else’s agenda as your own. While you may start internal transformative work on the suggestion or advice of another person, at some point your practice has to become a response to your own questions about life and being. Your own suffering, however it manifests, is the basis and motivation for your practice. To lose sight of it is to lose connection with your reason for practicing. Another person's experience can never answer your own questions. You have to know what you want from your practice. Then you can know what you want in a teacher.
From “The Mystery of Being,” p. 12, in Wake Up To Your Life by Ken McLeod
From time to time, friends talk about a workshop they've attended, a healing modality they've discovered, a new spiritual teacher they've encountered, or a framework that has helped them make sense of their lives. As culture evolves, so do our interests, and the way we talk about them. Lately I've noticed a shift in emphasis. These days, the framing is rarely about becoming your best self or manifesting the life you desire. Today's theme seems to be healing: healing trauma, healing old wounds, healing relationships, healing the self. Underlying much of this language is a wish to feel more whole, more understood, or more at ease.
The Buddhist tradition shares some of those concerns, and also points in a rather different direction. A central question is not how to become a better self, but how to see through the assumptions that make the self seem so solid and separate. I've sometimes wondered what, if anything, to say about this difference.
“How can I feel better about myself?” is a very different question from, “Who or what is this sense of self that I spend so much energy protecting?”
The first question seeks improvement. The second points in a different direction altogether. Many spiritual conversations never seem to reach that second question. They remain focused on managing experience, reducing discomfort, making sense of life, or cultivating a more satisfying identity. There is nothing wrong with these pursuits, and indeed, they may be necessary.
Practice often begins with these very practical concerns. In my case the concern was anger and the suffering it created. I was looking for improvement, for a way to live differently. Over time, however, the question that brought me to practice gave way to other questions.
When I first read this passage from Wake Up To Your Life, I took Ken's words mainly as advice about teachers and spiritual groups. Increasingly, I hear them differently. They point to a simple fact: no one else can give us the questions that matter. Those questions emerge from our own lives, our own disappointments, our own encounters with uncertainty, loss, beauty, love, and death. Reality is the best teacher.
So these days, when friends talk about their spiritual paths, I mostly listen.