I so appreciate in James Low's willingness to speak honestly about the realities of practice. I suspect that many of us will relate to his personal anecdote about feeling lonely, discouraged, and finding that meditation wasn't giving him any nurturing. He found himself arranging boiled sweets into coloured patterns. When practice feels dry, we invent endless ways to fill the space rather than simply experience what is present. But James doesn't present this as a failure. Instead, he ends with a wonderful reminder: "Don't blame yourself. Don't see yourself as having made a mistake. It's just like this." Very dzogchen as is his often repeated advice to practice the guru yoga of the three ahs.
From From Open to Life, part 18. The passage starts 55:27 minutes into the audio.
Years ago, someone came to see me in my role as a therapist, and they were a nun. The nunnery that they were in was causing some grief for this person, because they said, ‘In the nunnery, everything is controlled. So we get portions of the different kinds of food, so we don't eat too much, and so on. However, if you're sick, you're allowed to get a double portion of tahini with your breakfast. And so some of the nuns are pretending to be sick in order to get tahini.’ And she was incredibly upset. How could they be nuns and do this?
We spent quite a lot of time thinking about, if they're nuns, they don't do bad things, but they do bad things, so they can't be nuns. So what kind of nunnery is this? You go round and round and round, because you start with an assumption that nuns will be well-behaved. But some of these nuns are not well-behaved, because they want more. Why wouldn't they want more? They don't even have their hair.
‘Come on, ladies, give up your hair.’
‘At least give me my tahini.’ Fair exchange.
So you can be disturbed by anything. I did a retreat a long, long time ago. One of the first retreats I did was up in Manali, in a little shack. And every day I did my offerings, and I bought a big bag of sweets, every day putting two sweets and offering them. And after a couple of weeks, I'm looking at the bag of sweets, and I tipped it upside down, and it was like hard-boiled sweets, and they're different colors of wrappers. So I put all the blue ones in a column, all the red ones in a column, all the green ones in a column. And then I moved them around, and I made patterns. I hadn't a clue what I was doing. I was just thinking, ‘I have to do my meditation.’ And it wasn't giving me any nurturing. And I was feeling sad and lonely. Instead of thinking I'm sad and lonely, I entertained myself in this somewhat sad way, you know, slightly autistic. And that's what we do. We fill the space.
Trying to do the meditation, it wasn't going well. I lost my sense of agency. But at least I put the red sweets with the red sweets, the blue sweets with the blue sweets. So when we observe ourselves, we realise these funny things we do, just as a kind of reassurance. And these points are so important. Don't blame yourself. Don't see yourself as having made a mistake. It's just like this.